A panel charged with repairing the state’s lethal injection protocol sat through lectures by anti-death penalty advocates today during a public hearing.
Governor Phil Bredesen formed the panel after he found the protocol to be a quote, “cut and paste” job. Bredesen has asked for a rewritten protocol that can actually be followed to humanely carry out a death sentence. But, most of the speakers argued against the death penalty in its entirety.
Harmon Wray directs Vanderbilt’s Program in Faith and Criminal Justice. He quoted the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who near the end of his career opposed “tinkering with the machinery of death.”
“I think that was his finest moment, when he realized that all those years of trying to make the death penalty work, make it constitutional, make it anti-racist, make it dependable so that we really get the worst, really get the guilty, is just a doomed, futile enterprise.”
Correction Commissioner George Little, who’s leading the advisory panel, urged speakers to keep to the subject of the protocol.
Kelley Henry, an assistant federal public defender, did just that. Henry, who spoke as an individual and not a government employee, said the job of re-writing the protocols can’t be done in the 90-day time allotted.
“In order to conduct the type of comprehensive review that the governor asked the commissioner to conduct in this case, it can’t be done in 90 days.The Florida Commission that was appointed by Governor Jeb Bush took 90 days to issue a 14-page report that simply outlined all the things that needed to be done in order to fix the Florida execution protocols. They had no new suggestions, they had no new protocols, because it simply can’t be done in that amount of time.”
Commissioner Little said a quality product will be issued by the deadline set by the Governor.
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