Strange days for capital punishment: Keep debate over lethal injections open, not hidden as state secret

When it comes to the death penalty in the United States, we are in a peculiar place these days.

I have studied capital punishment for more than 30 years, starting in college and continuing throughout my career in daily newspapers. I have interviewed, commiserated with and written about every participant – from victims’ families and homicide detectives to condemned killers; from prosecutors, judges and executioners to defense lawyers. I witnessed four electrocutions in Georgia and covered hundreds of capital trials in both Georgia and Alabama.

I never have seen the issue reach such extremes.

Oklahoma's death chamber for lethal injections

Since 2007, six states have scrapped the death penalty altogether. Fewer than 2 percent of U.S. counties (including Alabama’s Jefferson County, where I covered courts) have produced more than 50 percent of the nation’s current death sentences and executions, a recent study by the Death Penalty Information Center found. Some 85 percent of U.S. counties have not produced a single Death Row inmate in nearly five decades, the study showed.

A solid majority approves of capital punishment, but public support continues to drop. Last year’s annual poll by Gallup showed about 60 percent generally favor it, a 40-year low. Support dropped to a bare majority when respondents were offered an alternative sentence of life without parole.

Life-without-parole capital sentences are increasingly viewed by juries, judges, victims’ families and prosecutors as sufficient to punish the killer and protect society.

The result: even as legislators in states like Alabama increase the number of legal circumstances that could earn a death sentence, fewer and fewer murderers are condemned. The annual rate of new death sentences lately is the lowest it has been since capital sentencing resumed following a brief, court-imposed national moratorium in the early 1970s.

Yet, some death penalty proponents and some of the people tasked with carrying out court execution orders are digging in their heels and going to extremes to maintain the viability of putting killers to death.

Some states, including Alabama, even have debated laws that would keep secret the specific drugs and drug sources for lethal injections, which is the primary method of execution used by all 32 states (plus the federal courts and military) with the death penalty. About a dozen states have bills pending or existing laws or policies shielding their drug protocols.

The reason? For several years, states have been unable to obtain a primary component in the court-sanctioned, three-drug lethal cocktail that was in common use until European manufacturers cut off supplies.

States planning executions have turned to riskier, untried lethal-injection drug combos. Some are prepared by compounding companies, which only came under federal regulation six months ago after contaminated batches of compounded medicine led to dozens of patient deaths.

The Oklahoma legislature passed a bill in 2011 keeping secret the manufacturer and drugs it planned to use for executions. When two murderers slated for execution filed suit earlier this year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court voted 5-4 to delay their executions until it could rule on the condemned men’s legal challenge to the lethal-drug combination.

The state high court eventually authorized the executions to proceed, although the lethal drug combination became public. It was the painkiller midazolam; vecuronium bromide, a paralytic; and potassium chloride to stop his heart – a combination that had been used in Florida.



Stephanie Nieman with her grandparents

Lockett

First up was Clayton Lockett, who helped kidnap two women, a man and a child at gunpoint in 1999 and took turns with an accomplice to repeatedly rape the women.

Lockett shot Stephanie Nieman, leaving her to die, buried in a shallow grave while still alive. The survivors testified against Lockett, who also had made a boastful confession to police.

The execution officially began at 6:23 p.m. on April 29. Fewer than 10 minutes later, Lockett was declared unconscious. But he suddenly began to writhe and mumble while gasping. The curtains to the execution chamber were drawn. Lockett died of a heart attack at 7:06 p.m., more than a half-hour after the drugs were administered.

State officials are investigating whether the procedure was botched – or if, as defense lawyers claim, the new compound Oklahoma used resulted in state-sponsored torture. Currently, state officials cite a collapsed vein as the likely cause and have imposed a six-month moratorium on executions pending a full probe.

It’s ironic to me that lethal injection is under such strict scrutiny now, leaving some death penalty proponents longing for the electric chair. It’s turned the debate about execution methods by 180 degrees.

For decades until the early 1990s, electrocution was the primary execution method. Use of the electric chair was widespread by the 1920s, viewed as a more humane alternative to hanging and a counter to the lynching allusions the noose carried in Southern states that were the chief practitioners of capital punishment.



Georgia's old electric chair

The electric chair was fraught with problems and controversy. In Florida, six-inch flames leapt from the head of Jesse Traferro during his electrocution in 1990, and a few jolts were required to execute him. Several condemned murderers, including one in Alabama, died only after receiving multiple shocks because the first effort failed.

Georgia Power Co. refused to sell electricity for executions. The state installed a generator for that purpose. An hour before one planned execution I covered, the prison was plunged into darkness when a storm knocked out the power. Technically the state could have proceeded but officials had little taste for conducting an execution by candle light. It was postponed for better weather.

By the early 1990s, many death-penalty proponents viewed lethal injections as a more humane execution method – a recognition that society did not need to be so brutal in the effort to show people that killing people is wrong. Worried that death by electrocution would be outlawed by courts one day, state legislators and judges voted to mothball electric chairs and switch to lethal injection.

Of course, this method has had its problems – even with the court-approved, three-drug combination once in common use. Prolonged deaths have been cited in more than two-dozen executions by lethal injection since the mid-1980s, often due to problems finding a suitable vein.

The more problematic lethal injection has become, the more some pro-execution forces have responded by trying to operate in secret and hide those problems from public scrutiny.

No matter how people feel about capital punishment, I have yet to meet anyone who honestly doesn’t give a rip about doing it correctly or fairly.

Folks in our society may differ on the best way to respond to horrific, deliberate murders. But most would agree that, if we’re going to have it, capital punishment should amount to more than mere payback to murderers who in effect have lost a lottery.

Most would say if we are going to have capital punishment, it should be done accurately, equitably and correctly, in a way that doesn’t make us flinch as a society – much less hang our heads in shame. On whether that is possible, good people will continue to disagree.

But the ongoing discussion over capital punishment – especially how the state kills our killers – should be done in public. It should not be rendered a state secret. After all, states conduct these executions in our name.

Judging for 'Bru Appetit:' From 'bee cap' to cooking fresh wild boar, Horn brings beer cooking show to the 'Ham

If all goes well, I will make my cable television premiere this fall.

I recently was a judge in the taping of a cooking contest, which is central to a new beer-and-food themed cable television show, Bru Appetit. Think of it as being akin to the Japanese version of Iron Chef (where cooking is treated as sport), tossed with the adventurous spirit of the cable television show, Dangerous Grounds.

Horn is a home cook, home brewer, personal chef and culinary instructor who is in the process of moving from Alabama to Atlanta. He is trying to parlay a solid concept and good looks into a television career.



Jason Horn

He said he has a deal for his pilot episodes, but must stay mum for now on the specific network. Hopefully soon we will discover which channel will broadcast the show.

The premise of Bru Appetit: Horn and crew -- producer Carlo Overhulser and videographer/photographer Chris Eldridge -- feature a beer from a single state. Horn challenges a chef in that state to a cooking throw-down using the beer and other food items he has locally sourced.

Now, by locally sourced, I mean Horn and crew hunted, killed and field-dressed the wild boar that was the protein in the Alabama throw-down. They went to the apiary that produces the honey used in Truck Stop Honey Brown Ale, the Alabama beer featured in that episode.

They get up close and personal, as you can see from this photo of Horn:

'If you ... don't act a fool, they won't mess with ya.'

Our segment was taped at The J. Clyde beer bar in Birmingham’s Southside district. Horn challenged J. Clyde’s executive chef, Charles Ryan Nichols.

One of the judges was Carla Jean Whitley, managing editor of Birmingham Magazine (who edits my stories for the magazine). The other was Danner Kline, a specialty beer rep for a local distributing company and the founder of Free The Hops, the consumer group that helped usher Alabama’s beer laws into the 20^th Century – even if the state legislature had to be dragged into it, kicking and screaming, nearly a decade into the 21^st.

Taping Bru Appetit is a whirlwind affair, mostly planned but sometimes off-the-cuff.

After starting at Back Forty Beer Co. in Gadsden, the crew traveled to Cold Creek Honey Co. in Hokes Bluff.

On the Bru Appetit page on Facebook, Horn recounts sage advice he got from Cold Creek’s Terry Thomas, who was preparing to shake a tree swarming with bees:

“If you respect them and don’t swat at ‘em or try to act a fool, they won’t mess with ya.”

It was a run or hive moment for Horn. But it had a happy ending.

If the photo below doesn’t wind up on some kind of Back Forty promotion, they’re asleep at the switch.



Like the honey from the bee

At a hunting camp near Geiger, the crew spent a grueling day trying to bag the wild boar for the cooking contest.

Early on, it seemed like all would go smoothly as the party got its first pig in the morning.

But the second pig proved elusive. They waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally, around dusk, the mission was completed.

The crew hauled hog and honey to the J.Clyde. Horn and Nichols cooked their respective dishes on a Saturday morning as invitees gathered to provide a background crowd for the taping.

We judges were perched on a side bar, with a narrow space on the other side for the contestants. It was amazing how technology allowed the crew to shoot multiple angles in an extremely confined space.

For our portion of the show, the chefs described their dishes and we tasted each. We also were asked to give feedback, including how well each showcased the state’s chosen beer, Truck Stop Honey Brown Ale, and the special ingredients, the boar and honey. Then we were to confer and choose a winner.

As the guest, Horn was first to present. In a way that was a shame because he made a dish suited for dinner while Nichols followed with his down-home Southern-style breakfast.

Horn’s dish evoked a post-hunt dinner on a French estate. He seared a two-inch-thick wild boar chop, topping it with a sweet-savory mixture of roasted garlic and sweet onion preserve cooked in Truck Stop Honey Brown beer and Cold Creek’s wildflower honey.

That was placed atop a puree of turnips, sweet potatoes and apple. Accompanying was braised Belgian endive cooked in Stone brewing’s Imperial Russian Stout. The whole thing was drizzled in chocolate balsamic vinegar that Horn had purchased in Gadsden.



Jason Horn's seared boar chop

It was an elegant dish, worthy of a white tablecloth setting and a hefty price tag. My only complaint was the chop could have been served more on the medium side, instead of cooked through. The meat was incredibly moist – as wild boar should be – but difficult to saw through.

Still, it was my favorite of the two. To my regret, it was whisked away before I could ask for a to-go box. But I did not want to overindulge; that would not be fair to Nichols.

It’s a good thing I saved room, because Grillades and Grits is one of my favorite brunch dishes. Nichols laid down a great version. He started with cutlets of the pork, which he soaked overnight in buttermilk and Truck Stop Honey Brown Ale. In the morning he pounded and pan-fried the cutlets before finishing them in creole-style gravy.

That topped some of the best cheese grits I ever have tasted. Nichols perfectly cooked the stone-ground grits to a smooth consistency, tossed in smoked cheddar and smoked Gouda cheese and topped it with fried country ham. Accompanying was a biscuit coated in a wonderfully sticky reduction of Cold Creek honey.



Chef Nichols' Grillades and Grits

Carla Jean and Danner both voted for the Grillades and Grits, which no doubt spoke to the Southerner in them. I preferred the chop plate, but frankly the brunch dish came in a close enough second that I said I had no heartburn with the majority's choice.



Danner Kline (left) talks to Jason Horn (right) as Carla Jean Whitley and I listen.

We announced the winner, a 2-1 split vote for Nichols. Horn, who is a great guy, graciously accepted the verdict, heaping praise on Nichols’ talent and generosity for graciously sharing his kitchen with a stranger.

But as the crew packed up to move on to Georgia and tape another episode, I couldn’t help but look back at our decision to vote down the host of Bru Appetit. I wondered:

Did we blow our chance for the premiere episode?

(Thanks to the Bru Appetit crew for the photos.)