Utah is not providing sufficient funding to competently represent death-row prisoners during their appeals, according to a motion filed on behalf of Douglas Lovell, the man most recently sentenced to death in the state. Because of that, Lovell's lawyer Samuel Newton says, Lovell's death sentence should be vacated and he should be resentenced to life in prison. Newton bases his claim on a 2008 Utah Supreme Court opinion, Archuleta v. Galetka, in which the court warned that "low levels of public funding for capital cases" and "significantly diminishing numbers of qualified counsel able and willing to represent capital defendants" might force the court to overturn death sentences if it "impedes prompt, constitutionally sound resolution" of a capital case. Newton argues that a billing cap imposed by Weber County officials and threats and meddling by county officials are compromising his ability to zealously represent Lovell. Lovell has been granted an evidentiary hearing on his post-conviction claims — including whether The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints interfered with the trial by limiting the testimony available from bishops who had worked with Lovell at the prison — and Newton estimates that the hundreds of hours required to investigate and prepare for the hearing would cost about $37,000. However, Weber County officials sent Newton an email accusing him of overbilling the county and meeting with his client too frequently, and threatening that, as a result, they may have to find other attorneys for future appeals. The county has capped his payment for the hearing at $15,000. "That's the bind," Newton said. "Do I represent my client zealously like I'm constitutionally required to do? Or do I tread lightly so I don't lose my livelihood?" Newton said that the financial strain of handling another death-penalty case has caused stress-related heart problems that led him to request to be removed from that case. Newton's motion is not the first time attorneys have expressed concerns about Utah's capital defense funding. In 2007, the Utah Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers filed an amicus brief in the case of Ralph Menzies. Affidavits submitted by well-known defense lawyers in connection with that brief reported that the final payments they received for handling death-penalty appeals had amounted to compensation at levels of $17 and $19 per hour — about one-tenth their normal billing rates. Defense attorney Richard Mauro said the pay rates make it almost impossible for private attorneys to take on capital appeals: "If you are doing the work the way it's supposed to be done — and trying to keep the lights on and run the copy machine — it's really not a feasible thing to do."

The legacies of Scharlette Holdman (pictured) and Marie Deans—two women who changed the landscape of capital punishment in the United States—are memorialized in a recent story in the Marshall Project and a new book scheduled for release in August. Maurice Chammah's article, We Saw Monsters. She Saw Humans, marks the July 12, 2017 passing of mitigation pioneer Scharlette Holdman and tells the story of her forty-year fight on behalf of capital defendants and death-row prisoners. The forthcoming book by Todd Peppers and Margaret Anderson, A Courageous Fool, tells the story of a similarly pioneering woman, Marie Deans, who long worked to save defendants and prisoners facing the death penalty and whose efforts to give voice to family members, like herself, whose relatives had been murdered, led to the creation of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation. Holdman used her background in anthropology to develop the practice of death-penalty mitigation—conducting a multi-generational social history investigation to tell the story of a client's life in a way that would humanize him or her to a jury or a judge. “What she saw is that killers are not just born,” said lawyer George Kendall, who represents death-row prisoners. “They have had unbelievably abused and neglectful lives, and that history is relevant. You become your client’s biographer, you speak to the 60 most important people in that person’s life—friend and foe.” She approached this difficult work with creativity and humor. In one case, she attempted to discredit a psychiatrist's testimony that a severely impaired defendant was competent to be executed because he had beaten the doctor at tic-tac-toe, by locating a tic-tac-toe playing chicken to present in court. The judge “felt that bringing the chicken into the courtroom to play tic-tac-toe would degrade the dignity of the court,” Holdman later told This American Life. “I thought that the dignity of the court was degraded by executing a mentally retarded, mentally ill person.” In 2011, she described mitigation investigations, saying, “As we in local communities began to look for mitigation, we saw it as presenting the narrative of someone’s life, and we became acutely aware that it was a very specialized, complex undertaking. That narrative is not there for the asking. It requires not just knowledge and skill but experience in how you search for, identify, locate, recognize, and preserve the information.” Her work was profiled in the book Among the Lowest of the Dead, an account of Florida's reinstatement of the death penalty. A Courageous Fool describes the work of mitigation expert and anti-death penalty activist Marie Deans to defend death-sentenced prisoners, to free the wrongfully convicted—including Virginia death-row exoneree Earl Washington—and to try to end the death penalty. Virginia Senator Mark Warner called A Courageous Fool, "A powerful story of a Virginia heroine." Deans passed away in 2011. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has reversed a ruling by a Texas federal district court that had denied Scott Panetti (pictured), a severely mentally ill death-row prisoner, the appointment of counsel and funding for a mental health expert and investigator to evaluate his competency to be executed. In a 2-1 ruling issued July 11, 2017, the Fifth Circuit, noting that "a decade has now passed since the last determination of whether this concededly mentally ill petitioner is competent to be executed," ordered Panetti's case returned to the lower federal court to appoint counsel, provide funds for an evaluation, and grant counsel sufficient time to prepare a petition on Panetti's competence. Under the U.S. Supreme Court's 1986 ruling in Ford v. Wainwright, prisoners who become mentally incompetent—that is, so mentally ill or cognitively impaired that they are "unaware of the punishment they're about to suffer and why they are to suffer it"—cannot be executed. Panetti has twice been granted stays of execution related to his mental health and competency to be executed. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Texas federal courts had misapplied the Ford standard when they ignored the effect of Panetti's paranoid schizophrenic delusions on whether he had a rational understanding of his pending execution. The Court wrote: "Gross delusions stemming from a severe mental disorder may put an awareness of a link between a crime and its punishment in a context so far removed from reality that the punishment can serve no proper purpose." On remand, the lower courts denied Panetti's challenge to his competency without providing him a lawyer and a mental health evaluation to develop his claim. In a statement, Panetti's lawyers said, "We are grateful that the court found that Mr. Panetti’s nearly four decades of documented schizophrenia and severe mental illness provided a sufficient showing to obtain experts and resources to pursue the claim that he is currently incompetent for execution.... Mr. Panetti has not been evaluated by any mental health experts since 2007 and his severe mental illness has only worsened while in prison. We are confident that when the lower court is presented with all the evidence, it will find that Mr. Panetti, a schizophrenic man who insisted on representing himself at trial and attempted to subpoena the Pope, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ, is not now competent for execution."

Something went wrong during the execution of Ricky Gray (pictured), who was put to death in Virginia on January 18, 2017, according to an independent expert who reviewed the official autopsy report of Gray's death. Dr. Mark Edgar, associate director of bone and soft tissue pathology at the Emory University School of Medicine, reviewed the official autopsy report, which Gray's family obtained from the Virginia medical examiner's office. Dr. Edgar says Gray suffered an acute pulmonary edema during the execution, with liquid in his upper airways and blood entering his lungs while he was still breathing. “The anatomic changes described in Ricky Gray’s lungs are more often seen in the aftermath of a sarin gas attack than in a routine hospital autopsy." Edgar said. "This is of concern especially given the fact that midazolam is not an anesthetic, but a sedative often used for medical procedures requiring conscious sedation and the issue that the compounded drugs used in this case may have lacked potency or been impure.” Virginia's lethal-injection protocol consists of three drugs: midazolam, a sedative intended to render the prisoner unconscious, followed by a paralytic intended to stop the prisoner's breathing, followed by potassium chloride, which stops the prisoner's heart. The use of midazolam in executions is controversial because it is not an anesthetic, it is used in medical settings only for lower levels of sedation rather than to produce full unconsciousness, and its use has been linked to numerous problematic executions. In Virginia, both the midazolam and the potassium chloride are produced by compounding pharmacies whose identities are secret under state law. “This way of dying is intolerable. You can’t control your breathing—it is terrible,” Edgar said. “When it is this severe, you can experience panic and terror and, if the individual was in any way aware of what was happening to them, it would be unbearable.” After Edgar's report was released on July 6, lawyers for William Morva—whose execution was scheduled in Virginia that night—asked Governor Terry McAuliffe for a temporary reprieve. “We believed a reprieve was appropriate to allow time for further investigation to ensure that the Commonwealth carries out future executions—including Mr. Morva’s—in a manner that avoids unnecessary pain and suffering,” explained Rob Lee, one of Morva's attorneys. McAuliffe denied the reprieve, and witnesses reported that Morva made a loud noise after the midazolam was administered and had several sharp contractions of his abdomen. The same three-drug protocol used in Virginia has been proposed for use in Ohio, but is being challenged in court by death-row prisoners.