Appeals court upholds Arizona execution restraining order: but not for long.

(Never mind those pesky death penalty appeals in Arizona, folks. You can count on the Governor to ignore the Board of Executive Clemency's recommendations, and the current US Supreme Court to encourage cruel and all-too-common punishment. Technicalities like the 8th amendment rights of prisoners don't slow us down for long in this place: Landrigan was executed the following day, as promised. 11/07/10)
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Judge delays execution set for today

by Michael Kiefer - Oct. 26, 2010 12:00 AM

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/10/26/20101026landrigan1026.html#ixzz14hnekItn

Arizona Republic

The scheduled execution of convicted killer Jeffrey Landrigan was put on hold Monday by a federal judge, but pending legal actions late in the day made it unclear if the reprieve would keep him from his appointment in an Arizona death chamber at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

State Attorney General Terry Goddard promised to appeal the federal restraining order, a harshly worded ruling referring to Arizona as "obstructive."
...
Goddard confirmed to The Arizona Republic on Monday that the drug was imported from Great Britain.

The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the restraining order sometime before 2 a.m. Tuesday morning. The state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Check back for updates on the high court's ruling Tuesday.

Florence Central: Witness to an execution wanted.

Back to business as usual. I wonder if it even occurred to the ADC before posting this notice that they just had two suicides in this unit. In fact, this notice was issued the day the last one occurred there. Now they can't wait for the execution. This is what they're really good at.

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ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
1601 W. JEFFERSON
PHOENIX, ARIZONA 85007
(602) 542-3133
JANICE K. BREWER, GOVERNOR
CHARLES L. RYAN, DIRECTOR

Media advisory

For more information contact:
Barrett Marson
bmarson@azcorrections.gov
Bill Lamoreaux
blamorea@azcorrections.gov

Sept. 30, 2010
Execution witness requests

Phoenix, Az – The Arizona Supreme Court has ordered the execution of inmate Jeffrey Landrigan, #82157, on Oct. 26, 2010.

Members of the media may submit a written (email) request to witness the execution to the Media Relations office. Each request must include the name, social security number and birth date of the journalist requesting access. Witnesses will be selected 15 days prior to the execution. Five members of the media will be selected to represent the media pool.

The execution is scheduled for 10 a.m. on Tuesday Oct. 26 at the Central Unit of ASPC-Florence.

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Ironically, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was recently interviewed about the death penalty...

From the Arizona Death Penalty Forum:

Retired Supreme Court Justice Regrets 1976 Vote Upholding the Death Penalty

Posted: October 04, 2010

In a recent interview on NPR, newly-retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said he particularly regretted one vote during his 35 years on the high court--his 1976 vote to uphold the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia. Stevens remarked, "I thought at the time . . . that if the universe of defendants eligible for the death penalty is sufficiently narrow so that you can be confident that the defendant really merits that severe punishment, that the death penalty was appropriate." But, over the years, he added, "the Court constantly expanded the cases eligible for the death penalty, so that the underlying premise for my vote has disappeared, in a sense." Justice Stevens also said that the court has made death penalty procedures more sympathetic to prosecutors: “I really think that the death penalty today is vastly different from the death penalty that we thought we were authorizing.”

The interview was conducted by NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg. She wrote more about Stevens's views: "The court, he notes, has become more permissive in allowing prosecutors to object to seating jurors who have qualms about the death penalty. The result is that instead of getting a random sample of jurors, jury panels are more supportive of the death penalty. In addition, the court now allows the relatives of crime victims to testify during the penalty phase of a capital trial. These so-called victim impact statements were once ruled too incendiary to be permissible, but four years later, a more conservative court reversed the decision. All of this, says Justice Stevens, has changed the nature of the death penalty as he and the court envisioned it in the 1970s."

(N. Totenberg, "Justice Stevens: An Open Mind On A Changed Court," NPR, October 4, 2010). See U.S. Supreme Court. The vote upholding the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976 was 7-2. Among those in the majority were Justices Blackmun and Powell, in addition to Justice Stevens. Since then, all three Justices have said they had changed their minds about the death penalty and no longer believed it was constitutional. If those Justices had voted differently in Gregg, the death penalty would probably have been ended by a 5-4 vote in 1976. It had already been struck down 5-4 in 1972 in Furman v. Georgia, and Gregg was the test case to see if it could be reinstated.