#so he provided neil with a tried and tested solution to that issue

[snarktheater]

The Chemist — Chapter 32&Epilogue

We made it, folks. We're at the end of the tunnel, and finally, we're ready to put this snoozefest of a book behind us. I know I am, at least.

But first, one more chapter and an epilogue. What could go wrong?

No, really, what could go wrong, in this book? There hasn't been any real conflict throughout the story and everything's resolved. I expect the characters to be fine. And if they're not…well, I'll have something to celebrate, at least.

So Alex wakes up feeling safe, and marveling at how she can finally feel safe because they've taken out Carston and Deavers, and Pace is on his way out as well. Everyone's fine, Daniel's recovering more quickly than is believable (book's words, not mine), and Alex sees that Pace is in fact dead from an "aneurysm", a.k.a. Alex's poison. Cue banter.

“It would have been more fun to shoot him.” […] “Well, you did get to shoot Deavers.” “I was too stressed about Danny to really enjoy it, though,” [Kevin] mused.

What was that about you having kept your soul again? Oh, right, just fake praise given to the Mary Sue in spite of being completely undeserved. The usual, basically.

The book then decides to recap how Kevin got captured (he didn't manage to surprise Deavers, who had forty men at the ready—yes, really). And…again, is this really necessary? Was this such a mystery that you couldn't resist clarifying the details? I'm pretty sure this is what I would have assumed if you hadn't said anything, book.

Anyway. Their heist didn't make the news, on the other hand, and neither did Carston or his granddaughter's kidnapping. The latter was the most likely to make it, but then again, since Olivia was returned to her mom, I guess there was no reason to get the news involved. As for the former…well, duh, it was the CIA director on a disaffected CIA facility. Even if the circumstances are shady, of course no one will tell the news about it.

Oh, yeah, also we have a gaping plot hole in their security. You know, the obvious witness? Don't worry, he's cool.

Alex was bemused by how much the white-haired old man took in stride. None of them had tried to explain their unusual injuries or even make up a cover story, but Volkstaff asked no questions and showed no obvious curiosity.

Yes, apparently he's perfectly fine healing guys with bullet wounds no questions asked. What kind of vet is he, exactly? This raises too many questions. Not the least of which: he still knows who Kevin and Daniel are, which makes him a liability even without asking questions, so what're you gonna do about it? Well, by the looks of it…not much. After all, tying up all the loose ends is way more important—and by loose ends I mean the other heterosexual couple.

Val surprised Alex by volunteering to house them again, back in her palatial penthouse, now that it was safe. For a fee, naturally. Kevin seemed the most shocked at her offer. “Don’t let it go to your head,” she told him. “I want the dog.” […] Then she’d kissed him – long enough that it got uncomfortable for everyone.

Gee, I'm sure that's all there is to it. The dog. And yes, bonus consequence avoidance again with this, since they don't need to find another place to stay.

Skip to them back at Val's place, with Alex sort-of-not-really packing. Kevin comes to ask her where she plans to go next.

Alex twitched her shoulders noncommittally. “Nothing too specific yet.”

Wow, what a great planner you are. I can see how you survived all these years through your extensive ability to plan for everything. You're selling me this character to the bitter end, book.

Daniel is of course tagging along with her…probably. They haven't talked about it, because it's not like communication is a good thing in a couple, but Alex just assumes he'll come. Because why would he ever want to stay close to his brother who's now back from the dead for the second time? Well, the solution to that one is obvious.

“If it makes you feel any better, he seems to be assuming you’ll be there, too.” Kevin’s eyebrows eased back from their normal compressed position. “Really?”

Do these people have an issue against asking? Oh, wait, no, Kevin feels honored that Daniel still wants to hang out, for some reason. And it's convenient, because Kevin has an idea of a town they could go live in Colorado.

Cue the epilogue, which is told from the point of view of "Adam Kopecky". Who's this? Eh, no idea, but why wouldn't the show introduce a brand-new character for its epilogue? George R. R. Martin has done it in a few of his books, and that clearly means the practice is automatically good, right? All we know is Adam works for a reality TV chef. Oh, sorry, a "reality road show" chef. Whatever the difference is.

for Adam, it meant flexible hours, a quiet little office, and a near-constant stream of positivity.

Because reality shows are well-known for their positivity.

Anyway, Adam gets a call from one of his colleagues who tests various locations in advance for the show, telling him about a barbecue restaurant in the Denver region called "Hideaway". Gee, I wonder who could own that place.

the outside was forgettable. It could have been anyplace in the West.

Yes, okay, we got it. it's Alex and the Beaches' place. Of course, now they're called Nathaniel, Ellis and Kenneth Weeks. And yes, I guess that means Alex and Daniel got married at some point. And yes, Daniel's still the best cook to ever cook.

Hideaway had gotten Neil’s enthusiastic thumbs-up as well. Best food he’d had in the past three seasons.

Can you do things in moderation, Meyer? Like, ever?

Anyway, Adam calls a few restaurants to book a date with them, until he gets to the Hideaway, and of course, Alex/Ellis refuses to participate, because paranoia. But apparently she's not paranoid enough to…I don't know, mute her pone while she and Kevin argue about it. And Kevin also hasn't stopped calling her "Ollie", because that's how aliases work, right?

“What do they want?” “To feature the Hideaway, apparently.” […] “Oh,” the deep voice said, and his tone reminded Adam of the woman’s first response. Flat.

You're the worst at not sounding suspicious, guys.

Alex spins some bullshit about one of Kevin's ex-girlfriends and legal issues making her refuse the publicity that the show would provide them, which would be great if…you know, they'd actually come up with a decent cover story instead of Alex clearly bullshitting on the fly, and not that well.

“Yada yada; you get the picture. It’s all very delicate – sticky, you know, and no press is good press for now.”

Again: this woman supposedly survived for years on the run before the book started. I am so convinced right now.

“I’ll be in contact if we are ever in a position to accept.” The line went dead. She hadn’t even let him give her his phone number.

Is Meyer not aware that caller ID is a thing?

And we end the book with Adam shrugging it off and moving on to another place, hoping they'll be happier to get an invite. Because I guess he just needs some major ego stroking.

Really, this end is kind of perfect for this book. The ego stroking, of course, but also the complete lack of effort, both from the writer and the characters. Oh, and the way we end on a complete tangent and on a character we don't care about.

For once, I will point out acknowledgments, too, because Meyer mentions several doctors who she worked with to figure out realistic ways to portray Alex's chemicals. I…have some serious doubts. Unless their advice was "sure, whatever, just use antibodies". Either that, or she really did do the research and then did a seriously awful job at putting that research into the book. Considering the overall quality of the writing, either answer is perfectly plausible.

I'm just glad to be done with this book at long last. Remind me to never take on another Meyer book for a full snark, these apparently have a tendency to take me forever. I'll just move on to something else. Hopefully something that goes a little easier.

#the chemist #stephenie meyer #book reviews #ya books #young adult #books #young adult books #ya #reviews #book #book review #review #st: the chemist

[maxwellyjordan]

In overnight orders, justices allow federal execution to proceed

In the early hours this morning, after a flurry of last-minute filings, a divided Supreme Court cleared the way for federal executions to resume for the first time in nearly 20 years. According to news reports, the federal government then moved quickly to carry out an execution that had been scheduled for Monday afternoon, executing Daniel Lewis Lee at a federal prison in Indiana shortly after 8 a.m. EDT this morning.

The battle over the federal government’s efforts to resume executions has been a hard-fought one for the last few months. Late last month, the justices declined to intervene in the dispute over the new lethal-injection protocol that the Department of Justice devised in order to avoid problems obtaining the drugs that have historically been used to put inmates to death. The court denied a request by four federal death-row inmates, including Lee, to review a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that upheld the new federal regulations for carrying out the death penalty. The decision by a divided three-judge panel had overturned a ruling by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who held that federal law requires the government to carry out executions using precisely the same protocol as the state where the execution takes place.

Lee was scheduled to be executed Monday at 4 p.m. EDT for the 1996 murders of William and Nancy Mueller and Nancy’s daughter, eight-year-old Sarah Powell. After stealing approximately $50,000 worth of cash, guns and ammunition from the Muellers to fund a white supremacist movement, Lee and his accomplice shot the Muellers with a stun gun, placed plastic bags over their heads, and threw them into a bayou.

On July 10, a federal district court in Indiana put the execution on hold. The postponement came at the request of Earlene Peterson, the 80-year-old mother of Nancy Mueller, and other family members of the victims. The family members have long said Lee should not be executed, but they insisted that, if he were going to be executed, they wanted to attend the execution. In their request for a postponement, they argued that traveling to the prison to attend Lee’s execution during the COVID-19 pandemic would risk their health. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit lifted the district court’s stay on July 12, prompting Peterson and the other family members to seek emergency relief at the Supreme Court on Monday.

In a 29-page filing, Peterson asked the justices to reinstate the district court’s order blocking Lee’s execution until her right “to safely travel and attend the execution during the resurgent pandemic can be adequately considered.” Peterson suffers from congestive heart failure, while Monica Veillette, Nancy Mueller’s niece, has chronic asthma. They would have “faced substantial risks from the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic had they traveled to attend the execution as matters now stand,” Peterson wrote, particularly when a staff member at the prison who has tested positive for COVID-19 was at the death chamber after he was exposed to the virus.

Peterson contended that the Supreme Court should intervene because it was likely to eventually grant review to weigh in on whether the federal government can “disregard the rights of crime victims and their families to attend the execution.” They are not trying, Peterson stressed, to “dictate the Attorney General’s choice of a date for an execution.” Instead, Peterson argued, the district court’s decision simply would require the government to “consider the danger to close family members of the victims from traveling and attending an execution to which they have already been invited.” And “if Lee’s execution goes forward” as scheduled, when she cannot safely attend, Peterson concluded, she and her family members “will effectively be denied their right to attend.” By contrast, Peterson observed, there was no reason why the government had to go forward with Lee’s execution; there was no deadline, and it did not explain why a delay would cause any problems.

Lee also filed his own request on Monday asking the Supreme Court to put his execution on hold to give the justices time to review his appeal, which raised Sixth Amendment arguments and other issues. In a petition for review, Lee urged the justices to weigh in on whether federal laws governing post-conviction relief would allow him to challenge the adequacy of his trial lawyer.

Also on Monday, Chutkan again put the scheduled executions on hold. She concluded that Lee and other inmates with upcoming execution dates were likely to succeed on their claim – the standard for temporary relief – that the federal government’s lethal-injection protocol violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Among other things, she noted, the “scientific evidence before the court overwhelmingly indicates that the” protocol “is very likely to cause Plaintiffs extreme pain and needless suffering during their executions.” Moreover, she added, the inmates identified two other options that would reduce the risk of such serious pain: giving the inmate a dose of either pain medication or an anti-anxiety medication before the execution begins; or execution by firing squad. In the government’s emergency appeal from Chutkan’s order, the D.C. Circuit late on Monday rejected the government’s request to allow the executions to go forward and ordered the appeal to be fast-tracked.

Shortly before 4 p.m. EDT, when Lee’s execution was scheduled to take place, the federal government came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to block Chutkan’s order or lift it altogether. In a filing signed by Acting U.S. Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, the government complained about the last-minute nature of the order, writing that the justices “should not permit such tactics.” But more broadly, the government continued, Chutkan’s order was meritless and highly unlikely to survive on appeal. The order, the government argued, “turns on a profound misunderstanding of this Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence.” It also “would produce the implausible results that huge numbers of recent state executions have violated the Constitution” and “would convert courts into precisely the kinds of boards of inquiry refereeing battles of the experts this Court has repeatedly made clear they are not,” the government said.

At approximately 2 a.m. EDT, the Supreme Court issued a trio of rulings. In an unsigned three-page opinion, by a vote of 5-4, the justices granted the government’s request to lift Chutkan’s order and allow the executions to proceed. Stressing that the inmates’ claim that the government’s lethal-injection protocol violates the Eighth Amendment “faces an exceedingly high bar,” the court explained that the inmates had not shown that they are likely to succeed on that claim. The Supreme Court, the opinion noted, “has yet to hold that a State’s method of execution qualifies as cruel and unusual,” in all likelihood because states have generally tried to make their methods of execution more humane, rather than more painful. And although the inmates have presented evidence suggesting that pentobarbital, the drug that the federal government has selected for its lethal-injection protocol, will cause the inmate to experience “a form of respiratory distress that temporarily produces the sensation of drowning or asphyxiation,” the government has countered that such a condition occurs only after the inmate has become unconscious or dies. The court emphasized that “last-minute intervention” like Chutkan’s Monday-morning order “should be the extreme exception, not the norm.” “It is our responsibility,” the court concluded, “‘to ensure that method-of-execution challenges to lawfully issued sentences are resolved fairly and expeditiously,’ so that ‘the question of capital punishment’ can remain with ‘the people and their representatives, not the courts, to resolve.’”

Justice Stephen Breyer dissented from the court’s ruling, in an opinion joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Lee’s case, Breyer argued, “illustrates at least some of the problems the death penalty raises in light of the Constitution’s prohibition against ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’” Lee spent over 20 years on death row, Breyer noted, which can cause “severe psychological suffering” and “undermine the penological rationale for the death penalty.” “Moreover,” Breyer continued, “the death penalty is often imposed arbitrarily”: Lee’s accomplice received a life sentence even though he committed the same crime. And there are “significant questions” regarding the constitutionality of the lethal-injection protocol that the federal government has adopted for the executions of Lee and other federal prisoners. Because “the resumption of federal executions promises to provide examples that illustrate the difficulties of administering the death penalty consistent with the Constitution,” Breyer reiterated his view that the “solution may be for this Court to directly examine the question whether the death penalty violates the Constitution.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor also filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Ginsburg and Justice Elena Kagan. She warned that the majority had set a “dangerous precedent” by granting the government’s request to allow the executions to proceed. In accepting the government’s “artificial claim of urgency to truncate ordinary procedures of judicial review,” Sotomayor cautioned, “there will be no meaningful judicial review of the grave, fact-heavy challenges respondents bring to the way in which the Government plans to execute them.” She noted that when the Supreme Court denied a government request to allow executions to go forward late last year, three of her colleagues – Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – observed that “in light of what is at stake, it would be preferable for” the D.C. Circuit to review the district court’s decision on the merits before the federal government could carry out the executions. And more broadly, Sotomayor noted that the court was again granting what she described as “an emergency application from the Government for extraordinary relief,” resulting in “the most irreparable of harms without the deliberation such an action warrants.”

At the same time that the court granted the government’s request to lift the stay that Chutkan imposed, it also denied – in brief orders, without any noted dissents – the requests by Peterson and Lee to postpone Lee’s execution. According to CNN, Lee was pronounced dead at 8:07 a.m. EDT in Terre Haute, Indiana.

The justices did not act on a separate request by the government to allow the execution of Wesley Purkey, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, to go forward. The 7th Circuit put Purkey’s execution on hold earlier this month.

This post was originally published at Howe on the Court.

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