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More on the moratorium mojo and a guessing game

By Douglas Berman

This front-page article in today’s Washington Post provides a very nice review of the de facto execution moratorium the the Supreme Court has helped produce.  The piece is entitled “Supreme Court Halts Va. Inmate’s Execution: Ruling Could Lead To National Hiatus In Lethal Injections,” are here are a few snippets:

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, agreed [a moritorium has developed]. “I believe this stay in Virginia, combined with previous stays in a number of other states, confirms that a moratorium on all lethal injections is in place in this country until the Supreme Court rules on the issue,” he said. Lethal injection is the primary method of execution in 37 of the 38 states that have the death penalty.  Nebraska uses electrocutions, but no executions are scheduled there.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director and general counsel for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which favors capital punishment and opposes expansion of criminal rights, said he had hoped the court would explain its reasoning in its case-by-case review of the stay requests.  Another appeal, from Georgia, is likely to reach the court this week. If the court’s action amounts to a moratorium, Scheidegger said, it would dilute “the deterrence effect” of the death penalty and “cause more innocent people to die.”

Even without a halt to the use of lethal injections, the pace of executions nationally is the slowest in a decade.

As I have explained in prior posts (some of which are linked below), the Baze case presents the potential to halt executions for as long as a year if the Supreme Court doesn’t issue a ruling in this Kentucky case until summer 2008, and then other states need a few months to figure out exactly what the ruling means for their execution protocols.  So, now seems like a fitting time for an SL&P guessing game centered on this question:

On what date and in what state will the next US execution take place?

As the excerpt above notes, it is possible that Georgia could still be trying to forward with executions in the next few weeks.  But, after the Virgina stay, I think Georgia will get thwarted, too.  As a result, I am inclined to guess that we won’t see another execution until probably August 2008 in Texas.  But this is pure speculation and others are encouraged to provide a more informed perspective.  (In this context, I must spotlight that my early January prediction of less that 46 executions in 2007 is now looking pretty good.)

Some related posts: