Cruel And Unusual Punishment

Joe Sullivan was 13 years old when he and two older boys broke into a home, where they robbed and raped an elderly woman. After a one-day trial in 1989, Sullivan was sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole. Terrance Graham was 16 when he and two others robbed a restaurant. When he was arrested again a year later for a home break-in, a Florida judge said he was incorrigible. In 2005, Graham received a life term with no parole. The two young convicts represent an American phenomenon, one the Supreme Court is set to reconsider in the fall term that opens Oct. 5. At issue is whether it is cruel and unusual punishment to imprison a minor until he or she dies when the crime does not involve murder.

Corrections officials heard overwhelming condemnation of proposed new lethal injection procedures Tuesday at the first-ever public hearing on execution methods in the state. Contrary to the solid majority of Californians who in opinion polls expressed support for the death penalty, only two out of more than 100 speakers supported a resumption of death sentences once legal hurdles are cleared.

As executioners poked his limbs with an IV needle, Romell Broom initially tried to speed along his own demise, flexing his arm and tugging on a rubber tourniquet to better expose a vein on the inside of his elbow. But as prison workers repeatedly failed to find a vein strong enough to take the lethal injections, the convicted rapist-murderer began to despair over his protracted end. Witnesses and the execution-team log from Tuesday describe how the 53-year-old winced and cried as a shunt inserted in his leg also failed to open a pathway for the fatal drugs.

In a stinging ruling, a Los Angeles federal judge said immigration officials' alleged decision to withhold a critical medical test and other treatment from a detainee who later died of cancer was "beyond cruel and unusual" punishment. The decision from U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson allows the family of Francisco Castaneda to seek financial damages from the government. Castaneda, who suffered from penile cancer, died Feb. 16.

Convicted child rapist and murderer Mark Dean Schwab was put to death Tuesday at Florida State Prison, the state's first execution since a botched lethal injection 18 months ago raised concern that a condemned man had endured a "cruel and unusual" ordeal. Schwab, 39, was executed for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Junny Rios-Martinez of Cocoa. He killed the boy in April 1991, just a month after early release from a previous prison term for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy.

A federal judge in Nashville on Friday blocked the execution of a man who has been on Tennessee's death row for more than 20 years, based on a challenge to the state's new lethal injection procedure. Attorneys for Philip Ray Workman demonstrated a likelihood of success on their claim that the protocol exposes their client "to a foreseeable and likely unnecessary risk of unconstitutional pain and suffering in violation of the Eight Amendment," U.S. District Judge Todd J. Campbell wrote.

In the first review by a federal appeals court of a full-scale challenge to a state's lethal-injection law, a court in St. Louis on Monday found Missouri's procedure constitutional, paving the way for the resumption of executions in the state. The ruling becomes the guiding legal principle within the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes two other states using lethal injection -- Arkansas and South Dakota.

Attorneys for condemned inmate Michael Morales told a judge overseeing a legal challenge to California executions that the state's new lethal injection procedures are "even more ill-conceived and deficient than the older versions." The comments came in an amended complaint filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose in response to proposed revisions to the state's procedures for executing death row inmates.

nashville -- A federal judge's ruling Wednesday that Tennessee's lethal injection procedure could cause excruciating pain is another blow to the three-drug cocktail used by every state that executes by lethal injection. Federal judges reached similar conclusions in Missouri and California last year, and now states have to decide whether to defend the three-drug method or find a new way to put inmates to death by injection.

Hours after staying the execution of an inmate already strapped to a gurney at a Florida prison, the Supreme Court said Wednesday it would hear his arguments that the drug cocktail in lethal injections could cause excruciating pain. Lethal injections are used in most states with capital punishment, and dispute has been growing over the way the executions are carried out. The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether a specific form of execution is cruel and unusual punishment.