On Sunday, the Tennessean published a piece on the challenges to lethal injection around the country but particularly here in Tennessee in the cases of both Sedley Alley (scheduled to die on May 17th) and Abu-Ali Abdur Rahman.

You can read the entire piece here: http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060507/NEWS03/605070353/1017/NEWS


The good news is that the Tennessee media is paying attention both to the issues of lethal injection and to the Sedley Alley case specifically (we're only about 8 days out now). The not so good news is that we continue to see the debate framed as being abolitionists vs. victims, as the quotes from Verna Wyatt in the article show. Of course we know that all victims do not want or support the death penalty. Just in the case of Moussaoui in the past weeks, we saw victims come down on both sides of the question as to whether or not they wanted the death penalty. You can read a good article about this group at the NCADP's blog here: http://deathpenaltyusa.blogspot.com/

We have a number of family members of murder victims right here in Tennessee who speak out against the death penalty, and hopefully in the coming days we will see more of those viewpoints presented as well. We aren't against family members. Far from it, we want to create a system focused more on healing for the victim than on vengeful punishment for the offender meted out over many years by an unfair judicial process!