Today, Explained - Reviving death

Episode Date: August 2, 2019

After 16 years, the Trump administration is bringing back the federal death penalty. Reverend Sharon Risher, who lost her mother, two cousins, and a childhood friend in the Emanuel AME Church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, explains how she feels about the possibility of Dylann Roof being executed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It would mean the world to us. Thanks. The death penalty used to be a huge talking point in heated national debates, right up there with abortion. But then the federal government and states slowed down executions, and it kind of faded out of the national conversation. But on Wednesday, it was back.

I want to bring Congresswoman Gabbard back in. Your response? The bottom line is, Senator Harris, when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people's lives, you did not. And worse yet, in the case of those who were on death row, innocent people, you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to do so. There is no excuse for that. And the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor,

you owe them an apology. Senator Harris. My entire career, I have been opposed, personally opposed to the death penalty, and that has never changed. Just a few days before the debates, the Trump administration made public a major death penalty decision. The Justice Department says it will reinstate the death penalty. There are currently 62 federal inmates on death row.

If the order holds, five of them will be killed in December and January. Maurice Shama reports on criminal justice for the Marshall Project, and he's writing a book about the death penalty in the United States. I asked him about the federal death penalty's 16-year hiatus and why it sounds like it's coming to an end. The last time someone was actually executed by the federal government was in 2003. It was a man named Louis Jones. He was in the military and was convicted of kidnapping and murdering a young soldier.

He didn't have any kind of criminal record, but he had claimed in his appeals and at trial that he was exposed to nerve gas in Iraq and the PTSD from the first Gulf War contributed to him snapping and committing this crime. There was a couple years before that a man was executed. His name was Juan Raul Garza. His legal appeals now exhausted. Former Texas drug kingpin Juan Garza awaits execution tonight in the same building where Timothy McVeigh died a week ago. The deaths of the 168 people who died in the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing

were violent, unexpected, and mourned by millions. Today, the man who killed those people died on schedule by lethal injection, and no member of his family was in attendance. And Timothy McVeigh actually gave up his appeals and asked for the government, in effect, to execute him. So those three are about it, I mean, really, since the 1960s. So after those three executions, a few things happen. It's the second half of the Bush administration, and a few federal death row inmates contest the way that the federal government is executing them.

They say that the way that lethal injection drugs are being picked and the way they're being used violates their constitutional right, that it's cruel and unusual punishment. That gets kind of backed up in the courts. And then in 2008, the Supreme Court finally takes on this question in a state case. States around the country are starting to lift their moratoriums on lethal injections now that the Supreme Court has approved the method. The justices decided on a 7-2 vote that the method in question is humane. And then a couple years later, those drugs get harder to get. European governments, which had overseen some of the drug companies that were

making these drugs, refused to export them. The drug makers themselves catch wind of the lethal injection issue and become morally opposed, express their sort of outrage at the idea that their drugs, which are supposed to help people and heal them, are being used to execute prisoners. And this creates a big block on the ability of states and the federal government to get execution drugs. People were sentenced to death under Obama, like Dylann Roof, but this is just sentencing people to death and sending them to death row.

It's not actually executing people, which politically and socially kind of looks very different. And the Obama administration just decides that they're not going to emphasize it under Attorney General's holder. And Lynch, all these men just sit on federal death row. Some of them, their appeals run out and they kind of wait there. And then all that changes when Trump is elected. Maurice, before we get into this decision from the Trump administration and what it means, where do most Americans stand on the death penalty right now?

What is public opinion on the death penalty? I always give a too complicated answer to this question. The simple answer is that support for the death penalty is dropping. Half the country, roughly, is opposed to the death penalty. I think there's one more thing to say about it, though, which is that the question isn't always asked with a lot of nuance. So you could imagine someone who, when a pollster calls them, saying, I oppose the death penalty. But then you say, well, what about Osama bin Laden? What about Tsarnaev? What about Dylann Roof? And they say, well, maybe in extreme cases, really extreme cases, I'm okay with it. At the other end, you know, you have people who say,

yes, I support the death penalty, but you ask them, well, what about the guy on death row who didn't even commit the murder? He just drove the getaway car. Or what about the guy who committed the murder, but he's severely mentally ill, so mentally ill that he doesn't even really understand what's going on around him and what he did, that he actually committed this murder. And they might say, well, no, and not in those cases. So public opinion has been drifting against the death penalty, but I think there's a lot of Americans who still support it. And I think that you might get a different answer case by case, which is why this ends up going to juries and juries spit out all kinds of different results when you present the facts for them. And this Trump federal death penalty thing

is not to be confused with the states and their death penalties, right? How many states still have death sentences? 29 states, more than half, have the death penalty on the books. But that doesn't mean that they actually execute anybody. A lot of them have it in a kind of symbolic way where they sentence people to death, they send them to death row. The death rows have anywhere between five and a hundred people on them. In the case of California, it's hundreds of people, but they don't actually carry out executions because of a variety of factors. Either the courts keep ruling against the state or there's just a lack of kind of political will. You know, some of these states have Democratic governors who personally oppose the death penalty,

like California, who have basically placed a moratorium. So even if the death penalty technically exists in a lot of states, it, for all intents and purposes, doesn't. Okay, getting back to the Trump administration's decision to reinstate the federal death penalty, does it come as a surprise? Trump has over and over again expressed an interest in the death penalty. He said that it's something that he believes in. But if we don't get tough on the drug dealers, we're wasting our time.

Just remember that. We're wasting our time. And that toughness includes the death penalty. After years and years of waiting and imagining that maybe there would never be another federal execution just because of all the hassles, we got a surprise, frankly, last week when William Barr, the attorney general, said, we're ready. We have five people whose appeals have run out and we want to start carrying out executions again. Attorney General William Barr put out a statement about this yesterday. In the statement, he wrote, the Justice Department upholds the rule of law and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system. It's a significant ramping up of the federal death penalty

because they're trying to execute five people in two months after executing effectively three people in 30 years. You said earlier that when the federal government effectively stopped doing this back in 2003, it was at least partly because death row inmates objected to this three-drug method being used, saying it counted as cruel and unusual punishment. The Trump administration is changing the lethal injection drug it uses, right?

It is. So historically, the way the federal government executed people was the same as many states. They used a combination of three drugs. Arizona is reviewing its lethal injection procedure after the execution yesterday of a man convicted of two murders. It should have taken 10 minutes, but it dragged on for an hour and 57 minutes. It is the third time in the United States over the last six months that a combination of drugs has failed to bring a swift and sure death.

But a few states, notably Texas and Georgia and Missouri, found that there was kind of minimal problems with a drug called pentobarbital. It's a drug that is largely known for animal euthanasia, and in a very large dose, it is supposed to produce unconsciousness and then death. That said, it's not free of problems. People in the states who have been executed by this drug have sometimes complained of a burning sensation and said that it's physically painful to be executed this way. It's also not necessarily that easy to get. The companies that make a kind of manufactured version of it in a mass factory or laboratory have said,

we don't want to export our drug for this. We're not going to allow it to be used in this way. And we reached out to the Department of Justice actually to ask where it's getting this drug, pentobarbital, and they declined to comment. The federal government is not telling anyone where they got the drug. There's a lot of secrecy around it. In fact, it's not even that clear from the press releases that they actually have it yet

and that they're not scrambling behind the scenes to get it. So you're going to likely see a lot of people raising questions around where they got this drug and whether it is capable of executing somebody without pain, without the sorts of kind of torturous effect that would maybe raise it to the level of a defense lawyer, you know, calling this cruel and unusual punishment. Does that mean that there's all but sure to be a legal challenge to this decision? Yes. In terms of the Trump administration's decision, there's a lot of different kinds of challenges we're going to see play out over the next few months.

You'll see legal challenges from the lawyers for these men on death row. They might contest the secrecy of the way the federal government's getting drugs. They might contest the drug itself. They might contest the way the government went about changing which drug they're going to use. There's all kinds of ways you can burrow into the laws and the bureaucracy of this and try to exploit a weakness to make a legal argument. And then even if a court doesn't necessarily rule in your favor, the court might just halt the execution until they can resolve it. So you're

going to see a legal battle over this, and then you're also going to see a kind of political and sort of moral cultural battle over it too. But if the Trump administration wins the legal or moral or cultural battle here, what's that going to look like? It's going to look like a lot of executions. The Trump administration and the DOJ picked cases where the appeals had run out, but also the facts of the case are pretty grisly, pretty scary. They're not people who, when you hear the bare facts of what they did, you're likely to feel a lot of sympathy. So you have a man who killed a grandmother and her nine-year-old granddaughter.

You have a man named Wesley Perkey who killed a 16-year-old girl and an 80-year-old woman. You have a guy named Daniel Lee. He's the first one scheduled to be executed. He was a white supremacist who wants to create a white republic. It's a long list of people who did scary things, but they're not people who, as of yet, are known to the public. It's a long list of people who did scary things, but they're not people who as of yet are

known to the public. If this goes on for a few more years and we keep having federal executions, and especially if Trump is elected to a second term, then you're going to see cases that we do tend to know a little bit more about, like Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing, and then Dylann Roof. And I can imagine the Dylann Roof case setting off a national debate and reckoning about him and his crime yet again. Today, my grand dog, Carter, my daughter's dog, decided that he did not want to leave my side. So if you hear any dog noises, Carter believes that he needs to be with me at all times to make sure that I'm all right. All right, so let's start. Okay. My name is Reverend Sharon Risher.

On June 17, 2015, my mother, Mrs. Ethel Lance, two cousins, and a childhood friend was murdered in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina by a young white supremacist who decided that that would be the night that he would go into that church and kill as many people as he could. 48 hours after the tragedy in that church, I was still in Dallas, Texas, trying to process everything that had believed that my mother would not want her to not forgive him. At that point, all I could do was scream and holler because I could not believe my ears. One year after having to deal with all of the emotions and understanding of what had happened. I went back and forth in my heart about what I felt about the death penalty because that was a subject that came up very early. I always thought that the death penalty was a good thing, especially for people that had did heinous crimes, especially against children. But after really understanding

what the death penalty really was about, I knew in my heart as a ordained minister and a Christian and being African American, I understood that the death penalty would not bring my family back. I knew that even though he had done this awful thing, that I would not want him to be able to rot in his cell, to confront every day of being locked up in a cage for like we had to face because of hate hurts my soul. And I'm getting emotional now because I can never get away. Dylann Roof will always be a part of America's landscape because anytime anything happened that has to do with white supremacy or anything, I'm always seeing pictures of him, there are articles about him. There are people now that have formed a group. They believe what this crazy little boy believe. So I try to do the best I can and just continue to lift my voice so people will know that this is not right.

Not just for black people, but for Muslims and anybody that get killed because somebody believes something crazy. When William Barr reinstated the federal death penalty, my heart sank. My mind went to how many innocent people will be put to death because of the reinstatement of the federal death penalty. Killing people regardless, even if they have done heinous things and I had to reconcile that in myself to me just seems to be so barbaric. Because of my faith, I believe that people have an opportunity to change their lives

and to understand what they have done. The death penalty would not allow that to happen. Reverend Sharon Risher is an author and speaker. Her new book is called For Such a Time as This, Hope and Forgiveness After the Charleston Massacre. This is Today Explained.