Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

The Death Penalty is Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Needle

LOS ANGELES DISTRICT ATTORNEY Steve Cooley is in a hurry to have Mitchell Sims put to death. You couldn’t blame Cooley if he felt frustrated. He’s seen the execution of Sims, a convicted triple murderer, delayed for six solid years, bogged down in a legal quagmire over whether California’s three-chemical lethal-injection sequence is a sufficiently humane method of killing someone. By the time the courts decide the issue, the state might not even be able to obtain the deadly drugs required. And to top it off, Cooley may be running out of time: this November, the state’s voters may ... Read More

The Final Feast: Last Meals on Death Row

What would you eat if you knew it was your last meal? For some people—death-row inmates facing imminent execution—the question is not a hypothetical one. In one of the most morbidly fascinating academic studies to cross my desk in a long time, Brian Wansink of Cornell University compiled a catalog of final food requests from 247 Americans who were facing the death penalty. Among his findings, published in the journal Appetite: “The average last meal is calorically rich (2756 calories) and proportionately averages 2.5 times the daily recommended servings of protein and ... Read More

Also on Maplight, Follow your Favorite Initiative

And one more: to follow the money behind California's upcoming initiatives, go here: votersedge.org/california. (Another Maplight site.) Right now, the data shows that $18.3 million has been raised in support of Jerry Brown's tax initiative (the largest amount comes from SEIU); $85,000 has been raised to fight against it. For the anti-death penalty initiative, $3.9 million has been raised in support, and $136,000 against. We are working on a story for our November issue about that convoluted issue (our national want of the death penalty, if only fair and humane). ... Read More

George Cowan, Founding President of Santa Fe Institute: 1920-2012

George Cowan

George Cowan, a Manhattan Project scientist and civic leader who helped pioneer the interdisciplinary investigation of complex adaptive systems and served as founding president of the Santa Fe Institute, died today at the age of 92. As a chemist who also spent nearly 40 years in research and administration at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cowan was SFI’s president from 1984 to 1991. He also helped establish the Santa Fe Opera and served as longtime chairman of the Los Alamos National Bank. "George Cowan's death is a huge loss to us all," SFI President Jerry Sabloff said in a ... Read More

The Death Penalty on Life Support

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(Editor's Note: The Connecticut Legislature voted today to abolish the death penalty for all future cases, becoming the fifth state in the last four years to do so. The following is a piece written by Vince Beiser for the upcoming debut issue of Pacific Standard. It explores the reasons why the death penalty is falling out of favor.) You may have noticed something about the debate over the death penalty in the presidential race: there’s hardly been one. That speaks volumes about how this persistent institution is quietly fading away in the U.S. — for the second time in history. Most ... Read More

A Mind of Crime

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Kent Kiehl, a prominent neuroscientist hired to study an admitted murderer named Brian Dugan, had already been under cross-examination in the hushed, wood-paneled suburban Chicago courtroom for more than an hour when a brain diagram, hatched with X's, was projected on a screen. The X's marked areas where Kiehl had discovered abnormally low grey matter density in Dugan's brain. In a curious meeting of law and neuroscience, those X's would help jurors decide whether he should be executed or sentenced to life in prison. Did the way Dugan's brain had developed leave him spring-loaded for violence? ... Read More

Should Minors Ever Face Life Without Parole?

The Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons struck down the death penalty for juveniles, citing the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But that left another possible Eighth Amendment issue on the table: whether sentences of life without parole for juveniles are constitutional. That question is now being considered on both the judicial and legislative levels. In the term beginning this October, the Supremes will hear two cases — one involving a 13-year-old sex offender, the other a 17-year-old probation violator present when a felony murder ... Read More

Innocent Until Reported Guilty

As guards led Ellen Reasonover to the van that would transport her to prison, she could not comprehend that a St. Louis County, Mo., jury had just found her guilty of a cold-blooded murder. A 24-year-old single mother of a baby daughter, Reasonover had no history of violence, yet she stood convicted of killing a 19-year-old gas station attendant in the neighborhood where she lived. She had come to the attention of police only after she answered a television broadcast requesting potential witnesses to offer information. Motivated by good citizenship, Reasonover showed up at the local police ... Read More

Nastier, Noisier, Costlier — and Better

In the not-so-distant past, state-level judicial elections were decent, docile and dirt-cheap affairs, even if drab and dull, and scarcely deserving of being called democratic. Today, they are, as professor Roy A. Schotland of Georgetown Law Center says, nastier, noisier and costlier, meaning that attack ads have become more commonplace, campaign activity of everysort has increased dramatically and, consequently, the need for campaign contributions to finance candidates for judicial office has increased exponentially. Few observers believe that this trend toward increasingly politicized ... Read More