Tag: prison authorities
The Key to Unlocking Prison Reform
From the standpoint of many on the left, former President Donald Trump did exactly two good things in office. He supported Operation Warp Speed, which facilitated the development and production of the first COVID-19 vaccines. And in 2018, he signed the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal-justice bill that shortened federal prison terms, gave judges more latitude in sentencing, and provided educational programming to ease prisoners’ eventual return to the outside world.
The best account of how Democrats and
Alabama Makes Plans to Gas Its Prisoners
Critics called 2022 “the year of the botched execution”—and it was indeed an infamous period, mainly because the state of Alabama lost the ability to competently kill prisoners in its charge while retaining the sovereignty to try.
On July 28, Alabama executed Joe Nathan James Jr., a convicted murderer. And, for some reason—the precise cause remains a mystery because of the extreme degree of confidentiality the state guarantees its executioners—the execution team working that night botched their task badly,
The Lawsuit Challenging the Humanity of Lethal Injection
Whether killing a person via intravenous poisoning qualifies as cruel and unusual remains, for the moment, an open question. Beginning in late February, the United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma heard testimony at the trial of Glossip v. Chandler, an eight-year-old lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of death-row inmates that seeks to prove that Oklahoma’s current lethal-injection recipe—500 milligrams of midazolam, followed by 100 milligrams of vecuronium bromide, followed by 240 mEq potassium