Although three states allow judges to override jury recommendations that a killer receive life in prison — Florida and Delaware are the others — only judges in Alabama are using the power, Sotomayor wrote.
USA Today: Why I’m for a moratorium on lethal injections
As an anesthesiologist, my job is to save lives, not to take them.
Joel Zivot 5:32 p.m. EST December 15, 2013
I am an anesthesiologist, and I possess the knowledge on how to render any person unconscious. You may call it sleep, but it is nothing of the sort.
I learned my craft with the use of sodium thiopental, a drug in the barbiturate class. To witness it for the first time, to watch as it raced into a vein, and in a moment, rendered the patient unconscious, was nothing short of astounding. In those moments, my job was to be reassuring and comforting, for I can imagine no greater moment of trust between a doctor and a patient.
Sodium thiopental is no longer in my pharmacology toolbox. Hospira, the last company to manufacture the drug, stopped making it to protest its use in carrying out the death penalty.
CNN – Innocent man: How inmate Michael Morton lost 25 years of his life
By Josh Levs, CNN
updated 10:28 AM EST, Wed December 4, 2013
Editor’s note: For much more about the dramatic exoneration of falsely accused murderer Michael Morton, watch CNN Films’ “An Unreal Dream, The Michael Morton Story,” airing Thursday, December 5, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CNN TV.
(CNN) — Imagine being out to dinner with the love of your life and your beautiful, smiling, 3-year-old child. It’s a double celebration: your birthday and the end of your young boy’s difficult recovery from surgery for a heart defect.
As you cross the street afterward, holding hands and swinging the little one up in the air, you think, “This is what it’s about.”
You know it’s one of the best days of your life.
For Michael Morton, that day was August 12, 1986. He had just turned 32.
The next day, it was all taken away. The dream became a nightmare.