Davis' Kin: Death Row Families Suffer Most

Martina Correia

Having a loved one on death row would be stressful enough for most people. The trial, sentencing, appeals and the wait to see if there is any possibility that the worst you can imagine may not come to pass can take its toll on anyone’s physical, emotional and mental health.

Martina Correia understands that better than most. The sister of Death Row inmate Troy Davis has been going through that emotional roller coaster for years and wrestling with a number of health issues, including her own battle with Stage IV breast cancer.

Davis, who is black, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of white Savannah policeman Mark MacPhail.

No physical evidence has linked Davis to the killing, and seven of the nine witnesses who implicated Davis at trial have since recanted, saying that they were pressured into naming him. Last year, the presiding judge of an evidentiary hearing in the case ruled that Davis failed to establish his innocence, clearing the way to set a new execution date.

In late March, the U.S. Supreme Court did not address Davis' appeal of the judge's ruling. Barring any other legal remedies, the remaining option would be getting the state of Georgia's Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant him clemency.

The pressure definitely took a toll on Davis’ family. His father died six months after he was convicted; an aunt died 16 months ago, and his mother died in April.

Correia told BlackAmericaWeb.com that within 30 minutes of telling Davis that his mother had died, prison officials also told him he could not have his monthly contact visit with his family. Authorities contended, Correia said, that there was concern about how Davis would react with relatives present so shortly after hearing the news about his mother.

So, beyond just working to see that her brother receives justice in the courts, Correia is also monitoring his treatment in prison while undergoing treatment for breast cancer, raising her teenaged son and caring for her husband, who recently began intensive dialysis treatments.

“I just have a strong faith in God,” Correia said when asked how she manages. “Whenever I have something happening, and it’s too much of a burden for me to carry, I just give it over to God."

She said lawyers for Davis continue to seek legal avenues to have his case heard.

In not hearing Davis’ case in March, Correia said, “They didn’t deny Troy’s case; they didn’t select Troy’s case. There’s a difference,” which may leave an opening for further appeal.

Correia said a new warden was assigned a year ago to the prison where Davis is incarcerated and has taken a hard line on the treatment of death row inmates, including limiting or eliminating contact with families, severely restricting inmates’ physical movement and increasing fines for minor infractions.

“For 20 years, there was no problem until the new warden came in,” she said. “They talk real nice to the family on the phone, and then go antagonize the inmates” to provoke them into committing infractions for which they can be punished.

“They put dog cages on the yard so they can’t go out for recreation. They have to go into these cages that are 5-by-9 or 6-by-9 and just stand. My brother said he hasn’t been outside for a year,” Correia said.

At one time, inmates were allowed to have books in their cells, some minimal art programs, “just things to keep them sane,” but all of those things have been eliminated or severely curtailed.

“The morale is so low that they’ve had suicide attempts and one suicide success. We get outsiders to talk (to officials on Davis’ behalf) because it minimizes the punishment,” Correia said, noting the Georgia state NAACP and the Southern Center for Civil Rights have been helpful go-betweens.

Through it all, she said, her brother has shown resilience. “He asks God if it’s his will to use him to make a bigger statement about innocence, then that’s God’s will."

Beyond getting her brother off death row and getting evidence that could prove his innocence heard, Correia said there is a push to change death penalty law in general. The law, as it is written, doesn’t require a confirmation of guilt, just a guilty verdict.

“The lawyers have told us it is not illegal to execute innocent people in this country if the courts feel they got a fair trial."

In the meantime, Davis’ family and supporters are urging people to go to www.JusticeforTroy.org, and sign the petition calling for his release, link the site to their Facebook pages and get friends to sign the petition too.

“Get Troy’s address from the site, and send him words of encouragement,” Correia said. “Not letters of ‘Woe is me’ and ‘the Department of Corrections sucks’ - which we already know."

Once the execution day is set, a Global Day of Solidarity will be scheduled five to 10 days before the date, with events held in various locations around the world and in Georgia, where Davis is imprisoned.

Correia said she wants people to remember that “both (MacPhail’s and Davis’) families are victims; Death Row families especially because they keep dealing with the uncertainty over the appeals."

“I just think my mother died of a broken heart, but she made sure we were strong enough to deal with this," Correia said. "It’s not just the inmate who is on death row. That whole family is on death row."

Source: blackamericaweb.com, May 19, 2011

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Merchants of death

An execution-frenzy may have been unleashed among death penalty U.S. States with execution drugs successfully sourced from India's Kayem Pharma Company. Will Indian authorities now tacitly condone the entry of generic drug manufacturers into a bloodthirsty niche of global commerce?

Brandon Rhode (31) was not in good shape when he was strapped into the execution chamber gurney on September 27 2010, in Georgia, United States. Six days earlier he had attempted suicide because, according to court documents, he did not want to be “put down like a dog.” As a result, he was left with “deep gaping wounds” from the razor he used to slash his neck and elbows. He was also said to have been brain-damaged from sheer blood loss.

Unfortunately for Rhode, convicted in 2000 of killing three persons during a burglary attempt, the worst was yet to come. For although medics spent 30 minutes trying to find a vein in Rhode's arm, into which they could insert needles to administer lethal drugs, something was clearly going wrong when the drugs started pumping. The first drug injected into Rhode, sodium thiopental, was supposed to render him unconscious, yet Rhode's eyes remained open throughout the procedure and moments before he was pronounced dead he was said to have turned his head and exposed the bandage over his slashed neck.

In a sworn declaration Mark Heath, a medical doctor and an expert witness in lethal injection cases, said: “Given the highly unusual provenance of the thiopental that was used in the Rhode execution, one explanation for the eyes remaining open is that the thiopental lacked efficiency.”

The “unusual provenance” that Dr. Heath mentioned in his report was a reference to the fact that the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) had imported the thiopental from Dream Pharma, a company located in the United Kingdom, “which operates out of the back of a driving school in London,” according to Dr. Heath.

Why did a key death penalty State of the U.S., itself a country steeped in a long and contentious history of capital punishment, have to resort to importing a lethal injection drug? A little bit of background is in order here, especially because since January execution drugs have entered the U.S. from yet another “unusual provenance” — Kayem Pharma Company of Mumbai, India.

While the history of the lethal injection goes back to May 1977, when the Oklahoma legislature first adopted it as a statute-supported method of execution, today 37 of the 38 death penalty States have lethal injection statutes. However, the entire execution “industry” in the U.S. relied on only one company for the supply of the lethal drugs cocktail — a firm called Hospira located in Lake Forest, Illinois. Emails, obtained by The Hindu, between Hospira and the Nebraska DOC, importer of thiopental from Kayem Pharma, made it clear that Hospira “do not support the use of any of our products in capital punishment procedures.”

Matters took a turn for the worse for States such as Nebraska when Hospira announced in the summer of 2010 that it had temporarily ceased production of thiopental due to a “shortage of raw materials.” Yet, according to Clive Stafford Smith, Director of a U.K.-based anti-death-penalty campaign group called Reprieve, the reason for the stoppage was that Hospira's plant was old and re-tooling it would be uneconomical given that thiopental is now off-patent.

Italy's stance

When Hospira sought to supply thiopental from a plant it owned in Italy, Reprieve campaigners worked with the Italian government, which was said to have been “shocked that Italy might be involved in the execution business,” and eventually “suggested to Hospira Italy that if they exported any drugs used for executions they might end up losing their export licence altogether.” At this point, according to Mr. Smith, Hospira made the “sensible decision” to cease production of the drugs altogether.

With the supplies of thiopental dwindling rapidly around the U.S., death penalty States saw themselves faced with two options. First, some of them, such as Ohio, Arizona, Oklahoma and Texas, switched to another anaesthetic, pentobarbital, commonly used for euthanising animals, and whose effects on human beings for execution purposes has never been tested.

States such as Ohio and Oklahoma have already executed four prisoners using pentobarbital, despite anaesthesia specialists such as David Waisel of Harvard Medical School warning that “the use of pentobarbital as an agent to induce anaesthesia has no clinical history... [and] puts the inmate at risk for serious undue pain and suffering.”

Act of desperation

In what might well have been an act of desperation, State executioners then decided to start importing thiopental, in the first instance from Dream Pharma in the U.K. Scarcely imagining the enormity of the legal backlash that would ensue, Arizona led the way, quickly executing Jeffrey Landrigan on October 25 2010 using the British thiopental. Georgia followed suit, executing Emmanuel Hammond on January 25 2011, having already executed Rhode.

The instant it was revealed in the British media that a home-grown company was supplying lethal drugs for U.S. executions, there was a flurry of public and legal campaigns mostly targeting two Liberal Democrats, Business Secretary Vince Cable and Foreign and Commonwealth Office Minister of State Jeremy Browne.

They initially declined to intervene; however they reversed that decision, reportedly after seeing evidence that the drug was only being exported for use on death row. Mr. Cable said: “In light of new information I have taken the decision to control the export of sodium thiopental. This move underlines this government's and my own personal moral opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances without impacting legitimate trade.”

The Kayem deal

Enter Nebraska DOC's transactions with Kayem Pharmaceuticals Private Limited, a small generic drug manufacturer based out of Marian Colony in Borivali, Mumbai. A series of emails, which The Hindu has in its possession, began between a representative of the Nebraska DOC and a Kayem sales representative in November 2010, the subject of discussion being the export of 500 one-gram vials of thiopental, valued at $2,056.15, from Mumbai to Nebraska.

The deal appeared to be progressing smoothly until the shipment reached Omaha around mid-December. A hold-up occurred at that point owing to the FDA's lack of clarity on whether or not the Nebraska DOC had a sufficient legal basis for importing the lethal drug. The FDA finally relented on January 7, 2011, making what informed observers described as a “political decision to not review the importation of the drugs.” It, however, clarified its position to the Nebraska DOC, saying: “In keeping with established practice, FDA does not review or approve products for the purpose of lethal injection. FDA has not reviewed the products in this shipment to determine their identity, safety, effectiveness, purity or any other characteristics.”

Yet with this action the FDA has risked unleashing an execution-frenzy among thiopental-starved death penalty States.

Already a likely victim of Indian-made thiopental has been identified — Carey Dean Moore (53). He awaits execution in the Nebraska DOC, now the owner of enough Kayem-manufactured thiopental to execute 166 men.

With the U.S.' patchy record of untested anaesthetics that fail to produce the expected unconsciousness, Moore may also expect the same outcome as Rhode, which Dr. Heath described thus: “There is no dispute that the asphyxiation caused by pancuronium [the second, paralytic agent administered] and the caustic burning sensation caused by potassium [the third, heart-stopping agent administered] would be agonising in the absence of adequate anaesthesia.”

Unless last week's seizures of Kentucky's and Tennessee's stocks of imported thiopental by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency are repeated in other States and the proliferation of these untested drugs eventually stopped, we could enter a new era of “cruel and unusual punishment” for death row inmates across the country. Already, it is possible that the dubious Indian barbiturate has found its way into the broader healthcare system and reached the DOCs of several States.

India's options

And for India, itself a user of capital punishment, although in the “rarest of rare” cases, it is anybody's guess as to whether authorities will follow the stellar example of the U.K. and Italy and ban the export of lethal drugs to the U.S. Perhaps in a stroke of irony it will be economics rather than morality that will stall the entry of Indian generic drug manufacturers into this bloodthirsty niche of global commerce.

According to Reprieve's Mr. Smith, “Kayem can expect to be party to U.S. litigation for decades. It may have made them a small profit at the start, but they will end up paying lawyers until their profits have vanished one hundred times.”

Indeed, even as Reprieve held a press conference in Mumbai this week to raise awareness of the issue in the country, Kayem announced: “In view of the sensitivity involved with sale of our Thiopental Sodium to various... prisons in USA and as alleged to be used for the purpose of lethal injection, we voluntary declare that we... refrain ourselves in selling this drug where the purpose is purely for lethal injection and its misuse.”

However, if the lethal drugs export persists, even as India clamours for a more prominent place on the world stage, it will have to hide the embarrassing fact that it tacitly condones its merchants of death.

Source: The Hindu, Opinion, Narayan Lakshman, March 8, 2011

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Cruel and usual: US solitary confinement

As incarceration rates explode in the US, thousands are placed in solitary confinement, often without cause. In Europe, solitary confinement has largely been abandoned, and it is widely viewed as a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, in violation of international human rights conventions.

The spectre of Bradley Manning lying naked and alone in a tiny cell at the Quantico Marine Base, less than 50 miles from Washington, DC, conjures up images of an American Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, where isolation and deprivation have been raised to the level of torture.

In fact, the accused Wikileaker, now in his tenth month of solitary confinement, is far from alone in his plight. Every day in the US, tens of thousands of prisoners languish in "the hole".

A few of them are prison murderers or rapists who present a threat to others. Far more have committed minor disciplinary infractions within prison or otherwise run afoul of corrections staff. Many of them suffer from mental illness, and are isolated for want of needed treatment; others are children, segregated for their own "protection"; a growing number are elderly and have spent half their lives or more in utter solitude.

No one knows for sure what their true numbers are. Many states, as well as the federal government, flatly declare that solitary confinement does not exist in their prison systems. As for their euphemistically named "Secure Housing Units" or "Special Management Units", most states do not report occupancy data, nor do wardens report on the inmates sent to "administrative segregation".

Prosecutor, judge and jury

By common estimate, more than 20,000 inmates are held in supermax prisons, which by definition isolate their prisoners. Perhaps 50,000 to 80,000 more are in solitary confinement on any given day in other prisons and local jails, many of them within sight of communities where Americans go about their everyday lives.

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Source: Al Jazeera, Jean Casella, March 24, 2011

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Life on Oklahoma Death Row — Execution Day

On the morning of the execution, the condemned inmate is taken from his cell and X-rayed and strip searched. This process, “to make sure there are no foreign bodies in him,” Crenshaw [the warden’s assistant at Oklahoma State Penitentiary] said, is to ensure that the inmate has no possession of harmful materials that could hurt him prior to the scheduled execution.

(Crenshaw referred to one condemned inmate that had obtained a harmful drug on the day of his execution. This inmate was rushed to the hospital only hours before his scheduled execution. His stomach was pumped, his life was saved and he was taken back to the penitentiary where his court ordered execution was carried out — a few hours late.)

Once the X-ray and strip search are complete, the inmate is given new clothing and placed in a holding cell that is just a few feet away from the execution chamber. Anytime the inmate leaves this cell for a visit, he is showered and receives a new set of clothes. There are “three officers that will monitor and log his every movement,” Crenshaw said. “There’s nothing he does that isn’t logged on the day of execution.”

Shortly before the hour of execution nears, the inmate will be taken from the holding cell and “afforded the opportunity to freely walk with staff” into the execution chamber. Crenshaw explained that this is the only time a death row inmate, during his time spent in the maximum security unit, is afforded the opportunity to walk freely amongst staff. Any other time the inmate walks in the facility with staff, he is bound by cuffs and shackles.

Allowing the condemned to make this final walk on his own, Crenshaw says, will “afford the inmate his dignity.” This final walk is approximately 4 feet, from the holding cell to the execution chamber.

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Source: McAlester News-Capital, January 8, 2011

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