Indiana lawmaker calls for hangings, firing squads to be used as state execution methods

INDIANAPOLIS - In October, Indiana is scheduled to execute Roy Lee Ward for raping and murdering 15-year-old Stacy Payne in 2001.




Ward waited for Payne's parents to leave their home for work on July 11, 2001. He then pretended to be looking for his lost dog before he persuaded Payne to let him inside her family's home.




Earlier this month, the Indiana Supreme Court set a tentative date for Ward's execution on Oct. 10.




In order to be able to carry out that execution, the state had to order more of the drug pentobarbital at a cost of around $300,000 per dose. Governor Mike Braun ordered the Indiana Department of Correction to prepare for the execution, despite saying the state didn't intend to order any more of the expensive fatal drug.




"Now that the court has set the execution date for Roy Lee Ward, I have directed the Department of Correction to proceed with the necessary preparations required to carry out the execution," Braun said in early July.




The cost of that drug - which has been used in other recent executions in Indiana - is part of the reason Representative Jim Lucas believes the state should consider other forms of capital punishment.




"The common-sense answer is just do what other states are doing and add you know two other forms of punishment," Lucas said. "Gallows and firing squad. They are being put to use throughout United States."




Lucas said he will put forward a bill during the next session to allow for those methods. Currently, the only method allowed by law is lethal injection.




Lucas points to states like Idaho and South Carolina which have brought back firing squads as drugs used in lethal injection become harder to come by.




"We shouldn't be in a corner where we are solely dependent on one form of execution," Lucas said. "Because if a problem arises, as we've seen happen in this instance, the rational, reasonable thing to do is to have alternatives."




However, Braun has asked lawmakers to debate the death penalty and whether or not it should continue to be a form of punishment. Last year, a group of house republicans filed a bill to repeal the death penalty, but it never received a hearing.




"It just doesn't work to do what we think it's gonna do," said Abraham Bonowitz, who serves as the executive director of Death Penalty Action. "We can be safe from dangerous people and hold them accountable by throwing away the key and the sentence being death by incarceration,  which is what we use in the majority of cases anyway."




Bonowitz said he's opposed to Lucas' suggestion and the death penalty in general. He points to the significant costs states have paid to retrofit death chambers for firing squads.




He also added that the state spends millions in taxpayer dollars on death penalty trials. Previous reporting indicates that, in 2015, research conducted at the behest of the Indiana General Assembly found that the average cost of a death penalty trial in the Hoosier State was $385,458, which is nearly 10 times higher than the cost of litigating a case in which the prosecution seeks a maximum sentence of life in prison with parole.




"What if we did better for victim families by taking away the money being wasted on capital trials, wasted on this idea that we might have an execution in a decade or two or three from now and instead put in services for victim families," Bonowitz said.




If Ward's execution is ultimately approved, he would be the third inmate to be executed in Indiana since December 2024, following the executions of Joseph Corcoran and Benjamin Ritchie. Both executions were carried out with pentobarbital.



via: https://fox59.com/news/indiana-lawmaker-calls-for-hangings-firing-squads-to-be-used-as-state-execution-methods/