Word: states
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...state of Virginia has executed John Allen Muhammad via lethal injection on Nov. 10. Muhammad, known as the D.C. sniper, was sentenced to death for the murder of Dean Harold Meyers, one of 10 victims gunned down during a three-week rampage around the capital in 2002. Muhammad is the highest-profile inmate to die by lethal injection since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April 2008 that the state of Kentucky was not violating a statute prohibiting "cruel and unusual punishment" by executing prisoners using the controversial method. The ruling effectively allowed executions by lethal injection to recommence after...
...Lethal injection gave executioners another option besides electrocution, which could set inmates on fire and cause extreme pain; in addition, prisoners who were paralyzed would not writhe around or cry out as they died, which made watching executions easier for witnesses. Chapman's proposal was approved by the Oklahoma state legislature the same year and quickly adopted by other states. In 1982, Texas became the first to use the procedure, executing 40-year-old Charles Brooks for murdering Fort Worth mechanic David Gregory...
...more people than any other nation by far, is phasing out death by gunshot in favor of lethal injection; the government provides mobile execution vans, which travel to smaller cities and towns that don't have permanent death chambers. While that morbid procession wouldn't fly in Virginia, the state clearly considers lethal injection the most humane option. When prisoners - like Muhammad - decline to specify whether they want to be executed by electrocution or lethal injection, Virginia gives them the latter by default...
...activist stance, Kurtz says, is tied to Catholic anxieties about the state of marriage as a whole. "We are aware that some of the the statistics that were presented to us shows that, I am told from the 1980s to mid-2005, there's been a decrease of 40% to 50% of couples turning to the church for sacramental marriage," says the Archbishop. "We had an awareness of marriage becoming an increasingly private affair, whereas of course the church believes it is anything but a private affair. Obviously it is very important to the husband and wife who are getting...
Kurtz's archdiocese is the state's largest and most influential in Kentucky, itself a bulwark in the opposition to gay marriage. In 2004, voters in the state overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage, despite the fact that it was already illegal. In part because of that vote and subsequent ones like it, Kurtz and his fellow bishops will find considerable wind in their sails when they gather next week to discuss the new pastoral letter and hear Kurtz on the bishops' efforts to defend traditional marriage through education and through active engagement in the political process...