“The cruelest aspect of executions is the restraints,” chief federal public defender Bo King writes in an op-ed in USA Today. King was Brad Sigmon’s lawyer, and before a South Carolina firing squad killed Sigmon, he was tied to a chair with straps across his ankles, lap, and waist. “His right arm has been wrenched straight back and tied to the chair. A white square with a red bull’s-eye is attached to his chest, where it rises and falls with his breathing,” he writes. His chin and jaw are tied to the chair with a bandage, and it takes a while before King and Sigmon’s spiritual advisor can understand that he’s saying, “I’m OK. I love you. I’m OK.” He reads Sigmon’s closing statement, which includes a prayer for his 28 friends on death row, Scriptures, and his closing prayer, “We are now under God’s grace and mercy.” King’s description of Sigmon’s last moments cannot be construed as anything but torture. It is difficult to read but should be required of anyone who argues that death by firing squad is not cruel and unusual punishment.
“The problem of secrecy now surrounding the execution process in the United States is well documented,” Austin Sarat writes in Slate. So he is hailing a ruling by U.S. magistrate judge for the District of Idaho Debora Grasham that prohibits the state from carrying out any executions until media witnesses can see and hear the process from beginning to end. Her ruling “pulled back the curtain on a critical stage in the lethal injection process, when the lethal drugs are handled and given to condemned inmates,” Sara notes. “Her opinion offers a model for judges in other jurisdictions to follow. It carefully parses existing precedent, forcefully articulates First Amendment values, balances competing interests, and suggests that if the state is going to kill, it cannot hide the “method and manner” it uses to put people to death,” he says.
In his essay, “Scalia and the King: The Ancient Writ of Habeas Corpus and the Missing Legitimacy Core of Modern Habeas Law,” in the Yale Law Journal, Adam Horn notes that habeas corpus “has come on hard times in the American system.” He points to recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court as evidence of how they “have significantly narrowed the scope of the habeas power and chipped away at avenues for relief for defendants.” Surprisingly, Horn cites Justice Antonin Scalia and his “attack on the mandatory Federal Sentencing Guidelines [as] provid[ing] a useful model for thinking about how habeas corpus law, now often rightly criticized as wasteful and redundant, could be streamlined and reinvigorated.” Horn maintains that “habeas law should refocus around vindicating judges’ historic habeas power to challenge arbitrary executive incarceration practices.”
