The Execution of Wallace Wilkerson

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Acker ◽  
Ryan Champagne
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
Firing Squad ◽  
Lethal Injection ◽  
The U.S

Wallace Wilkerson was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1879 after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of his sentence. Shots from the marksmen’s rifles missed his heart. Not strapped into the chair where he had been seated, Wilkerson lurched onto the ground and exclaimed, “My God!…They missed it!” He groaned, continued breathing, and was pronounced dead some 27 min later. Relying on contemporaneous news accounts and legal documents, this article describes Wilkerson’s crime, the judicial decisions upholding his death sentence, and his execution. It next examines ensuing methods of capital punishment from the electric chair through lethal injection and notes persistent gaps between principle and practice in the continuing quest for increasingly humane modes of execution. The article concludes by suggesting that Wilkerson’s botched firing squad execution harbingered difficulties which continue to plague capital punishment. The implications for the future of the death penalty—a long-standing and resilient practice in American criminal justice—and the ultimate legacy of Wallace Wilkerson remain uncertain, although starkly evident is the daunting and perhaps impossible challenge of reconciling the paradox inherent in the concept of a “humane execution.”

scholarly journals How Would You Like to Die? Glossip v. Gross Deals Blow to Abolitionists

2017 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-103
Author(s):  
Brenda I. Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Severe Pain ◽  
Supply Side ◽  
Drug Supply ◽  
Lethal Injection ◽  
Substantial Risk ◽  
Injection Protocol ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Attack Strategy

After capital punishment opponents’ pressure on drug suppliers reduced the lethal injection drug supply, Oklahoma began using midazolam, resulting in botched executions. Condemned inmates sought to stop use of this lethal injection protocol. In Glossip v. Gross, the U.S. Supreme Court found inmates failed to establish that such protocols entail a substantial risk of severe pain compared with available alternatives, undermining the supply side attack strategy and leaving inmates facing the possibility of an unnecessarily painful execution. This article places the Glossip decision within the context of method of execution jurisprudence and discusses implications for the ongoing battle over capital punishment.

Examination of Decision Making and Botched Lethal Injection Executions in Texas

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (12) ◽  
pp. 1715-1732
Author(s):  
Talia Roitberg Harmon ◽  
Michael Cassidy ◽  
Richelle Kloch
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Single Drug ◽  
Lethal Injection ◽  
Injection Protocol ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Analyze Data

This research examines the influence of lethal injection drug shortages on Texas criminal justice officials’ decision to change the state’s three-drug lethal injection protocol to the use of pentobarbital as a single drug protocol, without judicial oversight. We analyze data collected under the three- and one-drug protocols from 1982 through 2020 and compare differences in the length of time the lethal injection took, and complications reported by media witnesses. Findings suggest a higher rate of botched executions under the one-drug protocol than the three-drug protocol. We discuss the role compounding pharmacies may play in our results, the impact of this work on the U.S. Supreme Court’s death penalty jurisprudence, and implications concerning the unilateral decision making by Texas state officials.

scholarly journals Litigating in the Shadow of Innocence

2006 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence C. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Supreme Court

In 1976, the Supreme Court of the United States, allowing optimism to trump experience, accepted various states’ assurances that new death penalty procedures the states had then recently adopted would avoid the vices that had led the Court to strike down the death penalty in 1972. Now, some thirty years later, a body of evidence has developed demonstrating that this experiment has failed—that the problems of arbitrariness, racism and propensity to error are endemic to the criminal justice system (particularly with regard to capital punishment) and cannot be cured by what Justice Blackmun called “tinker[ing] with the machinery of death.” Despite the Court’s best intentions, the death penalty procedures of the 1980s and 1990s and the first half of this decade reflect little if any significant improvement over the condemned pre-1972 systems.

To Reinstate or to Not Reinstate? An Exploratory Study of Student Perspectives on the Death Penalty in Michigan

2016 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mensah Adinkrah ◽  
William M. Clemens
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Public University ◽  
The State ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Attitudinal Survey ◽  
The U.S

The U.S. state of Michigan abolished the death penalty in 1846. Since then, several abortive efforts have been made by state legislators to re-establish the death sentence to deal with convicted murderers. Concurrently, some support exists among Michigan residents for the restoration of capital punishment in the state. This article presents the results of the analysis of an attitudinal survey of 116 college students enrolled in three criminal justice courses in a Michigan public university concerning the reinstatement of the death sentence in the state. The data from this exploratory study show that a slight majority (52.6%) of respondents favored reinstatement whereas 45.7% opposed restoration. Advocates and opponents of re-establishment of the death penalty in Michigan provided similar religious, moral and economic arguments proffered by others in previous surveys on capital punishment available in the death penalty literature. The current study makes a contribution to the scant extant literature on attitudes toward the death penalty in abolitionist jurisdictions. As this body of literature grows, it can provide baseline data or information with which to compare attitudes in retentionist states.

Recent Legal Developments

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-215
Author(s):  
Craig Hemmens ◽  
Wesley McCann
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
The U.S

In this article, we review and analyze the criminal justice–related decisions of the 2016 term of the U.S. Supreme Court. We also provide a summary of the Court’s voting patterns and opine authorship. Twenty-two of the Court’s 69 opinions touched on criminal justice. There were significant decisions involving the Fourth Amendment, the death penalty, and sentencing.

Justice, Mercy, and Caprice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
National Archives ◽  
The Law

Justice, Mercy, and Caprice is a work of criminal justice history that speaks to the gradual emergence of a more humane Irish state. It is a close examination of what can be learned from the National Archives of Ireland about the decision to grant clemency to men and women sentenced to death between the end of the civil war in 1923 and the abolition of capital punishment in 1990. Frequently, the decision to deflect the law from its course was an attempt to introduce a measure of justice to a system where the mandatory death sentence for murder caused predictable unfairness and undue harshness. In some instances the decision to commute a death penalty sprang from merciful motivations. In others it was capricious, depending on factors that should have had no place in the government’s decision-making calculus. The custodial careers of those whose lives were spared repay scrutiny. Women tended to serve relatively short periods in prison but were often transferred to a religious institution, such as a Magdalen laundry, where their coercive confinement continued, occasionally for life. Men, by contrast, served longer in prison but were discharged directly to the community. Political offenders, such as members of the IRA, were either executed hastily or, when the threat of capital punishment had passed, incarcerated for extravagant periods. The issues addressed are of continuing relevance for countries that retain capital punishment as the ultimate sanction.

Recent Legal Developments

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 528-546
Author(s):  
Craig Hemmens ◽  
Ruibin Lu
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Exclusionary Rule ◽  
The U.S

In this article, we review and analyze the criminal justice–related decisions of the 2015 term of the U.S. Supreme Court. We also provide a summary of the Court’s voting patterns and opine authorship. Twenty-two of the Court’s 76 decisions touched on criminal justice. There were significant decisions involving the exclusionary rule, search incident to arrest, the death penalty, and sentencing.

The Use of the Death Penalty

1969 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter C. Reckless
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Dramatic Reduction ◽  
Public Sentiment ◽  
Discernible Effect ◽  
The World ◽  
Important Trend

Undoubtedly the most important trend in capital punishment has been the dramatic reduction in the number of offenses statutorily punishable by the death penalty. About two hundred years ago England had over two hundred offenses calling for the death penalty; it now has four. Some countries have abolished capital punishment completely; a few retain it for unusual offenses only. The trend throughout the world, even in the great number of countries that retain the death penalty, is definitely toward a de facto, not a de jure, form of abolition. In the United States, where the death penalty is possible in three-fourths of the states, the number of executions has declined from 199 in 1935 to an average of less than three in the last four years. This change is related to public sentiment against the use of the death penalty and even more directly to the unwillingness of juries and courts to impose a first-degree sentence. The increasing willingness of governors to commute a death sentence and of courts to hear appeals also contributes to this decline. A review of the evidence indicates that use of the death penalty has no discernible effect on the commission of capital offenses (especially murder).

Drone Penalty

Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 150-184
Author(s):  
David Wills
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Structural Space ◽  
Extrajudicial Killing ◽  
Criminal Conduct ◽  
The U.S

A different appropriation of the instant takes place in the case of extrajudicial killing by drones. That practice by the U.S., begun in 2002, has remained shrouded in secrecy. However one counts the victims, drone executions outnumber by a huge margin American judicial executions, and the drone penalty thus represents a particular paradigm of the American death penalty: for the most part out of sight and out of mind. It raises in turn questions about American democracy and the deadly criminal conduct of its foreign policy, but also produces a perspective that brings into focus the long series of historical relations between slavery and the death penalty, as well as lynching and the persistence of racism in the application of capital punishment. Furthermore, the sovereign secrecy of drone attacks produces a structural space shared by the U.S. president and the terrorist s/he attacks.

Opening the Blinds on Botched Executions

2018 ◽  
pp. 186-202
Author(s):  
Kelly Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Lethal Injection

This chapter uses the botched execution to interrupt the fantasy of the possibility of a humane death penalty. While the practice of lethal injection is designed to make capital punishment seem humane by making death instantaneous, during botched executions, the condemned die in visible and measurable real time. The chapter additionally examines the structure of the seminars themselves, arguing that Derrida's constant digressions and asides themselves serve to conjure an alternative temporality, allowing him to construct his argument performatively.

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