Stop Government-Approved Torture Killings of Death Row Inmates

Target: Dianne Feinstein, Chair of U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law

Goal: Push for moratorium on lethal injections in response to increase of botched executions.

In 2014, a death row inmate reportedly suffered for over two hours before he succumbed to the lethal injection he was given. This horrific case brought renewed scrutiny on the use of lethal injection as a supposedly “humane” form of execution. Yet since then, the problems have only mounted. A non-profit and non-partisan group known as the Death Penalty Information Center recently found that as many as one-third of executions (the sizeable majority of them lethal injections) that have taken place across the country were botched in some way.

Tennessee recently became the latest state courting controversy. An investigation revealed that execution administrators allegedly failed to test drugs used for contaminants that would make the death especially painful or prolonged. Some of the officials then apparently lied about these oversights, prompting their firings. The report also listed other serious concerns with the state’s implementation of the death penalty. Such troubling allegations have prompted extended moratoriums in some of the 27 states that still have capital punishment.

Sign the petition below to urge an extension of life-saving moratoriums across the nation.

PETITION LETTER:

Dear Senator Feinstein,

Tennessee has become the most recent in a string of states to reveal serious problems with its system of capital punishment. Because of possibly tainted drugs used in administered lethal injections, countless inmates may have died in a torturous and barbaric manner. Now the state is looking to revise its protocols, but what if the real problem is a fundamental structural flaw in the system itself?

Across America, hundreds of individuals have been released from death row after new evidence came to light that cast serious doubt on their guilt. These men and women could have very easily become casualties of the gravest and most irrevocable miscarriages of justice. And too many stories of horrifically botched executions have only compounded the tragedy. According to the Death Row Information Center, at least a third of all recent executions may have been plagued by troubling errors.

These are not the actions of a civilized and developed society. No person should have their life ended so cruelly simply because they live in a state that fails to protect their rights. Please introduce and support legislation that will put a nationwide moratorium on increasingly inhumane lethal injections.

Sincerely,

[Your Name Here]

Photo Credit: David