“Tonight, by killing Darryl Barwick, we the People of the State of Florida also killed the belief that redemption matters. That remorse matters. That people, especially those who are sentenced to die as teenagers, are capable of change. This execution cements the short-sighted notion that people are irrevocably defined by the worst thing they have ever done,” Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty Executive Director Maria DeLiberato, wrote after the state killed Darryl Barwick early last month. It was “the third premeditated murder by the state in 70 days,” she pointed out. Barwick was sentenced to death for killing Rebecca Wendt in 1986 when he was 19.
“We both presided over executions while in office, but if we had known then what we know now about prosecutorial misconduct, we would have exercised our constitutional authority to commute death sentences to life” two former Alabama governors, one a Democrat the other a Republican, wrote recently in an op-ed in the Washington Post. Republican Robert Bentley, who served as governor from 2011 – 2017, and Democrat Don Siegelman, who served from 1999 to 2003, write that “careful consideration calls for commuting the sentences of the 146 prisoners [of the 167 on death row] who were sentenced by non-unanimous juries or judicial override, and that an independent review unit should be established to examine all capital murder convictions.”
American executions are shrouded in great secrecy, as exemplified by Virginia, which abolished state killing in 2021, but is going to great lengths to keep details of its executions (numbering more than any other state in history) secret. In his Slate editorial on Virginia’s recent withdrawal of previously public audio recordings of some of its executions over the years, Austin Sarat writes that it’s not surprising because the tapes that still “remain in the public domain already offer a revealing glimpse into the bureaucratic logic that makes it possible for states to keep the machinery of death running. Listening to them is a startling reminder of the ways that ordinary people can be enlisted to participate in cold-blooded, state killing of all types.”
“For nearly seventy years, the Court has assessed Eighth Amendment claims by evaluating ‘the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,'” Kathryn Miller writes in her Washington Law Review article, “No Sense of Decency.” Because appellate court judges have been urging the U.S. Supreme Court to replace the “evolving standards of decency test” and that “three Justices have signaled their willingness to overrule the test, and at least two more are likely to join them,” and since “stare decisis does not appear to be a formidable constraint on the current Court, the time has come to grapple with a new reality for the Eighth Amendment,” she states.
