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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Temporary Ban on Executions in KY Upheld

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Monday, March 28, 2011   

FRANKFORT, Ky. - The Kentucky Supreme court has refused to lift a temporary ban on all executions until a lower court judge can decide whether Kentucky's lethal-injection procedures meet necessary standards. The five-to-two decision by the state's high court to continue to halt all executions stems from challenges by condemned death row inmate Gregory Wilson and others.

The Reverend Patrick Delahanty, chair of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, says he's relieved that the state's lethal-injection procedures will be fully vetted in court.

"Aside from moral considerations regarding human life and whether the states should be engaged in taking it or not, the process seems not able to be done correctly."

A Franklin Circuit judge ordered the ban last September as the state readied to execute Wilson - whose attorneys claim he is mentally challenged - for the 1987 kidnapping, rape and murder of a 36-year-old woman in northern Kentucky. The judge found the state lacked "adequate safeguards" in determining an inmate's mental capacity.

The Reverend Delahanty says the global hunt for an execution drug is another example of a broken system.

"You're always going to have in place a system that could put an innocent person to death. You're always going to have in place a system that costs taxpayers much more than life without parole in times when money is very tight and the needs of the citizens in the state are much higher than trying to execute someone."

Delahanty believes Kentucky would be wise to follow the lead of other states that have abandoned the death penalty.

"Reasonable people, in our opinion, would simply declare a moratorium and work on a way to get rid of this. Illinois just did it because they wised up. New Jersey's done it. New Mexico's done it. The court did it in New York. And, the court could do it here."

Kentucky recently secured a quantity of a key lethal injection drug from Georgia needed to carry out three executions. A national shortage of the sedative sodium thiopental put states on an international hunt for the chemical, which is the first component of a three-drug mixture used in lethal injections in Kentucky.


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