Is NC about to resume executions?
Submitted by scharrison on Sat, 10/08/2011 - 1:21pm
NC Supreme Court rules in favor of the Council of State:
The N.C. Supreme Court issued a ruling Friday that essentially gives the Council of State, the 10 statewide elected officials, authority to continue setting execution protocol for death row inmates without meeting publicly.
Whether or not this decision will impact the defacto moratorium on institutional wetwork state-sponsored executions is debatable (the N&O reporter thinks not). But those who watch the courts know: When there are multiple suits on a specific subject, and one of them is decided (zaftig pdf), the others tend to move in that same direction.
Setting aside for the moment the moral, ethical and logical pitfalls associated with our government believing there is a difference between a wrongful death and a "rightful" death, and that a small group of citizens is capable of making that determination based on filtered and sculpted information, this part of the written decision brings up something I hope readers can give me a hand with:
On 5 February 2007, an attorney for petitioner Campbell
also requested the opportunity to be heard by the Council at its next
meeting. McCoy responded on the same day and informed the attorney
that “[t]he Council of State‖s monthly meeting is a regularly
scheduled business meeting and is not a public hearing,” and
“[r]outinely, there is no public comment component on the Council‖s
agenda.”
That's the understatement of, if not the year, the month anyway. The public's access to the goings-on of the Council of State is pretty much nonexistent.
While I am by no means a journeyman data miner, I have some skills in that area. I probably wouldn't last three days at the NSA before they gave me my walking papers, but I do all right. The thing is, I've poked at this particular hole in the cloud several times, to little avail.
It's entirely possible that a world of information about the Council of State is sitting in a file cabinet somewhere, just waiting for Steve to file a FOIA so those documents can jump into his arms, after a modest wait of six months or so.
But here's a revelation: It's the 21st Century, for God's sake. And here's a subjective evaluation, backed by nothing more than an instinctive feeling: When information about such an important grouping of elected officials is that difficult to find, that information is intentionally being withheld.
I know some members of the Council of State read BlueNC, as do some of their staff. Fix this, please, so I can satisfy myself that they're not concocting evil schemes and such behind closed doors.
Another (admittedly unlearned) observation:
I really don't give a hoot-n-hell what other states have done or will do on this issue, and the NC Supreme Court shouldn't either. You're supposed to look up for your guidance, not across or down.