Opioid crisis continues to impact capital punishment in Alabama | STEPHEN COOPER
On May 30, Jamie Mills will be the next man Alabama executioners will pick and poke with a needle — possibly pricking him for hours, and perhaps even slicing into him with a knife — in a ghoulish search for a vein by which to pump him full of lethal chemicals. A highly secretive protocol will be deployed to accomplish this uncivilized and unholy “task” — killing a man — one Alabama has a long history of bungling, accumulating a record of “botched” barbaric executions.
Alabama’s history of torture, as of January, includes being the first state to torture a prisoner to death with nitrogen gas. But, since Mills never “opted in” to die by way of that abomination, he’s due to be exterminated via lethal injection instead — for the 2004 robbery and heinous killings of an elderly couple, Floyd and Vera Hill, at their Marion County home.
What I want to highlight again here is: Capital punishment is wrong. It’s wrong no matter the method used, and it is wrong no matter how terrible the crime that is sought to be punished. Furthermore, torture, whether by way of a needle, knife, nitrogen gas, or any of the myriad terrible ways man has come up with to torment his fellow man, cannot be tolerated. Not in a free and just society.
But also, I want to point out: Mills’ case is yet another reason why, in June 2016, I took to the pages of The Gadsden Times to “humbly beseech the United States to ‘stop tinkering with the machinery of death’: Massive, long-standing societal addiction to opioids — a problem that is especially nefarious and pervasive in the hills, hamlets and countryside of Alabama — and in the stories of its death row population.”
As I advanced at the time, “Off the top of my head I can think of a panoply of people facing execution — right now in Alabama — where opioid addiction either directly, or indirectly, played a part in the crime that put them on death row.” Mills’ case falls within this subset because, whether from the vantage point of the state or Mills — as put forth by his lawyers from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) — the theft of victim Vera Hill’s prescription “pain pills” from the murder scene was an important development, inextricably important to the case against Mills.
Records and reporting about Mills’ case reveal that Benjie Howe — a “well known” drug “user/dealer,” at one point himself arrested and charged with the Hill murders — was found with Vera Hills’ prescription pain pills; Howe would later testify Mills sold him the pills on the night of the murders. Mills’ EJI attorneys, however, argue: “The physical evidence was consistent with Mr. Mills’ theory of defense that he was innocent and being framed by Benjie Howe who was identified as a suspect in the murders and arrested with the victims’ pills and a large amount of cash.”
I’m not taking sides between EJI and the state on the specific import of the “pain pills” at issue, nor am I arguing this crime would definitively not have happened in their absence from the case. But, more generally, I am again advancing that: “In poor, agrarian areas of Alabama, where manual labor and minimum wage mete out subsistence — where the best paying jobs are at a plant or a prison, and where pills are interchangeable with money — it’s not hard to see how opioid addiction-related crime seeps into (or is directly implicated in) death penalty cases.”
Worth considering in conjunction with this, as the Blue Cross/Blue Shield website observes: “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Alabama ranks highest in the nation as having more opioid prescriptions than people with Alabama physicians writing an alarming 5.8 million prescriptions for opioids in 2015. Alabama also ranks number one as the highest prescribing state in the nation for opioid pain reliever prescriptions, according to the CDC.”
I know from personally working on capital cases as an assistant federal defender in Alabama — in the exact same county where Mills was prosecuted — the ignoble, outsized part the opioid crisis has played in death penalty cases in Alabama — before, at, and after the time the Hills were killed. What I’m arguing is that the opioid crisis has already ravaged Alabama more than enough. Exacting vengeance on Jamie Mills using state-sanctioned torture won’t bring the Hills back. And it won’t address one of the reasons undergirding their tragic, needless loss: opioid addiction.
Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California. Follow him on "X"/Twitter @SteveCooperEsq
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Opioid crisis continues to impact capital punishment in Alabama | STEPHEN COOPER
