The American Civil Liberties Union and Nevada Coalition against the Death Penalty called on the Pardons Board to block the October 15, 2007 execution of murderer William Castillo, who had withdrawn his appeals and asked that his execution be carried out.
In a letter to the board the two groups wrote, “We implore you to halt Monday’s execution and delay any other executions in Nevada until the United States Supreme Court has issued a decision on the constitutionality of lethal injection.”
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to lethally injecting prisoners sentenced to death, opening the door for the state to resume the practice .
Nevada has been imposing capital punishment since before statehood, including the first known execution in November 1860 when a judge ordered the death of John Carr for the murder of Bernhard Cherry. Since then, the state has conducted some 60 executions using the hangman’s rope, shooting, the gas chamber and lethal injection.
There is no comprehensive list of legal executions before 1903 because, until then, they were conducted at the county seat where the person was convicted. Counting Carr’s hanging in Carson City, there are 20 known executions before 1903 including the first black man, Sam Mills, in 1.877, and the first American Indian, Indian Dave, in 1885.
The only woman ever executed in Nevada was Elizabeth Potts. She was hanged with her husband Josiah in 1890 in Elko.
Only one other woman has been ever put on Nevada’ s death row. Priscilla Ford rammed her car into a 1980 Thanksgiving crowd in downtown Reno, killing six and’ seriously injuring more than 20 people.
Ford died of emphysema at age 75 in January 2005. Incidentally, the former Macy’s department store gift wrapper was driving a Lincoln Continental when she said she heard voices telling her to commit this crime .
And before he left Nevada for the last time, Mark Twain sent two newspaper reports about a Virginia City event to the Chicago Republican. It is Twain’s second letter, dated May 2, 1868, that he includes his eyewitness report of the hanging of John Millian, or Melanie as Twain writes, who had been convicted of murdering Virginia City prostitute Julia Bulette, the year before .
“I saw a man hanged the other day,” Twain starts. The great writer is well known for his wit, humor and biting sarcasm and it shows, “He was the first man ever hanged in this city (or country either), where the first twenty six graves in the cemetery were those of men who died by shots and stabs…”
His natural ability to poke fun at life is halted with the imagery of the condemned mans lifeless body, “I can see that stiff, straight corpse hanging there yet, with its black pillow-cased head turned rigidly to one side, and the purple streaks creeping through the hands and driving the fleshy hue of life before them.”
Both Bulette’s murder and Millian’s trial and execution are ranked among l9th-century Nevada’s landmark events. Over the years, the pair have reached near mythological status, Bulette as the prostitute with a golden heart and a haunting and Millian as the arch villain.
By l875, the Legislature banned public executions and in 1901 lawmakers ordered that all executions be conducted at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City. The 1911 Legislature gave inmates the option of hanging or being shot to death.
The only man to take them up on the firing squad was Andriza Mircovich. He was killed by an automated rack of three rifles mounted on a frame in May 1913.
The Legislature ordered lethal gas as the state’s method of execution in 1921 and Nevada became the first state in the nation to gas an inmate in February 1924 when Gee Jon, a Chinaman, was executed. A total of 32 men died in Nevada’s gas chamber between 1924 and 1979 when Jesse Bishop became the last to die by gas.
The state adopted lethal injection in l983.
At the time of this writing, 11 men have been executed by this method. The nation’s high court decision yesterday concluded that while use of the death penalty itself might be debatable, the bench could not rule lethal injections violated the Constitution .
“A method of execution violates the eighth amendment only if it it’s deliberately designed to inflict pain,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion of the court’s 7-2 decision .
The Supreme Court’s decision was announced jus’ as Pope Benedict XVI was heading for his first visit to the White Bouse. Benedict is adamantly opposed to the death penalty and has raised his objections during a previous meeting with the President George Bush.
During an execution, a prisoner is first injected with a sedative to render the subject unconscious before the deadly substances of pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride follow to paralyze and kill. The ACLU and the NCDP both argued that a mistake in injecting the sedative sodium thiopental would cause the prisoner intense pain while dying.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one the two dissenting members, wrote in her opinion that there was no guarantee the prisoner would be adequately immune to pain, “I would not dispose of the case so swiftly given the character of the risk at stake,” Ginsburg wrote.
There is still no word on when those will start back up again in Nevada including William Castillo ‘s, whose execution was stopped this past fall with just 90 minutes to spare . The Nevada State Supreme Court will examine the High Court’s ruling before deciding how to move forward with stat executions.
It is a good thing to have a nation ruled by law and not by emotion.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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