American Civil Liberties Union

Last week, the Rhode Island ACLU announced its disappointment with a federal circuit court's decision overturning Gov. Lincoln Chafee's efforts to prevent the institution of federal death penalty charges against Jason Wayne Pleau, whom Rhode Island was already prosecuting in state court. We join that sentiment here.

Pleau has been charged with the robbery and murder of a gas station manager who was making a bank deposit. Rhode Island, like every other state, has laws designating these crimes as murder and robbery, courts in which to prosecute the crimes and prosecutors and defense attorneys ready to work the case. But because the victim was making a bank deposit, and bank robberies violate federal criminal statutes, the crime could also theoretically be prosecuted in federal court.

The courts of the U.S. have long held that the states may punish people with death, putting us in the minority of the world's countries and in the company of Iran, Iraq, North Korea and the Sudan. The caveat, in the U.S., is that the executions must be humane, and this has led to litigation over the manner in which states perform executions. In the last 30 years the gas chamber and the electric chair have fallen into disuse for this reason; there have also been a number of cases about the drugs used in lethal injection. Unfortunately, states' efforts to afford fairness in capital (and other) trials have far too often been lax, while their efforts to keep enough drugs on hand for executions have been anything but.

It's Halloween. So what could be scarier than a state throwing a person in prison for arson when the fire was accidental?

Executing him.

That's the lesson of a report released Friday by the Texas Forensic Science Commission. The report is the latest twist in an ongoing legal saga following Texas's 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. In 2004, before Texas executed Willingham for the alleged arson murder of his three children, the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole had received a report by a renowned fire scientist named Dr. Gerald Hurst. Dr. Hurst's report showed that the "fire-science" testimony accusing Willingham of arson at his trial was farcical and anything but scientific. Governor Rick Perry received the report too. Willingham's execution went forward despite that the debunked "fire science" had been the centerpiece of the state's case against him.