Workman Dead

"I have prayed to the Lord Jesus Christ not to lay charge of my death to any man. I commend my spirit into your hands, Lord Jesus Christ."

Shortly after speaking those words, Philip Workman's head drifted to the left, and he breathed his last visible breaths.

For a moment, we'll pretend that two of the most prominent ballistics experts in this nation didn't reach the conclusion that the fatal shot didn't come from Workman's gun. We'll pretend that the eyewitness they built their original case around was a reliable, upstanding witness rather than a convicted perjuror. We'll pretend that it was entirely fair that the judge who heard the original case was the one to preside over the appeal. We'll pretend there was nothing fishy about interring a murder victim without so much as an x-ray of the body and the state's inability to remain consistent on whether or not an x-ray existed at all.

In other words, we're casting aside the mountain of reasonable doubt in this case. We'll pretend, only for a moment, that he did it, and the state did a bang-up job of proving it. I'll even go a step further and pretend that no one in Lt. Oliver's family joined in the requests for clemency.

What did we accomplish with that needle?

Yes, the State of Tennessee sent a clear, unambiguous statement. And that statement is "Killing is wrong. And to prove that, we're going to kill you."

For even if we pretend that there was no reasonable doubt in the case, we cannot pretend that killing Philip Workman acheived any aim that imprisoning him for life did not. Is society any safer now that he no longer breathes than it was yesterday when he did? Is there someone out there contemplating murder that is going to be stopped by thinking "Workman got the needle--- Better not chance it"?

Criminologists are nearly unanimous in agreeing that the death penalty is absolutely worthless as a deterrent for crime. In this world where 50.1% is considered a "mandate", only 12% of criminologists think the death penalty has any deterrent value whatsoever.

Killing Philip Workman, even if we defy common sense by pretending there was no reasonable doubt, acheived absolutely nothing that keeping him in jail did not.

Last Chance

Tonight, the Philip Workman execution is to be carried out. The stay of execution was lifted yesterday.

Any other time, I would come here to discuss the justness of the death penalty. I've made no secret of my stance on it, nor will I now.

But that's a fight for another day altogether. For this is one of those rare cases where there is entirely too much reasonable doubt to ignore.

The eyewitness that the state built its case around has recanted his testimony. That's perhaps not unusual in capital cases, but what makes this one unusual is that not even the police could put Harold Davis at the scene of the crime. On the witness stand, he told us where his car was parked, and crime scene photos did not show his car there. Other witnesses on the scene never managed to see Davis. And if you watched Sharon Cobb's short film, you know that even the witness's own sister says he was with her that night.

Another witness on the scene, Steve Craig, has said that he saw policemen firing at Workman, despite their own testimony that they never fired their weapons. He was told "there was no need to talk about this ... unless it was with someone from the department." No one ever checked the service revolvers of Stoddard and Parker to see if they had been fired.

No less than Dr. Cyril Wecht, former lead consultant on the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Assassins and former president of the American Board of Legal Medicine has testified that the wounds on Lt. Loiver's body are not consistent with the .45 hollowpoint ammunition Workman used. Medical Examiner James Bell testified that the wound was not only inconsistent with the .45 hollowpoint, but was entirely consistent with the .38 ammunition used by the police.

Five jurors have signed affidavits asking that either the verdict or sentence be overturned based on the evidence that has come out since the original trial. And Lt. Oliver's own daughter and the original prosecutor have lent their voices to the call for clemency.

The time to do the right thing is running out. For even if you disagree with me on the justness of the death penalty you have to want to make sure that everyone receiving the death penalty deserves it.

Call Governor Bredesen at 615-741-2001 or email him at phil.bredesen@state.tn.us to ask him to put a stop to this.

Clemency is not absolution. There is reasonable doubt in this case, and the sentence becomes irreversible at 1 AM Wednesday.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about the procedures involved in a lethal injection execution. It's worth bringing up again here so we can have a look at what a Tennessee judge said yesterday is NOT cruel and unusual punishment:

The goal of lethal injection is not to be easier on the person being killed. The goal of lethal injection is to be easier on the person doing the killing.

First, you’re strapped to the gurney. Then the executioner inserts a catheter into each arm and flushes them with a solution to keep them from getting clogged.

If you’ve ever been in the hospital and had a clumsy nurse try to start an IV for you, think about that and then imagine what care she might have shown if you’d been convicted of murder and would soon be too dead to sue her.

In one arm, they give you 5000 milligrams of sodium thiopental, which puts you to sleep for about thirty seconds. In the other arm, they give you 100 milligrams of pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes your respiratory system.

Finally, they give you a dose of sodium chloride, which induces cardiac arrest. Within two minutes, the state is declaring you dead.

The British medical journal The Lancet reported on the results of forty-nine autopsies from Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Medical examiners found that in 43 of those executions, the condemned had lower levels of thiopental in their bloodstream than what is required for surgery--- Low enough that they were awake and aware as they slowly suffocated. Without enough thiopental, you remain awake and alert. The pancuronium stops you from moving, but leaves all of your higher brain functions intact.

So in fact, they went through excruciating pain, but since their bodies were crippled, they gave no outward indication.Let’s put this in perspective. Our standards for euthanizing animals are actually higher than our standards for executing the condemned.

Perhaps it’s simply the origin of the procedure shining through. It was created by Dr. Karl Brandt, personal physician to Adolf Hitler. How concerned with humanitarianism do you think he was?

So no--- I’m afraid that the question over whether or not lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment is far from a silly one.

We remedy inhumane acts by committing them ourselves. We avenge suffering and death by making others suffer as they die.

**UPDATE**
I believe in providing accurate information, and I found something that contradicts my writings from last year. While Dr. Karl Brandt was indeed a pioneer in lethal injections (He hanged for it at Nuremburg), the formula in use in America today was developed by Dr. Jay Chapman, who recently gave an interview to CNN verifying everything I wrote last year, and calls for a new formula to be established. Click here to read it.

A Temporary Stay For Workman

It's not the best news we could have hoped for, but I'll take it.

A judge has issued a restraining order against Governor Bredesen, forbidding the execution of Philip Workman until after a hearing on May 14.

WPTY has the restraining order here.

Stranger Than Fiction: The People vs. Philip Workman

All right, let’s say you’re writing one of those TV shows about forensic investigations. For the sake of conversation, we’ll call it “CSI: Memphis”.

The draft that you hand in has a shooting victim’s entrance wound larger than his exit wound. The producer is going to hand it back to you and say “That’s not very realistic.” If you insist that it is, he’ll then hand the script off to the technical consultants on the show, who will hand it back to you and say “It doesn’t work that way. Please learn something about gunshot wounds before attempting to write again.”

But here in Tennessee, where the stakes are far greater than poorly written TV, we’re expected to believe that.

Okay, now you’re writing a police procedural drama. We’ll call it “Law & Order: Stupid Drug Addicts”.

Over the course of investigating a policeman’s killing, an eyewitness comes forward, stating that he saw the defendant shoot the victim. The “witness” didn’t turn up in the original canvass of the scene, nor did any vehicle he could have been in show up on crime scene photos. His sister says that not only was he not there, but he routinely made up false information and fed it to police so he could use reward money to feed his drug habit. Yet your script portrays him as a reliable witness.

Again, the script will be shoved back into your face and criticized as having little resemblance to reality.

You’re writing an episode of “Boston Legal”. The firm is defending a murder suspect. The policemen insist that the murder of another policeman couldn’t have been a friendly fire shooting because they never fired their guns. A witness on the scene says that he saw a policeman firing at the suspect with a shotgun. And the defendant’s medical records indicate that he had shotgun pellets removed from his backside.

But the policemen that insisted they never fired their guns are considered unimpeachable witnesses, and the jury returns a guilty verdict based on their testimony.

Airing such a story would induce a collective groan as every viewer in America vows at once never to watch the show again.

But these are the things we’re expected to believe in the Philip Workman case.

The closest thing to a form of entertainment that would try to push a story as absurd as this one would be if Rowan Atkinson filmed “Mr. Bean Goes to Trial”. Even that would be more likely to have a happy ending than the Workman case.

He has four more days unless the governor can muster the political will to prevent his senseless death. This is not the state administering a reasonable punishment--- It is a state-sanctioned hit on someone who, though he is far from a model citizen, did nothing to deserve to be killed.

And it’s happening in your name, Tennessee.

Just the Facts: The Philip Workman Case

Fact: Exit wounds, without fail, are larger than entry wounds.

Fact: Lt. Ronald Oliver has an exit wound on his chest almost twice the size of the entry wound on his back.

Fact: Lt. Ronald Oliver was facing Philip Workman at the time that a bullet passed through his body.

Fact: Ballistics experts have said that Philip Workman’s Colt .45 was not the weapon that killed Lt. Oliver.

Fact: The other two policemen on the scene, Aubrey Stoddard and Steven Parker, claim that they never fired their guns at all.

Fact: Witness Steve Craig claims he saw Officer Parker fire a shotgun at Philip Workman.

Fact: Philip Workman had shotgun pellets removed from his buttocks.

Fact: If such a story is to be taken at face value, then Lee Harvey Oswald’s “magic bullet” has been surpassed in sheer absurdity. Perhaps there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll across from Wendy’s on that fateful day? Because it is a fact that a bullet fired from a .45 caliber gun does not abruptly turn 180 degrees in midair.

Fact: Prosecutors have tried to explain the discrepancy in bullet wound sizes by claiming that the bullet fragmented inside Lt. Oliver, and that only a small chunk exited through his back.

Fact: Prosecutors have never been able to provide a single X-ray establishing that the bullet fragmented inside Lt. Oliver at all.

Fact: Prosecutors are also inconsistent on whether or not an X-ray of Lt. Oliver exists at all. It would be highly unusual not to have one, as X-rays had been in use for almost a century by the time the crime was committed.

Fact: The state’s case falls apart if the magic bullet theory is disproved by X-rays. For even the felony murder statute to apply, the fatal bullet would have to have come from the gun of Workman or a Workman accomplice.

Fact: Only one witness ever claimed to have seen Philip Workman fire the fatal bullet.

Fact: There’s no indication he was ever at the crime scene.

Fact: His sister refutes the idea that he could have been there and seen it, as she was with him at the time of the murder.

Fact: He had a habit of making up information to feed to police--- Claiming rewards was how he supported his drug habit.

Fact: He now claims to have been coerced into testifying.

Fact: With no forensic evidence to back up the state’s case and no eyewitness, the remaining facts of this case do not add up to first degree murder. At best, a case could be made for criminally negligent homicide, arguing that Workman’s reckless crime set into motion a chain of events at the end of which a law enforcement officer tragically lost his life.

Fact: To my knowledge, Tennessee has neither sought nor obtained an execution in a criminally negligent homicide case in its entire history.

Fact: Philip Workman has not disputed that he robbed the Wendy’s restaurant on the night of August 5, 1981.

Fact: Philip Workman has not disputed that he shot Officer Aubrey Stoddard in the arm.

Fact: There are too many things that remain unknown about this case for an execution to be anything short of a travesty of justice.

Fact: You should watch this Sharon Cobb joint and see what Lt. Oliver’s daughter has to say about the impending execution of Philip Workman.