Several organizations against the death penalty blasted an execution in Alabama that reportedly took around three hours to complete.
The execution of Joe Nathan James Jr. took Alabama officials around three hours to complete, making it longer than any other lethal injection in recorded United States history, an examination by Reprieve US, an organization against the death penalty, found. Several organizations working to abolish the death penalty told the Washington Examiner that botched executions are violations of the Constitution and further reason the death penalty should be abolished.
“Government executions routinely get botched — the states of Oklahoma and Ohio are a couple of other recent examples — but this happening even once is inexcusable and, given the extreme secrecy surrounding the use of the death penalty, we may never really know how it happened,” Demetrius Minor, the national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “Botched executions are one of many reasons conservatives have been reevaluating the death penalty.”
DEATH ROW INMATE HAS SHOCKING LAST WORDS FOR STATE GOVERNOR
A staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union told the Washington Examiner the “horrifying details” of James’s execution “should shake us all.”
“Execution by lethal injection, while sold to the public as a sanitized procedure, remains cruel and regularly causes tremendous pain and suffering,” said Claudia Van Wyk. “Mr. James is not the first, nor will he be the last, to experience prolonged agony during his execution. The time is long past to end the death penalty. When the state kills in the name of its citizens, it degrades our humanity.”
Witness to Innocence, an organization against the death penalty that is led by death penalty exonerees, called botched executions “a horrific reality of our capital punishment system” and said that such punishments go against the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects people from cruel and unusual punishment.
James was convicted of murder and sentenced to die for the 1994 killing of Faith Hall, who was shot to death in Birmingham, Alabama, according to investigators. He was scheduled by Alabama officials to be executed at 6 p.m. on July 28, though media witnesses were not allowed to enter the execution chamber until 9 p.m., and it was not until 9:27 p.m. that officials pronounced him dead, according to Reprieve US’s examination.
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Alabama officials have insisted that “there was nothing out of the ordinary” with James’s execution, according to a statement. A modified statement that was released later noted that James’s executioners had trouble establishing the intravenous lines carrying the drugs into James’s body.
The Washington Examiner has contacted the Alabama Department of Corrections for comment.
