5/27: Baseball, Death Penalty Suff
6 p.m.
• 14-10 Pirates. I was right (see 1:30 p.m. entry).
• You may have already
1:30 p.m.
• So I was flipping in-between the Braves and Reds games this afternoon, and just watched the unfortunate Reds pitcher give up 5 in the first to the Pirates and left the game with runners on first and second base with still NOBODY out. Ouch. Speaking of baseball, my MVP franchise is somewhere in mid-May, and when I played my A and MLB games this past week (both were on the same “day,” according to the calendar) I hit a grand slam in each contest. Never hit one before in any league, so to do so twice was weird. I hear cheering. Guess the Reds got someone out. I just heard Zach Duke is pitching for Shittsburgh. Cincinnati’s still in this one.
8 a.m.
• Uh, checkmate?
In 2001, Christopher Newton, 37, and his cell mate Jason Brewer, 27, were engaged in a chess game that turned violent. Newton slammed Brewer's head onto the floor, stomped his throat and took a piece of his orange prison suit and strangled him.
But that bad joke isn't the reason I posted this story.
Newton insisted that he be sentenced to death and made no attempt to appeal, thus the process moved swiftly. The sentence was carried out Thursday and Newton was pronounced dead at 11:53 a.m., nearly two hours after the scheduled start of his execution at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. The process typically takes about 20 minutes.
The execution team had to stick Newton at least 10 times to insert the shunts into his arm where the deadly chemicals are injected. During that time, it is reported that Newton chatted and laughed with prison staff throughout the delay. It took so long that the staff paused to allow Newton a bathroom break.
Death penalty opponents are calling on the state to halt all executions.
"What is clear from today's botched execution is that the state doesn't know how to execute people without torturing them to death," American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio attorney Carrie Davis said Thursday.
"Tortuing them to death"? Oh boo-hoo you fucking commie.
Previously, in May of 2006, Joseph Lewis Clark's execution was delayed about 90 minutes when the Ohio execution team could not find a suitable view, due to his longtime intravenous drug use.
Prison officials responded by saying that it was Newton's size - he weighed 265 pounds - that caused the delay.
A group of Ohio inmates has filed suit over the state's methods, calling it unconstitutionally cruel. "There will be a day in trial that they will have to answer up as to what caused this two-hour delay," he said. "That's a lot of time messing around trying to get a needle in a vein," said Greg Meyers, chief counsel for the Public Defender's office.
Perhaps if the condemned wasn't a drug user, then the State could find a worthwhile vein to penetrate. Like I said before, I’m not always a fan of capital punishment, but that’s not because I feel bad for blacks/Latinos/the poor/etc. being given the needle. You can’t take back an completed death penalty. All it takes is one lying witness or DNA test to set someone convicted free. However, if you are filmed robbing a store and shooting the clerk, seen on camera trying to end the life of a police officer that pulled you over for a busted taillight, then you die. No questions asked. No 20,000 appeals. No cell with Internet access. No trying to figure out why you did what you did. You die.
Oh yeah, back to solving the crisis of torturing prisoners to death. You don’t have to spend 20 minutes finding a vein when you put a gun in a person’s mouth.
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