Death Penalty Watch: Stephen Michael West [DEAD] and Dexter Johnson

ETA: The result here is a tad ironic and I'm glad even a conservative activist (who pops up repeatedly over the years in litigation) at least gives lip service to concerns about pain.  But, he couldn't resist to note that West caused more pain during his crimes  (this is something akin to the "better than Trump" standard; too low of a bar on its own).  The litigation, if we want to be all cynical, also helped to extend his life for years.

There is also that Alito anti-death penalty blame. Yes, there is a movement against the death penalty and one result is that fewer people (especially in Europe) want to aid and abet the process.  But, again, I am not sure how hard it really is to find alternative sources of the drugs in question.  (Assuming they are okay; all execution procedures have issues. This might lead to a gotcha akin to "yes, ideological based speech limits are wrong, no matter how you try to craft them." )  Can they not be made domestically?  Also, as multiple reporting noted, the alternative sources of drugs sought had various problems.

So, no, it was not wrong for the Obama Administration to stop the problematic inflow of such drugs. 

West [23] and Martin [17] left work at McDonalds in Lake City, Tennessee, on March 17 and went driving around and drinking in Martin’s car for several hours. They drove to the home of Sheila Romines, a classmate of Martin’s who had previously rejected his unwanted advances. At approximately 5:20 a.m. after Mr. Romines left for work, Martin knocked on the door with West standing nearby. When the door was opened, the two then made their way into the house. Between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., Wanda and Sheila were brutally murdered. Sheila was raped before she was killed.

The rape/murder of two women (Sheila Romines was fifteen; Wanda was her mother) with "torture-type" wounds is not really a surprising death penalty call.  A standard principle still is that even in death penalty states you can find comparable crimes not resulting in a death sentence though there tends to be lots of variables involved.  West was sentenced to die in 1987, so we have another case of the troubled concept of executing people after decades of confinement.  Martin admitted to the murders though it should be noted that he was a minor so was not liable to die (the constitutional rule would come years later).

The summary linked above notes: "the trial judge did not allow the jury to hear a tape recording of Martin confessing to both murders while he was in custody at the jail. "  It also notes claims of trial counsel ineffectiveness, mitigating evidence such as a horrible childhood and psychological problems: "suffering from major depressive disorder with psychotic features, paranoid schizophrenia, and schizoaffective disorder." A recent argument against the execution focuses on his "severe mental illness" and the fact he did not personally commit the murders. There is also a report of a failed challenge to the lethal injection protocol (not surprising at this point given the state of the law there).

The fact he personally did not commit the murders -- let's grant this is true -- is not necessarily compelling though the jury might have been affected by hearing about it.  The long time in prison to me is a notable factor here, I continue to question the value and justice of executing someone in prison for three decades. The strongest claim appears to be his mental state, at least to warrant a commutation to life in prison.  The execution of someone in prison for so long because of involvement in a heinous crime, if not one of the few that would seem to be the "worst of the worst" by someone with his mental problems (toss in the due process concerns involving the trial as a sort of extra) would to be to me a summary of the problems here.

The governor did not commute his sentence and his final last minute appeal was basically a lost cause execution protocol claim that was denied without a written dissent.  A statement from a brief (again, can be found using the docket numbers on the final order) is sort of telling:

The contention that West seeks nothing more than to avoid his August 15, 2019 execution may find favor among those cynicism about the objectives of method of execution challenges has clouded their willingness/ability to look at the case before them, but is not what West seeks here.

Uh huh. The firing squad was offered as a readily available alternative but  as noted above the challenge failed. Relying on Justice Sotomayor's dissent to argue the majority opinion should not be applied too strictly underlines the desperation.  Then, it was a forlorn statement regarding him choosing electrocution, still allegedly unconstitutional, as an option but that his execution should still be stayed so his challenge can be heard. He was electrocuted, yes, that still being done in the 21st Century.

[Even if it didn't sound like a strong case, I continue to think at least one justice should in each execution case explain why the execution was correctly carried out and/or comment on the case.]  
So, he won or lost the execution lottery, decades after his crimes. The net value to justice here is yet again very unclear to me. 

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According to prosecutors, Johnson then shot Ngo in the head before murdering Aparece. It took investigators five days to figure out what happened but by the time trial rolled around, the state had linked Johnson to a slew of robberies and killings, including the slaying of a man standing at a pay phone and the murder of man sitting inside his car.

The core crime Dexter Johnson was sentenced to die for was the rape/ theft ($25 in cash and a credit card)/murder involving an Asian couple. But, there is reference to a spree that covered more ground. Johnson was eighteen at the time of the crime though was captured when he was nineteen (there was an intervening birthday). So, there was some mitigating factor there as to age.  The constitutional line by this point (2007) was eighteen though as noted in a past entry in this series there is some thought that the line should be twenty-one.  Either way, his age might be deemed a mitigating factor, if not one that is a total bar to execution.

The specific crime, like the first one, is of the sort that someone might deem appropriate for the death penalty but not necessarily a slam dunk. It gets easier if it was merely one part of a wider spree.  The age of the defendant complicates things.  The time on death row as these things go (around a decade) is not that long.  Johnson is only thirty-one, which is rather young.  The best hope for him is a claim of being intellectually disabled; if his status there is severe enough, he would be constitutionally barred from being executed.  The case is close enough that the often conservative court of appeals this week sent it back to the district court. Texas had issues with not carefully enough handling this issue in the past so can see some reason for concern.

So, we are set for another last minute drama, which drive the conservatives on the Supreme Court up the wall and is far from ideal.  But, overall, this would be a strong reason not to execute though there is often a lot of debate over being unable to firmly draw lines in marginal cases. [I ended my draft there, expecting the state to challenge the stay, but it did not. So, the execution is for now stayed.  As things go, this is not that long in.]