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In an execution an expert has characterized as botched, Arizona Department of Corrections personnel failed for 25 minutes to set an intravenous line in Clarence Dixons arms on May 11, 2002 before performing a bloody and apparently unauthorized cutdown procedure to insert the IV line into a vein in his groin. It was the first execution the state had carried out after a nearly eight-year hiatus following the botched two-hour execution of Joseph Wood on July 23, 2014.

Fox News media witness, Troy Hayden, reported that the execution team had trouble inserting the IV line and that Dixon appeared to be in pain and grimaced during the insertion process. He said that after about 25 minutes the execution team cut into Dixons groin to place the IV line there. Associated Press reporter Paul Davenport, who also witnessed the execution and saw the incision being made, said at the post-execution news conference that execution team members had to wipe up a fair amount of blood from Dixons groin. Taylor Tasler, a media witness from Phoenix NBC affiliate KTAR, reported that Dixon gasped after the drugs were administered, before losing consciousness.

Lethal-injection experts said the amount of time it took to set the IV line was indicative of serious problems. Its a sign of desperation (on the part of the execution team), and its a sign of an unqualified executioner, Fordham Law Professor Deborah Denno said. Austin Sarat, an Amherst College professor and author of Gruesome Spectacles: The Cultural Reception of Botched Executions in America, said the repeated efforts to place the IVs were serious problems in the execution itself. Sarat noted that Dixons execution appeared to have violated Arizonas execution protocol, which, he said, allows peripheral IV catheters or a central femoral line as determined by the Director acting upon the recommendation of the IV Team Leader but does not include a cut-down to insert an IV in the groin.

Michael Radelet, a University of Colorado-Boulder sociologist and longtime death-penalty researcher, said, I would classify it as a botch, recognizing that not everyone would agree with that. But things did not go right. Dixons execution, Sarat said, shows yet again that lethal injection is by no means a humane process.

Dixons execution reflects continuing serious problems in Arizonas execution process. Lawyers for Frank Atwood, whom the state is scheduled to put to death on June 8, 2022, reviewed 14 prior Arizona lethal-injection executions and found that IV insertion took from 7 to 54 minutes, with IV placement in half the executions taking 23 minutes or more.

Defense lawyers say that these problems are exacerbated by the lack of transparency about Arizona executions. Dixons lawyer, assistant federal public defender Amanda Bass, said [s]ince Arizona keeps secret the qualifications of its executioners, we dont know whether the failure to set two peripheral lines in Mr. Dixons arms was due to incompetence, which resulted in the unnecessarily painful and invasive setting of a femoral line. The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry did not respond to media requests for information about the training of the execution team members tasked with inserting the IV.

Arizonas execution protocol was the subject of litigation after Woods botched execution, in which he reportedly gasped and snorted more than 640 times as executioners injected him with 15 doses of the two drugs used at the time. The state reached a deal in 2017 to abandon that two-drug protocol, replacing it with a single drug, the barbiturate pentobarbital. In 2020, the state settleda media access lawsuit after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the media had a First Amendment right to witness executions but not to know the identity of the states drug supplier. Under that settlement, the state agreed to allow witnesses to see and hear the entirety of the execution, while keeping the identity of its drug suppliers secret.

In April 2021, a heavily-redacted invoice obtained by The Guardian showed that, in October 2020, Arizona ordered 1,000 vials of pentobarbital. Each one-gram vial cost the state $1,500, for what the newspaper described as a jaw-dropping total of $1.5 million. Two months later, another Guardianinvestigation revealed Arizona had refurbished its gas chamber and spent more than $2,000 to acquire ingredients to execute prisoners with cyanide gas, the same gas used by the Nazis to murder more than one million men, women, and children during the Holocaust.

Later in 2021, the Arizona Attorney Generals office sought to shorten judicial review in the cases of Dixon and Atwood after learning that the shelf life of the drugs it intended to use in the executions would expire before the executions could be carried out.

Atwood is challenging his June 8 scheduled execution, for which he must choose between cyanide gas or lethal injection. Atwoods lawyers argue that both methods would result in unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. They point to the lengthy IV insertion process and the possibility of femoral vein access as potential sources of excruciating pain in Atwoods execution, given Atwoods spinal condition, disability, and overall frailty.

Sources

Jimmy Jenkins, Arizona struggles to administer lethal injection drugs, Arizona Central, May 18, 2022; Austin Sarat, Time, the Execution Process, and the Botched Lethal Injection of Clarence Dixon, Verdict, May 16, 2022; Jacques Billeaud, Experts: Arizona executioners took too long to insert IV, Associated Press, May 12, 2022; Jimmy Jenkins and Chelsea Curtis, Arizona executes Clarence Dixon for 1978 murder of Deana Bowdoin, Arizona Central, May 11, 2022; Navajo man executed in Arizona prison, Indian Country Today, May 11, 2022; Clarence Dixon execution updates: Ducey says execution is justice served, Arizona Central, May 11,2022.

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Witnesses Report Problems Inserting IV in Arizona's First Execution in Eight Years - Death Penalty Information Center

Technology is tampering with freedom of speech, and we dont know what to do about it. At issue are the global platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the disturbing propaganda, disinformation and lies propagated on them.

The inclination, on the left and the right, is to censor. It is a terrible solution, more toxic and damaging to the body politic than the disease.

The left would like to shut down Fox Cable News and its principal commentator, Tucker Carlson. The right would like to have Twitter sold, presumably to Elon Musk, so that it stops blocking tweets from the right, notably those from former President Donald Trump.

How our society and others deal with the downside of social media racial incitement, disinformation, mendacity and opinions that are offensive to a minority, whether that is the disabled or an ethnic group is a work in progress. The instinct is to shut them down, shut them up. The tool that old monster solution is censorship.

The first trouble with censorship is that it has to define what is to be eradicated. Take hate speech. The British Parliament is struggling with a bill to limit it. The social networks seek to exclude it, and there are U.S. laws against crimes inspired by it.

How do you define it, hate speech? When is it fair comment? When is it satire? When is it truth taken as hate?

I say if you can untie that knot, go ahead and censor. But I also know you cant untie it without savaging free speech, doing violence to the First Amendment, arresting creativity and hobbling humor.

The censor is often as much clothed in moral raiment as in political garb. Take Thomas Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta, who in 1807 published an expurgated version of the works of Shakespeare. Henrietta did most of the work on the first 20 plays, later Thomas finished all 36. They expunged sex, blasphemy and double entendre. Thomas was an admired scholar, not a crackpot, although that might be todays judgment.

Oddly, the Bowdlers are credited with increasing the readership of Shakespeare. People reached for the forbidden fruit; they always do.

Likewise, many a novel would have avoided success if it hadnt been serially banned, like D.H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover. The moral censorship of movies by the Hays Office, starting in 1934, didnt save the audiences from moral turpitude. It just led to bad movies.

The censors often begin with specific words; words, which it can be argued, represent offense to some group or some social standing. So specific words become demonized whether it is the naming of a sports team or a colloquial word for sex, the urge to censor them is strong.

Jokes, like the English ones about the Welsh or the Scots ones about the English, became victim to a newly minted sensitivity, where political activists sell the idea that the joked about are victims. The only victim is levity, to my mind.

When you start down this slope there is no apparent end. Euphemisms take over from plain speech, and we live in a society in which the use of the wrong word can suggest that you are not fit for public office or to teach. Areas around ethnicity and sexual orientation are particularly fraught.

Until the 1960s and the civil rights movement, newspapers de facto censored people of color: They ignored them a particularly egregious kind of censorship. At The Washington Daily News where I once worked, a now defunct but lively evening newspaper in the nations capital, some of us once ransacked the library for photos of Blacks. There were none. From its founding in 1927 until the civil rights movement took off, the newspaper simply hadnt published news of that community in a city that had a burgeoning African-American population.

That was collective censorship as pernicious as the kind that both political extremes would now like to impose on speech.

Alas, censorship banning someone elses speech isnt going to redress the issue of the rights of those maligned or lied to or excluded from social media. In print and traditional broadcasting, libel has been the last defense.

Libel laws are clearly inadequate and puny against the enormity of social media, but they are a place to begin. A new reality must, and will in time, get new mechanisms to contend with it.

One of those mechanisms shouldnt be censorship.It is always the first tool of dictatorship but should be an anathema in democracies. For example, it is an open issue as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been able to invade Ukraine if he hadnt first censored the Russian media.

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Censorship Isn't the Solution to Social Media's Ills InsideSources - InsideSources

Voice of OC Publisher Norberto Santana Jr will be recognized this week by the nations top news editors for his leadership in training and hiring diverse news leaders.

Your unselfish contributions as an investigative reporter, editor, mentor, lecturer and now as editor and publisher of the Voice of Orange County stand out as a journalist who has worked to elevate others and serve his community. You were nominated by your staff, in itself a heartfelt recognition. said News Leaders Association President Manny Garcia, who serves as the Executive Editor of the Austin American Statesman newspaper, in announcing the Robert G McGruder Award for Diversity Leadership.

McGruder was a trail blazing African American journalist who spent his career breaking racial barriers and encouraging his industry to do the same. His career prematurely ended in 2002 after a 20-month battle with cancer. He is remembered for his excellence in journalism and his string of firsts: first black editor of the Daily Kent Stater, first black reporter at The Plain Dealer, first black president of the Associated Press Managing Editors group and first black executive editor of the Detroit Free Press.

I am honored and humbled to stand alongside Robert G. McGruder, advocating for a fair shot for all kinds of voices in Americas newsrooms, said Santana.

Santana is being recognized alongside S. Mitra Kalita, curator of a New York nonprofit newsroom, Epicenter NYC and co-founder of URL Media, who received the News Leader of the Year award.

The Diversity Leadership Award honors the spirit of McGruder by celebrating news executives that carry on his legacy of ensuring that news leadership jobs include people of color and that a diversity of voices is represented in training, promotion and hiring.

Past award winners include Miami Herald Publisher David Lawrence and Pulitzer Prize winning Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts and Peter Bhatia, editor at the Detroit Free Press.

The News Leaders Association represents the nations top editors and publishers. Founded in 1979 the NLA supports all aspects of open government and free speech.

They are best known for their sponsorship of the annual Sunshine Week activities throughout the country that remind local leaders of the importance of First Amendment rights.

Santana will be recognized in a virtual ceremony May 20 during their annual convention.

Voice of OC was also recently recognized by Cal State Fullerton University for its commitment to student journalists with the James P Alexander Internship Site of the Year award.

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Voice of OC Publisher Norberto Santana Jr to Receive Prestigious Robert G. McGruber Award From Nations Top News Editors for Diversity Leadership -...

Upset parents want a Tallahassee principal to be fired. She posted comments to her personal Facebook page critical of new state laws restricting discussions of race, history, gender, and sexual identity in the classroom. While the first amendment likely protects the principals job, shes still being pressured to exit.

During a recent school board meeting, several local parents and even a local radio host took issue with the comments posted to the principals personal Facebook page. Her post argued parents should leave teaching to teachers. She said schools would continue to teach kids in spite of parents and called the new laws around how schools discuss gender and sexual identity, along with race and history, stupid bills.

If shes so tired, stay home. Pick another job. No one called her a hero, said Jason Levy, the father of a sixth grader at Cobb Middle School. You know who the real heroes are? The parents that stayed home with their kids, missed work, in spite of this school boards keeping kids home for an extended amount of time when the rest of the state opened.

Brandy Andrews also took issue with the principals words and cited the comments as an example of an attitude she believes is the reason more than 2,000 children have left the Leon County School District since the start of the pandemic.

There are no repercussions for principals, teachers, who make public posts that spark negativity about parents, particularly the Cobb principal (Sarah) Hembree, Andrews said. Why are these staff members allowed to tell parents to butt out?

Theyre speaking on their personal Facebook pages, not even at school, so theres no possibility of disruption at school based on their expression of speech, says Pam Marsh, executive director of the First Amendment Foundation based in Tallahassee. So I think, were they to be dismissed - the principal and the teacher - they would have very good suits to bring under the First Amendment. A teacher at another local school has also been getting pushback for taking a similar stance on their personal social media page.

Marsh says decades of lawsuits and court rulings have firmly placed the law on the principals side. The most applicable case is Tinker v. Des Moines, a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case where justices ruled neither teachers nor students shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

The principals Facebook comments were first reported by Tallahassee Reports, and Rep. Jason Shoaf, R-Blountstown, suggested the principal should be fired. Other major court rulings have also weighed in on free speech and employment: chief among them, Pickering vs. Board of Education.

Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote the threat of dismissal from public employment is a potent means of inhibiting speech, and he also said a teachers exercise of his right to speak on issues of public importance may not furnish the basis for his dismissal from public employment, Marsh says.

Another case, 2005s Garcetti vs. Ceballos, adds more nuance. In that case, the court found when an employee makes statements while carrying out their official duties, they are no longer speaking as private citizens, and there are no constitutional employment protections for their speech. So there may be a gray line between outside of school criticizing a bill on their personal Facebook page versus being a teacher in front of a classroom involved in their employment duties, Marsh says.

The principals comments earned an endorsement from School Board Chairman Darryl Jones, who highlighted her post on his own social media and said he agreed with her statements. During the recent school board meeting, member Alva Striplin distanced herself from the principals words.

To the statement made from the Cobb principal, I dont agree with it, and Im just throwing out my own opinion, Striplin said. I believe that parents should be completely involved in their childrens education. As a mother of six, I should be the first person involved.

Its not lost on Marsh and others that calls for the principal to be fired for speaking out on social media mirror that of calls from the left to cancel speech they dont agree with either. Marsh says the first amendment is for everyone, regardless of their politics, and that right to speak - no matter how disagreeable or who disagrees - is still protected speech.

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A Tallahassee principal and teacher face calls to resign over Facebook posts, but the First Amendment likely protects them - WFSU

Edit buttons, open-source algorithms, long-form tweets, and stopping scam bots are just some of themodificationsElon Musk suggested he would implement in the run-up to his successful bid to buy Twitter. All of those sound like interesting ideas.

But none of them will directly improve the prospects for free and open dialogue on the platform, which appear to be Musks overarching reason for buying the company. As he has rightlysaid, Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.

Musk also recently tweeted, By free speech, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. He is on the right track. Twitter should do what matches the law by modeling its policies after First Amendment standards.

Musks commitment is a breath of fresh air for those who value free speech. He seems to comprehend that free speech is essential to preserving a free society, and that social media has replaced the physical town square as the primary place for debate and expression.

So how should Musk practically implement his promise to improve free speech on Twitter? He should revise the platforms policies based on the lessons of First Amendment case law the worlds richest repository of practical wisdom on protecting free speech.

As a private company, Twitter is not legally obligated to follow the Constitution as a government actor would be. Nevertheless, the First Amendmentslegalprotections are valuable guidelines for how private actors can help create acultureof free speech.

Here are two actions he can take that will directly improve the prospects for free and open debate and dialogue on the platform: One, eliminate private speech codes policies that contain vague and imprecise terms that threaten free speech. Two, adopt a robust anti-censorship policy.

What are speech codes? They are rules that control the content of what people can or cant say. In addition, these regulations commonly contain unclear and imprecise terms that give enforcement officials unbridled discretion to censor speech they dont like.

In the First Amendment context, courts routinely strike down government speech codes because of the plain threat they pose to free speech. Unfortunately, these types of policies now proliferate on private social media platforms, including Twitter, and significantly contribute to the censorship problem in the digital public square.

Musk can spot speech codes by looking for vague or imprecise language two tell-tale signs of looming censorship. One basic guideline on how to spot these problematic terms is to look for vague terms.

A term is vague if it (1) forces an individual of ordinary intelligence to guess at what it means, or (2) invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement due to a grant of unfettered discretion or lack of objective standards. Terms that lack clarity and grant broad discretionary powers to those in control threaten free speech because officials can use them to suppress whichever viewpoint they disfavor.

Another thing to look for is imprecise terms: A term is imprecise if it fails to narrowly target the specific harmful activity it is designed to prohibit. Imprecise terms imperil free speech because they reach beyond the harmful activity they purport to target and instead censor and chill speech.

Hate speech, hateful conduct, misinformation, and disinformation are some of the most common terms in speech codes. They are also notoriously unclear and imprecise. Twitter has numerous policies containing these terms. Each of these terms is a threat to free speech because they can be wielded to silence any viewpoints those in authority choose.

Take, for example, how these policies affect the free exchange of ideas on the ongoing national debate over gender ideology and its effects on female athletics, privacy, religious freedom, and free speech. This issue is, borrowing from Musks words, a matter vital to the future of humanity. Yet time and again, Twitters policies have hampered the freedom of people to freely discuss this critical issue.

Specifically, Twitter has wielded its hateful conduct policy to censor or deplatform users on one side of this debate. Among other things,that policysays, You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. It also bars targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.

Prohibiting hatefulconduct or targeted harassment is a noble objective. But, as applied to speech, Twitters speech code allows for disproportionate application and censorship. And thats exactly what has happened.

For example, in late January 2021, Twitterlocked outThe Daily Citizen, a Christian news outlet, from its account for stating that one of President Joe Bidens nominees is a man who identifies as a woman. The full tweet said: On Tuesday, President-elect Joe Biden announced that he had chosen Dr. Rachel Levine to serve as Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of HHS. Dr. Levine is a transgender woman, that is, a man who believes he is a woman.

The tweet linked to an article on The Daily Citizens website. This tweet addressed a matter of dramatic importance whether identifying as a woman is what makes a person a woman and expressed the position that many reasonable people hold: that identity is not the only thing that makes someone a man or a woman.

The tweet neither expressed any hatred nor encouraged any violence toward Levine. Nevertheless, Twitter informed The Daily Citizen that the tweet violated its hateful conduct policy because it promoted violence, threatened, or harassed Levine. Twitter denied The Daily Citizens appeal and imposed a four-month ban.

Similarly, The Federalists Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson was locked out of his Twitter account for saying Levine was a man. Twitter refuses to unlock Davidsons account unless he deletes the offending tweet, a common practice Twitter applies disproportionately to conservative commentators.

Similarly, during the 2021 summer Olympics, Twitter banned several commentators for questioning Olympic rules that permit males to compete in womens categories. For example, when New Zealand transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard exited the competition after failing all three attempts, Allie Beth Stuckeytweetedthat Laura [sic] Hubbard failing at the event doesnt make his inclusion fair. Hes still a man, and men shouldnt compete against women in weightlifting.

In response to Stuckeys 12-hour ban, Erick Ericksontweeted, This is absurd. Laurel Hubbard is a man even if Twitter doesnt like it. He also received a 12-hour ban. Both times, Twitter invoked its hateful conduct policy.

More recently, Twitter has censoredThe Babylon BeeandU.S. Rep. Vicky Hartzlerfor expressing their views on gender identity ideology and its impact on women. These examples of viewpoint discrimination against high-profile users only scratch the surface of the distortion Twitters hateful conduct speech code does to Twitters town square in cyberspace.

The same free speech threats spring from policies barring so-called misinformation and disinformation, which have both been wielded to silence ongoing conversations about public health, gender identity ideology, voting integrity, and more. For example,one current Twitter policy defines informational harmas follows: Harm that adversely impacts the ability for an individual to access information fundamental to exercising their rights, or that significantly disrupts the stability and/or safety of a social group or society including medical mis-information i.e. COVID-19.

Its difficult to imagine policy language that grants more discretion to restrict speech than the terms of this policy. There are no standards at all. The policy will inevitably be enforced based solely on Twitter employees subjective judgments about which views impact the ability of a person to access information, or significantly disrupts the stability of society. Those who control access to a speech forum, and what you are allowed to say, have no business wielding this kind of unchecked power over the exchange of ideas.

Twitters current policies fail to appreciate a critical First Amendment maxim: The answer to speech you dont like is more speech, not censorship. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in a 1927decision, If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

Thankfully, Musk appears fully cognizant of Twitters policies propensity to squelch free speech. He seems motivated to make good on Twitterspromiseto give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information, and to express their opinions and beliefs without barriers. To do so, he must eliminate Twitters speech codes, starting with the policies outlined above. Any essential limits on content should be shaped with surgical precision to give users clear notice of the boundaries and prevent employees biases from infecting their enforcement decisions.

Musk should take one additional step to restore free speech on Twitter. He should adopt a policy that bars censorship and expressly states that it will not enforce any of its policies in a manner that restricts the free exchange of ideas. By doing so, he will provide his content moderation team a workable roadmap to implement his guiding free speech principles across the enterprise.

Here is model language Musk should consider for a new free speech policy:

Twitter does not discriminate against users,censor users or a users expression, or interfere with users ability to receive the expression of another based on the viewpoint of the user or another person,regardless of whether the viewpoint is expressed on the platform or through another medium.

No Twitter policies will be enforced in a manner that restricts expression on matters of public concern because of the expressions viewpoint, even when some may find the expression offensive, hurtful, misguided, upsetting, or otherwise objectionable.

By following the steps outlined above, Musk can make important strides toward realizing his goal of aligning Twitters policies with First Amendment free speech protections.

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Musk Can Use The First Amendment To Make Twitter Free Speech Again - The Federalist