Capital punishment

Further information on UA: 176/12
Issue Date: 28 June 2012
Country: USA

ARIZONA CARRIES OUT USA’S 1300TH EXECUTION
Sammy Lopez was executed in the US state of Arizona on 27 June for a murder committed in 1986. Samuel Villegas Lopez (known as Sammy Lopez) was sentenced to death for the murder in October 1986 of Estefana Holmes, a 59-year-old woman. The details of the defendant’s background of extreme poverty and severe childhood abuse and its effects on him were not presented to the sentencing judge, either at the 1987 trial or at the 1990 re-sentencing.

The execution reportedly ended at 10:37am, about 40 minutes after the lethal injection process began with the insertion of intravenous tubes into the condemned man’s veins.

This was the 23rd execution in the USA this year, and the 1300th since the USA resumed judicial killing in 1977. Arizona has carried out 32 of these executions, four of them this year.
Name: Samuel Villegas Lopez (m)
Issue(s): Death penalty

I signed the petition not to execute Troy Davis and also for Samuel Villegas Lopez. The death penalty is contrary to the right to life. It is an affront to human rights. No democracy should have capital punishment as a normal means of dealing with convicted felons. It is sad to state that the convictions to death penalty are riddled by all kinds of ills: human error, economic or racial bias. Since I am a part time resident of Arizona, I feel the need to speak out, because this execution was not carried out in my name. It is my ethical obligation to speak out against the death penalty.
A figure to make us think: with 1300 death penalties since 1973, 138 people have afterwards been exonerated: that is over 10 percent of the executions. That is an inadmissible margin of error.
For claiming to be a civilized and democratic country the USA is one of the five most executing nations. We should be the 140th nation to end executions. Stop capital punishment now.

There now over 3200 people on death row. With the above said margin of error that would constitute over 330 innocents: to me that is mass murder. End capital punishment, now.