The Day Ferguson Cops Were Caught in a Bloody Lie

Why not get rid of courts altogether and just make a list?

That's the problem. The fact that we all each and everyone of us can come up with a poster child for capital punishment shows that it just can't be fairly administered. If murder is wrong, than even state sanctioned murder is wrong.

The European Union, for its part, makes no secret of its death-penalty stance. EU guidelines call for its “universal abolition” and declare that doing so would “[contribute] to the enhancement of human dignity and the progressive development of human rights.” EU diplomats and leaders frequently petition U.S. governors and state parole boards to halt forthcoming executions. Sometimes, the supranational organization even works in more subtle ways: EU agencies contributed over $4.8 million in donations to U.S. anti-death-penalty organizations between 2009 and 2013.

The EU’s influence extends to the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices have drawn upon the organization's amicus curiae briefs from time to time in death penalty cases. Justice John Paul Stevens’ majority opinion in 2002’s Atkins v. Virginia cited the EU’s brief on worldwide opposition to executing the mentally disabled as a factor in the Court's decision to forbid the practice in the United States. During oral arguments for Roper v. Simmons in 2005, Justice Anthony Kennedy pondered whether European views should be considered when assessing the “unusual” aspect of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel or unusual punishment.” The EU had already told the Court in an amicus brief that imposing the death penalty on persons who were minors at the time of the crime “violates widely accepted human rights norms and the minimum standards of human rights set forth by the United Nations.”

In Arkansas, corrections officials obtained sodium thiopental from British distributors and then shared it for free with Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. But the states soon ran afoul of federal regulators for violating trade restrictions. The Drug Enforcement Agency seized Georgia’s supply of sodium thiopental in 2011 after records suggested that state officials might have broken the law by purchasing and importing the drug from Dream Pharma, a British distributor operating out of the back of a driving school in London. Kentucky handed over its sodium thiopental to the DEA that same year.

The European Union, for its part, makes no secret of its death-penalty stance. EU guidelines call for its “universal abolition” and declare that doing so would “[contribute] to the enhancement of human dignity and the progressive development of human rights.”