Cases and articles

Executioners administering lethal injections in Arkansas will follow methods used by "medical paraprofessionals" to ensure that condemned inmates are unconscious before delivering the two final drugs to carry out the death penalty, a revised state protocol says.
The state attorney general's office offered the revised lethal injection procedures as part of an effort to lift federal court stays of execution against inmates challenging the method.

By Adrianne Appel

BOSTON, Jun 8 (IPS) - After more than a decade of DNA tests, appeals and waiting on death row, Texas prisoner Michael Blair is likely to be exonerated soon, further undermining public confidence in the infallibility of the U.S. death penalty system.

Recent extensive DNA tests on microscopic hair samples established no link between Blair and a child who was murdered in 1993, according to state prosecutors.

ACTION #1

Contact Gov. Tim Kaine RIGHT NOW by telephone and/or fax and politely
ask him to grant clemency (show mercy) to Percy Walton by commuting his
death sentence to life without the possibility of parole. If you live
in Virginia, be sure to start by stating your name and the place where
you live.

Gov. Tim Kaine
Phone: (804) 786-2211
Fax: (804) 371-6351

NOTE: You can e-mail Gov. Kaine via his web page, but in order to
stress the urgency of this matter we are urging more personal/tangible
contact at this time.

For 35 minutes, they couldn't find good vein for lethal injection

Executioners struggled for 35 minutes to find a vein before Curtis Osborne died by lethal injection Wednesday for a 1990 Spalding County double murder.

Osborne, 37, was pronounced dead at 9:05 p.m., 14 minutes after his executioners injected the first of three fatal drugs. He was the second man Georgia has executed in a month. He also was the fourth person in the country to die by lethal injection since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the method was constitutional.