Judge’s anti-death protest riles conservatives

Serial executions take toll on executioners too: critics

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas, April 16, (Agencies): After barring Arkansas from executing eight inmates in rapid succession because of a dispute over how it obtained one of its execution drugs, Judge Wendell Griffen went to an anti-death penalty rally, where he made a stir by lying down on a cot and binding himself as though he were a condemned man on a gurney.

Griffen’s participation in Friday’s protest outside the governor’s mansion sparked outrage among death penalty supporters, including Republican lawmakers who described it as judicial misconduct and potential grounds for Griffen’s removal from the bench.

Griffen, a Pulaski County circuit judge, said he’s morally opposed to the death penalty and that his personal beliefs alone shouldn’t disqualify him from taking up certain cases. For years, he has been pushing the boundaries of how much a judge can speak out on controversial issues.

“We have never, in my knowledge, been so afraid to admit that people can have personal beliefs yet can follow the law, even when to follow the law means they must place their personal feelings aside,” Griffen told The Associated Press on Saturday.

On Friday, Griffen granted a restraining order preventing Arkansas from using its supply of vecuronium bromide, one of three drugs it uses in executions, because the supplier said the state misleadingly obtained the drug. The ruling came a day before a federal judge halted the executions on different grounds. The supplier, however, on Saturday sought to drop its lawsuit and have Griffen’s order lifted because it believed the federal ruling removed the imminent risk its drug would be used in executions.

The back-to-back decisions upend what had initially been a plan to execute eight men in 11 days in four double executions, starting Monday night, because the state’s supply of one of the other execution drugs expires at the end of the month.

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge on Saturday also asked the state’s highest court to vacate Griffen’s ruling, citing the judge’s participation in anti-death penalty events before and after he issued it. She asked for a new judge to be assigned the case.

“This court should put a stop to the games being played by a judge who is obviously unable to preside over this case impartially,” Rutledge’s wrote in her request.

Demonstration

Griffen declined to comment on the demonstration or his ruling, saying he’d address any questions about it at a hearing he scheduled for Tuesday. Lawmakers have suggested the move may be grounds for the Arkansas House to begin impeachment proceedings, saying the demonstration and a blog post Griffen wrote on the death penalty this week may amount to “gross misconduct” under the state constitution. “He is outside the bounds of normal behavior for most judges probably anywhere in America,” Republican state Sen Jason Rapert said.

Meanwhile, putting a prisoner to death “stays with you for a long time,” says Ron McAndrew.

The former warden of Florida State Prison says his own mental health had begun to deteriorate by the time he left his position in 1998 after taking part in eight executions.

schools across the country to rethink campus security and reignited the debate over gun control that rages to this day.

Sunday’s events included a wreath-laying ceremony around 9:43 am — the time when SeungHui Cho’s rampage in Norris Hall began. Followed by a commemoration

event featuring remarks from Kaine and a reading of the names and biographies of the 32 slain students and faculty members. (AP)

‘Be criminally charged’:

An attorney is calling for the two Georgia police officers who were fired after Now, McAndrew is fighting against the death penalty. He is particularly concerned about the psychological well-being of the handful of officials who would be involved if Arkansas were to proceed with the rapid-fire executions of several condemned men, originally set for April 17 to 27. Courts in that southern state have blocked those executions for now, as legal appeals continue.

“We wanted the governor (of Arkansas) to understand that he’s sitting in his office very comfortable. And these men are going to be partaking in a killing of another human being,” McAndrew told AFP. He doesn’t use the word “execution,” which he considers a euphemism. “These officers, they get to know these inmates,” he explained. “Twenty-four hours a day they work with these inmates. They feed them. They take them to get their showers, they take them for exercise. They stand in front of their cells and they talk to them when they feel lonely,” McAndrew said. “The only persons that the inmates know are the officers. Suddenly it’s the same officer who’s taking them to another room to kill them.”

Experience

“The experience is something that will stay with you for a long time; I don’t think it ever goes away.”

McAndrew, who took part in the deaths of eight convicts — three in Florida, and five in Texas as training — says that the executions in Arkansas will undoubtedly be carried out by the same five people.

“You can’t change the team,” he said. “The officers that will carry out the executions, they have practiced the executions several hundred times. They do it over and over and over again,” he said. An officer volunteers to play the part of an inmate, he said. “They take him from the cell, they put them on the gurney, they strap him down, they put them on the IVs,” or intravenous lines.

Arkansas prison authorities have refused to divulge the makeup of their execution team, fiercely protecting the identities of those involved. “I can say that they are well-trained and qualified to carry out their respective responsibilities,” said Solomon Graves, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Correction. In the view of antideath penalty activists, everyone involved pays a price.

“We are concerned for the welfare of the prisoners, we are concerned for the victims’ families, we are concerned for the welfare of the prison workers that have to do this,” said Abraham Bonowitz, director of the New York-based Death Penalty Action group.

“There’s a broader range of collateral damage than simply the prisoner and the victim.”

Arkansas’s original packed schedule would place added pressure on the execution team, increasing the risk of error, critics say. And no one wants to see a repeat of the agony Clayton Lockett suffered during his botched execution in Oklahoma in 2014.

“The rapid schedule will put an extraordinary burden on the men and women required by the state to carry out this most solemn act, and it will increase the risk of mistakes in the execution chamber — which could haunt them for the rest of their lives,” said Allen Ault, Georgia’s former commissioner of corrections who has overseen five executions, writing in Time magazine’s March 28 edition.

being caught on camera having a violent confrontation with a motorist to face criminal charges.

Justin D. Miller said at a news conference Saturday that the firing of Sgt Michael Bongiovanni and Master Police Officer Robert McDonald was not enough. They were fired Thursday by the Gwinnett

County Police Department after being videotaped beating 21-year-old Demetrius Hollins.

The department has opened a criminal investigation into the officers’ behavior.

“We want both of these officers criminally charged,” Miller said. “We want them to have to stand before a Gwinnett County judge in a courtroom full of Gwinnett County citizens, with their legs shackled and their hands cuffed behind their back.

And then we want them to spend the night in the Gwinnett County jail in the general population away from their family and friends. We want them to feel what Demetrius was forced to feel. Maybe then it will click to them what they did to this young man was atrocious and unacceptable and truly unbecoming of law enforcement officers.”

Bongiovanni’s attorney, Mike Pugliese, told WSB-TV Friday what his client did not use not excessive force: “It was an elbow strike, an FBI-taught defensive tactic.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports (http://on-ajc.com/2oi1nu2 ) Hollins said during the press conference that the encounter with police was “the scariest moment of my life.”

“The truth would never have come to life without these videos,” Hollins said, reading from a prepared statement. (AP)