Kansas City Star Denounces AG Kris Kobach Death Penalty Bill

For many voters and conservatives . . . This scathing criticism might have the opposite effect and inspire more questions and even support for the legal end game.

Check the basics as we hope to follow-up on this story after the AG's press conference today:

"Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach introduced a bill in the Kansas Legislature that would enable the state secretary of corrections to use hypoxia as a method of execution. House Bill 2782 promises that death by hypoxia would be “administered in such a way to cause death in a swift and humane manner.” However, the experimental results of Kenneth Eugene Smith’s execution demonstrate that death by suffocation is cruel, torturous and decidedly unusual.

"Cynicism must not allow us to overlook the irony of a proud right-to-life institution experimenting with the machinery of death. As laboratories of democracy, states must recognize when a law or policy has failed. In Kansas, the death penalty has failed by any objective measure of success. I should know. As a Kansas public defender specializing in the defense of death penalty cases, and as an adjunct professor at Washburn University School of Law, I have devoted my career to the rigorous study of the death penalty.

"Since Kansas reinstated the death penalty in 1994, there have been more 3,500 criminal homicides in the state, but no executions. Two men on death row have already died of natural causes before their first appeal was finalized. The two cases nearest to completing their appeals are still many years away from an execution date, and these two men are now 68 and 80 years old. Is the dubious purpose of retribution advanced by slowly suffocating elderly men to death many decades after their crimes of conviction?"

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

Cruel and unusual: Kris Kobach wants Kansas to start executing people by suffocation | Opinion

The attorney general wants the state to use nitrogen hypoxia on death row prisoners. It produced a gruesome result in Alabama just weeks ago. | Opinion