As reportedin this AP piece, in South Dakota "Charles Rhines was executed by lethal injection at 7:39 p.m., after the U.S. Supreme Court denied to halt his execution despite three late appeals." Here are more details of the crime and appeals:
Rhines, 63, ambushed 22-year-old Donnivan Schaefer in 1992 when Schaefer surprised him while he was burglarizing a Rapid City doughnut shop where Schaeffer worked. Rhines had been fired a few weeks earlier. Rhines ambushed him, stabbing him in the stomach. Bleeding from his wound, Schaeffer begged to be taken to a hospital, vowing to keep silent about the crime; instead, he was forced into a storeroom, tied up and stabbed to death.
Steve Allender, a Rapid City police detective at the time of the killing who is now the city's mayor, said Rhines' jury sentenced him to death partly because of Rhines' "chilling laughter" as he described Schaeffer's death spasms. "I watched the jury as they listened to the confession of Charles Rhines on audiotape and their reaction to his confession was appropriate. Any human being would be repulsed by the things he said and the way he said them," Allender told KELO....
Media witnesses to the execution said Rhines appeared calm, and it took only about a minute for the pentobarbital used by the state to take effect. They said when he finished speaking, he closed his eyes, then blinked, breathed heavily and died.
Rhines had challenged the state's use of pentobarbital, arguing it wasn't the ultra-fast-acting drug he was entitled to. A circuit judge ruled it was as fast or faster than other drugs when used in lethal doses and speculated that Rhines wanted only to delay his execution. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that appeal, as well as his arguments that he was sentenced to die by a jury with an anti-gay bias and that he wasn't given access to experts who could have examined him for cognitive and psychiatric impairments.
Intriguingly, the appeal concerning access to experts related to the operation of South Dakota clemency process, and it prompted a short statement from Justice Sotomayor respecting the denial or cert. Here are excerpts from that statement:
In order to assist them in preparing a state clemency application, Rhines’ federal habeas attorneys retained medical experts to evaluate Rhines. State officials, as well as a state court, refused to grant the experts access to Rhines in prison. The Federal District Court below also denied Rhines’ request for access....
It is unclear from this record whether an expert evaluation is necessary to Rhines’ clemency application. Although Rhines’ experts believed there were additional grounds for investigation — including traumatic events that Rhines suffered earlier in his life — Rhines, as the State notes, has already been evaluated by several psychiatric experts in a different context. For that reason, I do not dissent from the denial of certiorari. I write separately, however, to note that this Court’s denial of certiorari does not represent an endorsement of the lower courts’ opinions. I also write separately to emphasize that clemency is not “a matter of mercy alone,” but rather is the “‘fail safe’ in our criminal justice system.” Harbison v. Bell, 556 U. S. 180, 192 (2009) (quoting Herrera v. Collins, 506 U. S. 390, 415 (1993)). By closing the prison doors in this context, a State risks rendering this fundamental process an empty ritual.
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