Ohio (aka Texas north) has just set 7 new execution dates – meaning there is now an execution in the state scheduled each and every month between February and October. Ohio officials are claiming that the change to a new execution drug, announced just two weeks ago, had nothing to do with this sudden splurge in execution dates.
Also having nothing to do with it are the beliefs of the Ohio Supreme Court judge who was an architect of Ohio’s death penalty law, the former director of Ohio’s prisons who personally witnessed 33 executions, and Ohio’s Catholic bishops, all of whom have called for Ohio to stop executions and get rid of the death penalty.
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Former Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired from the Supreme Court in June after turning 90, has come out swinging in the past few days against the death penalty. In an appearance on 60 Minutes this past Sunday and a New York Review of Books essay that is now online, Justice Stevens makes the case that capital punishment as it is now administered in the U.S. is hopelessly flawed — and unconstitutional.
In so doing, he is pushing the death-penalty debate just where it needs to go. ...