Louisiana sues all its own death row inmates

Last Thursday, the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections decided to sue every inmate on death row -- in an effort to prevent them from challenging the state's lethal injection procedures. 

Each of the 84 prisoners in the "death house" at Angola State Penitentiary was personally served papers in the suit, said Nick Trenticosta, who has represented numerous clients on Angola's death row.

Trenticosta, who is also director of the non-profit Center for Equal Justice in New Orleans, knows of no other instance in which a state sued its death row inmates en masse over legal questions relating to their execution. 

"I've been hanging around death penalty cases for 25 years," Trenticosta said in a phone interview, "and I have never seen anything like this."

According to the Huffington Post, the Corrections Department's litigation is a countersuit, filed in response to an earlier lawsuit claiming that Louisiana's lethal injection procedure is in violation of state law. 

That suit was filed by the Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana (CPCPL) on behalf of death row prisoner Nathaniel Code. It stated that Louisiana had not met the requirements of its own Administrative Procedures Act in creating guidelines for execution by lethal injection.

 The state procedure ought to specify exactly what drugs should be used to kill prisoners, the CPCPL argued, rather than simply calling for the administration of drugs. Without such stipulations, Trenticosta said, "They're saying if we want to pour boiling oil into your veins, we can do it."

Just over a month ago, on January 8, a state district court in Baton Rouge dismissed Nathaniel Code's suit, which would have halted all executions in Louisiana until the Corrections Department brought its procedures in line with state law.

The state of Louisiana, however, decided to initiate offensive maneuvers against further challenges to its methods of execution. Immediately after the ruling in Code's suit, the Corrections Department filed its countersuit against all death row inmates. 

The department's attorney, Wade Shows, told the Baton Rouge Advocate that Louisiana was asking the court "to formally declare'once and for all' that the state's lethal injection protocol is not subject to the Louisiana Administrative Procedure Act." 

Such a ruling, Shows said, "'means you don't have to go through the rule-making process.It's sort of an internal management decision.'"

Similar challenges in other states have yielded mixed results.  Only Louisiana, however, has dealt with the issue by suing the residents of its own death row.

Louisiana seems determined to have the choice to execute if and when it wants to, without interference from prisoner lawsuits alleging administrative technicalities.

According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune: "Since the United States reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Orleans Parish juries have condemned 38 defendants to death. But a recent tally by attorneys for death-row inmates calculated that courts have found errors in 25 of those sentences, or nearly 2/3. In some cases defendants were retried, resulting in convictions on lesser charges, while in others defendants were released."

But in any case, whether the death row  inmates are guilty or innocent, it seems that Louisiana is simply not ready to waste any time on trying to figure out the way they should die.