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      After Biden Pardons His Son Hunter, Prison Inmates Hope They’re Next

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      President Biden has pardoned people convicted of some marijuana offenses, but advocates for prisoners say he has been slow to grant other requests.On Thanksgiving, Hunter Biden got the word from his father, President Biden, that he would be pardoned for tax and gun law violations, saving him from potentially spending a few years in federal prison.But Michael Montalvo, 78, a former cocaine ringleader who has spent nearly 40 years behind bars racking up course certifications, credits for good behavior and recommendations from his prison wardens, is still waiting to hear about his request for a pardon.So is Michelle West, who has spent more than 30 years in prison for her role in a drug conspiracy connected to a murder, while the gunman, who testified against her, has gone free. And Sara Gallegos, who is serving a 20-year sentence for being briefly involved in a drug ring after her husband was murdered when she was pregnant with her fourth child.“Everyone wants that chance,” said Lazara Serrano, who is waiting for her mother to win release from prison after more than 25 years, and who was stunned to hear that Hunter Biden’s criminal case was over. “For something just to be so sudden, and to happen right away, is crazy when there’s a line of people waiting.”Andrea James, who runs an organization that helps incarcerated women, said she did not begrudge Hunter Biden his pardon, but said she was hopeful that it would “move President Biden to consider other families who’ve endured what they have gone through for much longer periods of time.”Critics have complained that Mr. Biden has approved a smaller fraction of the requests for clemency that he has received than any other modern president. Of course, he still has time, and presidents have made a habit of waiting until the 11th hour to announce their clemency decisions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden must Trump-proof US democracy, activists say: ‘There is a sense of urgency’

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      The skies above the White House were cold and grey. Joe Biden greeted the championship winning Boston Celtics basketball team, quipping about his Irish ancestry and tossing a basketball into the crowd. But the US president could not resist drawing a wider lesson.“When we get knocked down, we get back up,” he said. “As my dad would say, ‘Just get up, Joe. Get up.’ Character to keep going and keep the faith, that’s the Celtic way of life. That’s sports. And that’s America.”Such events continue to be among the ceremonial duties of a “lame duck” president with waning influence. Biden has cut a diminished figure in recent months, first surrendering his chance to seek re-election, then finding himself sidelined by the doomed presidential campaign of his vice-president, Kamala Harris.But with his legacy imperiled by Donald Trump, the president is facing calls to mitigate the oncoming storm. Advocacy groups say Biden, who turned 82 this week, can still take actions during his final two months in office to accelerate spending on climate and healthcare, secure civil liberties, and Trump-proof at least some fundamentals of US democracy.Trump’s signature campaign promise was a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration. He has nominated officials including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, architects of family separations at the southern border during his first term, and vowed to use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.The plans include mandatory detention, potentially trapping immigrants in inhumane conditions for years as they fight deportation. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is leading an opposition effort, urging Biden to halt the current expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities, especially those with records of human rights abuses.Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU national prison project, said Ice detention facilities “characterised by abusive conditions, pervasive neglect and utter disregard for the dignity of people in their custody” are key to Trump’s logistical plan.Dozens of people have died in Ice detention facilities – mostly owned or operated by private prison corporations – over the past four years, according to the ACLU, and 95% were likely preventable if appropriate medical care had been provided. Yet the Biden administration has backed new Ice detention facilities in states where they did not existed before, such as Kansas, Wyoming and Missouri.“We are calling on the Biden administration to take action now, in the final days of the administration, to halt any efforts to expand immigration detention and to shut down specifically abusive facilities once and for all,” Cho told reporters on a Zoom call this week. “We don’t need to put down runway for the Trump administration to put in place these mass detention and deportation machines.”She warned: “We know that the anti-immigrant policies of a second administration are going to be far more aggressive than what we saw in the first term, and mass arrest and detention is going to become perhaps the norm to create and carry out these deportation operations unless we can do all we can to put a halt to them.”View image in fullscreenAnother crucial area for Biden to make a last stand is criminal justice. In his first term, Trump oversaw the execution of more people than the previous 10 presidents combined. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, then imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021.Trump has indicated his intention to resume such executions and even expand the death penalty. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as Florida’s top law enforcement officer after she sought to delay the execution of a convicted killer because it conflicted with a fundraiser for her re-election campaign.Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s capital punishment project, told reporters via Zoom that Trump said “he will work to expand the death penalty. He’s going to try to expand it to people who do not even commit killings. He’s called for expanding the death penalty to his political opponents.“But perhaps most dangerously in Project 2025 [a policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation thinktank] – and we believe every word of it is this – he promised to try to kill everyone on death row, and the reason why we have to believe this and take it so seriously is the record that Donald Trump left where he, in a span of six months, carried out 13 executions.”The ACLU and other groups are therefore pressing Biden to commute the sentences of all individuals on federal death row to life in prison, fulfilling a campaign promise and preventing potential executions under Trump. Commuting “is really the thing that Biden can do to make it harder for Trump to restart executions”, Stubbs added.Pastor Brandi Slaughter, a board member of the pressure group Death Penalty Action, told reporters this week: “We know what the next president plans to do if any prisoners are left under a sentence of death under the Biden administration. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.”Biden has also received 8,000 petitions for clemency from federal prisoners serving non-death penalty sentences that he could either reduce or pardon. The former senator has long been criticised for his role in drawing up a 1994 crime law that led to the incarceration of thousands of Black men and women for drug offences.This week, members of Congress including Ayanna Pressley and James Clyburn led 64 colleagues in sending a letter to Biden urging him to use his clemency power “to reunite families, address longstanding injustices in our legal system and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration”.They were joined at a press conference on Capitol Hill by Maria Garza, 50, from Illinois, a prison reform advocate who spent 12 years in a state prison. She said in an interview: “There is a sense of urgency because a lot of the people that are sitting waiting for clemency are people that have de facto life sentences that will die in prison if they don’t [receive clemency]. A lot of their unjust sentencing was because of the 1994 crime bill that he was the founding father of.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMitzi Wall, whose 29-year-old son Jonathan is incarcerated on a seven-and-a-half-year federal cannabis charge, called on Biden to keep a campaign promise to grant clemency to more than 4,000 people in federal prison for nonviolent cannabis crimes.“We voted for President Biden,” she said. “He gave us hope and we’re asking him to do nothing more than keep his promise.”Wall, 63, from Maryland, added: “President Biden was partly responsible for writing the 1994 crime bill that thrust families into abject poverty and pain. I know he feels bad about that and he can right that wrong with the power of the pen. I’m appealing to him as a father whose son [Hunter] could very possibly be going to prison.”In other efforts to protect civil liberties, the ACLU is recommending a moratorium on all federal government purchases of Americans’ personal data without a warrant. It is also asking Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act to prevent potential abuse of surveillance technologies under the Trump administration.Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare law and stop clean-energy development projects. White House officials are working against the clock to dole out billions of dollars in grants for existing programmes to minimise Trump’s ability to rescind or redirect these funds. Earlier this month, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, announced more than $3.4bn in grants for infrastructure projects across the country.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, notes that Trump will have the power of impoundment to stall the money flowing out of the government and can order rescissions to programmes funded by Congress.“The singular thing that Joe Biden can do is expedite the flow of federal dollars in all the programmes,” Schiller said.“Any money that is supposed to leave the treasury to go to schools, food safety, environmental protection – anything that is not yet distributed needs to get distributed. It’s like emptying literally the piggy bank before you go on a trip. President Biden needs to be literally getting as much money out the door in the hands of state, local and community organisations as he can.”Another priority for the White House is getting Senate confirmation of as many federal judges as possible, given the potential impact of the judiciary in challenging Trump administration policies. The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organisation, noted: “Federal judges restricted hundreds of Trump administration policies during his first term, and will likely play a significant role in determining the trajectory of his second.”Senate Republicans forced numerous procedural votes and late-night sessions this week in attempt to stall confirmations. Eventually a deal was struck that will bring Biden within striking distance of the 234 judicial confirmations that occurred in Trump’s first term – but four of Biden’s appellate court nominees will not be considered.The outgoing president could also engage with Democratic-led states and localities to bolster protections and establish “firewalls” against Trump’s agenda, particularly in areas such as immigration. These collaborations could involve reinforcing sanctuary city policies and providing resources to states that are likely to face pressure from the Trump administration.Chris Scott, former coalitions director for Harris, said: “What will be interesting is how or what can President Biden to work with states, especially where we have Democratic leadership in place, to be able to brace themselves and arm themselves with more protection. We already have places like a Michigan or Illinois where you have governors vowing to make sure that they have protections – even in the Trump presidency.”As Barack Obama discovered before handing Trump the keys to the Oval Office in 2017, however, lame duck presidents can only do so much. Trump will come into office with a flurry of executive orders, a supportive Congress and fewer guardrails than the first time around.Bill Galston, a former adviser in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “On January 20 Donald Trump will control all the instruments of government and, at that point, it’ll be up to the courts – and public opinion – to restrain him.” More

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      Biden urged to use clemency powers to tackle ‘crisis’ of US mass incarceration

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      More than 60 members of Congress have written to Joe Biden calling on him to use his presidential clemency powers to reunite families, address unfair sentencing policies, and begin to tackle the scourge of mass incarceration, which they said was eroding “the soul of America”.Biden has 61 days left before he leaves the White House in which he could pardon or commute the sentences of incarcerated Americans. The letter, signed by a number of prominent Democratic politicians and spearheaded by the progressive politician Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, urges Biden to act while he still can.“Now is the time to use your clemency authority to rectify unjust and unnecessary criminal laws passed by Congress and draconian sentences given by judges,” the letter demands.Biden’s clemency power is one of the most concrete tools at his disposal during the lame-duck period of his presidency. During his term in the White House he has already granted 25 pardons and 132 commutations, including for people imprisoned for simple possession of marijuana and several court-martialed from the military because of their sexual orientation.But he could make a far greater impact, should he choose to. There are currently more than 12,000 petitions for commutations and almost 4,000 requests for pardons on his desk.“So many people who are serving extensive sentences today are there because of crimes that are victimless. That is astonishing, and it should be dealt with,” Clyburn told a press conference outside the Capitol building on Wednesday.Clyburn’s participation in the appeal may carry weight with the president. The congressman is widely credited for having helped Biden secure the Democratic presidential nomination during the primary contests of 2020.In their letter, the congress members urge Biden to focus on categories of prisoner who they say especially deserve his help. That includes the 40 men who are currently on federal death row and who are facing the threat of imminent execution once Donald Trump returns to the White House.Other groups of incarcerated people highlighted by the group include women forced into crime or acts of self-defense by abusive domestic partners, and those serving long sentences because of the disparate sentencing rules around crack cocaine. In 1986 Ronald Reagan introduced harsher sentences for crack than the powder form of the drug, even though the only difference in their chemical composition is baking soda.Crack tended to be used more widely by Black people and powder cocaine by white people. The Biden administration addressed the disparity in 2022 by leveling the sentences, but the change did not help those already imprisoned.“The mass incarceration crisis is one of our country’s greatest failures,” said Pressley, whose father was incarcerated when she was a child as a result of his drug addiction. “President Biden was elected with a mandate for making compassionate change, and he has the power to do so right now.” More

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      Texas Judge Finds Death Row Inmate Melissa Lucio Innocent In Daughter’s Death

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      In a court filing, the judge said the conviction of Melissa Lucio, whose scheduled execution in 2022 was halted, should be overturned. The state’s highest criminal court will now decide.A Texas district judge declared that a mother on death row is innocent in the 2007 death of her 2-year-old daughter, according to court documents filed in October but made public this week.The decision in the case now stands with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, which in 2022 halted a scheduled execution of the mother, Melissa Lucio, to gather more evidence. That included asking the district judge in the original trial, Arturo Nelson, to file an opinion. An execution date has not been rescheduled.Ms. Lucio, 56, who lived in the border city of Harlingen, was sentenced to death in 2008 after her daughter, Mariah Alvarez, died as a result of what prosecutors said was the mother’s physical abuse. Ms. Lucio and her lawyers have long maintained her innocence, arguing that Mariah died from complications after accidentally falling down a flight of stairs. An autopsy said the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.Judge Nelson sided with Ms. Lucio in his recent findings, writing that she was “actually innocent; she did not kill her daughter.”He added that, even regardless of that conclusion, Ms. Lucio had a right to have her conviction overturned because the state had used false testimony in her trial and withheld evidence that was favorable to her case. The judge also cited new scientific evidence that was unavailable during her trial.It was unclear on Saturday when the Court of Criminal Appeals would issue its ruling. Vanessa Potkin, one of Ms. Lucio’s lawyers and a special litigation director for the Innocence Project, said it could take a couple of months. Once that court rules, the case could be returned to trial court, at which point a prosecutor would decide if the case should be retried or the charges dismissed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Death Row Inmate in Shaken Baby Case Set to Testify in Texas House

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      Robert Roberson, whose execution was postponed last week, has been subpoenaed to appear on Monday before a committee of the State House.Robert Roberson, the Texas death row inmate whose execution in a strongly disputed shaken baby murder case was postponed last week, is scheduled to testify on Monday before a committee of the State House.A subpoena for his testimony, issued in a novel last-minute legal maneuver, halted his execution just before it was set to be carried out on Thursday evening. The Texas Supreme Court ruled that by issuing the subpoena, a bipartisan group of Texas House members had raised legal questions about the separation of powers that needed to be resolved.The Texas House and Mr. Roberson’s lawyers had hoped he would appear in person before the Legislature’s committee on jurisprudence. But over the weekend, the office of the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, representing the Department of Criminal Justice, stepped in and said that, “in the interest of public safety,” Mr. Roberson would only be made available by video conference from prison.The Texas Supreme Court ruled on Sunday that as long as Mr. Roberson was able to give testimony in response to the subpoena, it would not involve itself in the dispute over how he would testify. So Mr. Roberson’s appearance seemed likely to take place by video conference, aides to the Texas House said, though negotiations over the matter were continuing.Mr. Roberson’s lawyers have argued that his autism, which was diagnosed after the murder conviction, would make any attempt to judge his credibility by video conference “profoundly limited.” And they said that having him appear remotely without his lawyers by his side would deprive Mr. Roberson of access to counsel during the questioning.Mr. Roberson’s case has drawn extensive national attention. A broad range of supporters — including a majority of the Republican-controlled Texas House, the novelist John Grisham and the detective who helped convict Mr. Roberson — have raised questions about the conviction, which relied in part on a finding of shaken baby syndrome.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘I’m terrified I’ll be executed’: Trump win could bring spree of death row killings

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      If Donald Trump wins the election, he is expected to pursue a spree of executions that could fast-track the cases of people on federal death row, and threaten the life of a man with a longstanding innocence claim.Advocates for people on death row fear a second Trump term could be worse than his first, which saw an unprecedented 13 federal executions. Under Trump, more people incarcerated in the federal system were put to death than under the previous 10 presidents combined, a staggering number that raised grave human rights concerns.Among those who were executed were people with intellectual disabilities. Defendants were deprived of opportunities to present new evidence. Some were killed after lawyers said the execution method was “tortuous”. In some cases, executions occurred over the objections of both victims and prosecutors.Since his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s pro-death penalty rhetoric, which dates back to his 1989 campaign against the Central Park Five, has only escalated. He’s recently called for executions of “everyone who gets caught selling drugs” and has reportedly suggested government leakers should be executed for treason. Last year, Rolling Stone reported, Trump allegedly floated bringing back firing squads and hangings and pursuing group executions and televised killings.Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for a second Trump term that was written by Trump’s allies, although it has been disavowed by the former president, calls for the US government to do “everything possible to obtain finality” for the 40 people on federal death row. It also urges the president to expand capital punishment to non-homicide crimes and push the US supreme court to overrule precedent limiting death sentences to murders.“Trump has said he plans to finish what he started,” said Billie Allen, 47, in a recent call from federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana. Allen, convicted of a 1997 robbery and murder, has maintained his innocence, but he has exhausted his appeals. “I’m terrified that I will be executed – not just because I’m going to die, but because I’m going to die for something I didn’t do … I can only hope that as someone who is innocent he would do the right thing.”‘Lawless’ killing spreeThe federal killings under Trump all took place during his final months in office, and they raised significant concerns about the rights of US capital defendants.View image in fullscreenThe first execution, in July 2020, was of Daniel Lee, condemned to death for a 1995 killing of three family members; his co-defendant, considered the “ringleader”, got life in prison. The lead prosecutor, judge and victim’s family opposed execution. But the justice department pushed to proceed, even when there was a court injunction halting the execution. Lee was strapped to a gurney for four hours while the government fought to move forward, and the supreme court greenlit the proceeding at 2am. He was killed by lethal injection.Days later, the US executed a 68-year-old man whose lawyers had won a brief injunction after arguing he was unfit due to advanced Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and schizophrenia.Other cases included a man who was not the shooter and had asserted his innocence; a man who suffered a painful condition akin to drowning during his execution; and a case where five jurors and a prosecutor objected.“There was a big rush to kill with a lot of trampling on fairness, procedure and just basic decency,” said Ruth Friedman, director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project, which represents death row defendants and was Lee’s counsel. “It was a parade of horribles.”Across 13 executions, she said, courts issued more than 20 stay orders halting the killings. But the supreme court and appeals courts repeatedly rejected the rulings.“It was the lowest point in my 34 years of practicing law, not only because of the breathtaking speed of those 13 executions, but also the ways in which the court system utterly failed our clients,” said Kelley Henry, a federal public defender. “The brokenness of the death penalty system was on full display in a way that shook me to my core.”Henry represented Lisa Montgomery, who was executed in the final week of Trump’s presidency, the first woman put to death by the US government in nearly 70 years. Montgomery had been convicted of murdering a pregnant woman; her attorneys said she suffered profound mental illness stemming from horrific abuse and argued she should be barred from execution due to incompetency.In Montgomery’s final weeks, four courts sided with her lawyers and issued stays. But the US bureau of prisons plowed ahead, and the supreme court, at around midnight on the day of her scheduled lethal injection, tossed out the lower court rulings. Montgomery was pronounced dead at 1.31am on 13 January 2021 – before her competency claim had been resolved.View image in fullscreen“The 13 executions were lawless,” said Henry. “I never believed the legal system could be so politicized. It’s untenable to me that it could happen again.”View image in fullscreen40 men on death rowThe 40 men currently held on federal death row represent systemic problems with capital punishment, experts said. The majority are people of color, and 38% are Black (while Black people comprise 14% of the American population), said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. In 58% of cases, at least one victim was white. And nearly one in four men were 21 or younger during the crime.“By every objective measure, the federal death penalty is irretrievably broken,” said Maher, noting that some death sentences were secured during the racist crackdown on “superpredators” in the 1990s, and some relied on discredited “junk science” techniques.It’s unclear how many men could be immediately vulnerable under Trump, as their litigation is in varying stages, but advocates fear a chaotic rush led by his justice department. Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, spearheaded the last execution spree and approved the use of the drug pentobarbital. Advocates have little hope that he’d use his presidential authority to issue clemency grants or pause federal executions.“I feel fairly confident that [a second Trump] administration, if it comes to pass, could try to cut some corners,” said Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project.Kamala Harris has previously opposed the death penalty, but has been silent on it during her presidential campaign, and a call to abolish capital punishment was left out of the Democratic party’s platform this year for the first time in 12 years. The Harris campaign didn’t respond to inquiries. Joe Biden issued an executions moratorium in 2021.Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, didn’t respond to questions about Trump’s executions and his plans for federal death row, but said in an email: “President Trump has repeatedly stated he supports the death penalty for drug dealers. He will carry out that promise when elected.”‘I deserve to live’Billie Allen, the defendant at risk of execution, was convicted of a 1997 bank robbery in which two men killed a guard.One suspect was arrested on the scene; Allen was arrested hours later.Allen has said he was shopping at a mall during the robbery, and a mall guard told police that he saw Allen at that time, his lawyers told the federal pardon office earlier this year. Blood on the scene believed to belong to a robber did not match Allen’s, DNA tests showed. And while the getaway car exploded, Allen tested negative for traces of gasoline. His lawyers say his trial attorney was ineffective.In a statement, a US attorney’s office spokesperson defended Allen’s conviction, pointing to a 2001 appeals court ruling that said that Allen confessed after his arrest, that eyewitnesses identified him in a lineup and that he was “primarily responsible” for firing the fatal shots.Allen has said he didn’t confess, an officer testified he “threw away” notes from the confession, and other eyewitnesses described a suspect who didn’t match him.“I’m hopeful because I have evidence of my innocence,” Allen said. “I believe if someone in Biden’s administration examines this, I’ll be home after 26 years convicted for a crime I didn’t commit.”“But we’re dealing with a system that’s flawed,” he continued, pointing to the recent Missouri execution of a man prosecutors suggested was innocent. Allen has focused on writing and art while imprisoned: “If I’m executed, I want people to look back on my art and see this guy was documenting the trauma he went through on death row … he documented for us that he’s human, he deserves to live and is innocent.”Allen has remained scarred from Trump’s executions, recounting hearing guards walking by his cell, not knowing whether he’d be taken to be killed. And he lost close friends, one by one: “I came in at 19. These are people I grew up with. I’m seeing them be carried out, never to return again, never to see them smile or hear them laughing.”Allen said he wished people recognized death row defendants were capable of change: “The majority of people here become better men for themselves, their family and friends and supporters.”Yvette Allen, his sister who has been fighting for his release, said the stress of the high-stakes election has been overwhelming: “There is no time to breathe. Every day is a sense of urgency. We’re working every day making sure the world sees he’s innocent before it’s too late.” More

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      How a Michael Portillo BBC film inspired a US push for nitrogen-gas executions

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      Shortly after Alabama last week carried out its second-ever execution using nitrogen gas, state officials took credit for pioneering what they see as a breakthrough approach to the death penalty – even though it has sparked outrage and revulsion among critics.But the idea to execute inmates in the US with nitrogen was actually set in motion by a rebellious and ultra-conservative lawmaker in Oklahoma, and surprisingly involves a former British Conservative MP turned television personality, Michael Portillo.Both promised such executions would be free of the complications that had plagued lethal injections and that sentenced prisoners would drift off painlessly to sleep – though witnesses to both executions have described a very different process.Nitrogen executions were first legislated in 2015 by Oklahoma, a US state boasts the highest execution rate per capita and a long history of death penalty innovation, having also been the first to introduce the lethal injection in 1977.The story of its most recent innovation in execution methods involves a documentary hosted by Portillo. After a career in British politics, where he was once seen as a darling of the Conservative right, Portillo reinvented himself as a television presenter. He later became famous for shows on the BBC such as Great British Railway Journeys.But in a bizarre collision of worlds, it was his film How to Kill a Human Being, broadcast by the BBC in 2008, that helped persuade the Republican representative Mike Christian and a high-school friend of his to pursue a bill writing nitrogen executions into law. So convinced were they by Portillo’s film and findings that they screened it at the Oklahoma capitol in September 2014.“I remember it being quite disturbing,” said Emily Virgin, a Democratic representative present at the time who voted against the nitrogen bill Christian later authored. In 2015, it passed 85 to 10 in the Oklahoma house and unanimously in the Senate.View image in fullscreenThe bill had been a while in the making. By 2014, states across the country were struggling to enforce capital punishment. Anti-death penalty advocates had successfully lobbied drug companies to stop supplying them with lethal injection drugs and many states were forced to improvise. Some attempted to get their drugs via illegal backchannels while others sought out substitute compounds, but both contributed to a string of botched and messy executions.In April 2014, things came to a head. Oklahoma’s supreme court issued a stay on the execution of death-row inmate Clayton Lockett over issues of secrecy around its lethal injection drugs. Incensed by the move, Christian, who was also a former state trooper, drafted a resolution to impeach the five justices who had supported the stay and was quoted in newspapers around the country for saying of Lockett’s execution: “I realize this may sound harsh but as a father and former lawman, I really don’t care if it’s by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, guillotine or being fed to the lions.”The stay was soon overturned by Oklahoma’s governor, and Lockett’s execution went ahead. The executioners tried for almost an hour to establish an intravenous line before inadvertently injecting the drugs into the tissue around his groin. Witnesses saw him writhing in a pool of blood and according to an inquiry by the Oklahoma department of public safety the execution took 41 minutes, during which his heart rate dropped to six beats per minute.Months later, Christian was back with another plan. He had gathered more than a dozen or so Oklahoma legislators and public officials for a judiciary committee meeting at the Oklahoma capitol to make the case for something new.“We knew there was a problem after the Lockett execution,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting. “In 1977 we became the first state to adopt lethal injection. My wishes are in 2015 we abolish, possibly, lethal injection and we go to this new innovative method, which is death by nitrogen hypoxia.” Then, on a television in the meeting room, he screened Portillo’s BBC documentary.At the start of the 50-minute film, Portillo sets out to discover the “perfect killing device” for carrying out humane executions. After touring labs and meeting with experts across the US and Europe, he finds that all the methods known to the west – including the firing squad, electric chair, cyanide chamber, and hanging – are flawed. But, he concludes: “I think hypoxia is the solution.”View image in fullscreenThe term hypoxia simply describes when the body’s cells receive insufficient oxygen to function and can be induced in many ways. In the film, Portillo attempts to experience hypoxia at a Dutch air force training facility, where he sits in an altitude chamber that simulates oxygen-thin air. Satisfied that the experience was painless, he seeks out a more practical way to starve somebody of oxygen and meets a veterinarian who tells him that if a human were forced to breathe just pure nitrogen they would lose consciousness “within 15 seconds” and die “within a minute”.“It turns out a canister of gas, a tube and a mask can be the perfect killing machine. It’s as simple as that,” says Portillo.On the day his film was screened for Oklahoma officials in 2014, some six years after it first aired in 2008, Christian brought along with him a part-time professor of political science at Oklahoma’s East Central University, Michael Copeland, who was also a high-school friend and had been involved in his election campaign.“People that aren’t familiar with the legislative process might think that state governments like Oklahoma have a bunch of experts on their payroll to advise them, but that’s not really what happens. Members can go out and they dispatch people that work at colleges,” said Copeland when asked about his involvement.He and some peers at the university produced a 14-page research paper which found that the use of nitrogen would not require the participation of a “licensed medical professional”, nor the “cooperation of the offender being executed”.“It’s such a simple procedure, it would be hard to do it wrong,” said Copeland when asked about the specifics of a nitrogen execution. “You won’t find one person who is for the death penalty in general but thinks that this method is somehow complicated, or you won’t be able to implement it correctly.”Another person present at the meeting was David Cincotta, legal counsel to the Oklahoma department of corrections at the time. “The details provided in the research that had been done were not close to what would be required to defend the method in court,” he said when asked about the material presented.Christian was part of a highly conservative rebel faction of Republicans in Oklahoma who were further to the right than the mainstream Republicans, according to Virgin. One of his friends in that group was Senator Randy Terrill, who in 2013 was sentenced to a year in prison for bribing a Democratic candidate to withdraw from a Senate election so that Christian could have her otherwise unwinnable seat. Their mutual friend Copeland testified in support of Terrill during his trial.Before that, the group pursued a controversial bill calling for the installation of a monument of the Ten Commandments outside the Oklahoma capitol. And when Christian ran in 2017 for the Oklahoma county sheriff’s office, documents emerged indicating that in 1999 he was reprimanded for toasting to the death of a judge who had ruled against a lawsuit seeking to have the Confederate flag returned to the state capitol. The group that brought the suit was an Oklahoma division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.View image in fullscreenWhen asked why Oklahoma passed its nitrogen bill in 2015 but never followed through on developing and finalizing a protocol, Copeland said: “Nobody wants to be the first. You don’t want to be the one who gets blamed if something goes wrong.”But just a few states over in Alabama, Republican senator Trip Pittman caught wind of the Oklahoma bill and figured nitrogen might cure the execution woes they were facing in his own state, so he authored his own. “Misery loves company,” he said. “Oklahoma had passed the bill and they had done the research.”Fortunately for Pittman, a dogged attorney in the Alabama attorney general’s office by the name of Lauren Simpson was ready to step up, and wasn’t scared to do the legal work necessary to get nitrogen executions over the line. But she didn’t come out unscathed. In a rare and humiliating move, in 2021 she was fined for misleading the courts over whether Alabama’s death row inmates were properly briefed on how and when they could choose between lethal injection and nitrogen. Simpson declined to comment on her involvement, citing a lack of permission from her office.The Alabama protocol she had a hand in developing sees a firefighter-style gas mask attached to the prisoner’s face, which is then filled with a stream of pure nitrogen, thus depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die.The smoothness of Alabama’s two nitrogen-gas executions has been widely disputed by their few witnesses. While the state has claimed they were “textbook,” others have described them as more violent than some botched lethal injections.“Despite misinformation campaigns by political activists, out-of-state lawyers, and biased media, the State proved once again that nitrogen hypoxia is both humane and effective,” said Alabama’s attorney general Steve Marshall, minutes after the second execution last week.Yet in both nitrogen executions almost all witnesses spoke of jerking against restraints and gasps for air over several minutes. A prison official involved in the first execution, carried out in January, later acknowledged in a sworn statement that it took “longer than I had expected.”In a statement to the Guardian, Copeland disputed that Alabama’s executions had gone wrong, saying: “There was some movement during the procedure, which could be interpreted as either conscious struggling or the involuntary movements typically exhibited by people who are dying.”“The death penalty is never going to be something pleasant,” he said. “Nobody wants to die.” More

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      in Elections

      America Does Not Need the Death Penalty

      by

      Capital punishment is not a front-burner political issue this year. In fact, the Democratic Party dropped the subject from its 2024 platform, eight years after becoming the first major party to formally call for abolishing the death penalty. But in 2020, President Biden’s campaign platform included a pledge to “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.” Once elected, he became the country’s first sitting president openly opposed to capital punishment.It would be an appropriate and humane finale to his presidency for Mr. Biden to fulfill that pledge and try to eliminate the death penalty for federal crimes. Such an effort would also remind the nation that this practice is immoral, unconstitutional and useless as a deterrent to crime.For more than two decades now, most barometers of how Americans view capital punishment — the number of new death sentences, the number of executions and the level of public support — have tracked a steady decline. There were 85 executions in 2000 but only 24 last year and 13 so far this year, all carried out in only seven states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah.While a majority of Americans, about 55 percent over the past several years, remain in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers, half no longer believe it is used fairly. The Gallup Crime Survey, which has been testing opinions on this subject of fairness since 2000, found in last October’s sampling that for the first time, more Americans believed the death penalty was applied unfairly (50 percent) than fairly (47 percent).“I regret deeply that we followed the easiest path.”This editorial board has long argued that the death penalty should be outlawed, as it is in Western Europe and many other parts of the world. Studies have consistently shown, for decades, that the ultimate penalty is applied arbitrarily, and disproportionately to Black people and people with mental problems. A death sentence condemns prisoners to many years of waiting, often in solitary confinement, before they are killed, and executions have often gone awry, arguably violating the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More