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Deborah Denno on the Ohio Botch

By Steve Hall

Fordham Law prof Deborah Denno is perhaps the foremost legal scholar on lethal injection.  Her take on today's events are especially relevant because of her scholarship on a botched Louisiana execution in 1946 and its legal legacy.  Here's her take: On a federal (and state) level Ohio?s argument for attempting another execution of Mr. Broom would rely on Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U.S. 459 (1947).  In Resweber the Court  upheld under the Eighth Amendment the execution of Willie Francis a black youth whose first execution attempt by electrocution miserably failed.  Yet the precedential aspects of Resweber are critical to consider in context.  Willie Francis was only fifteen at the time he allegedly murdered a white pharmacist in small-town St...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on September 16, 2009 (boomark / email).