The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in a jury selection bias case last month in which Mississippi death row prisoner Curtis Flowers, an African-American,
On Thursday, the Supreme Court considered whether to take the case of a South Dakota death row prisoner who maintains he was sentenced to death
Dear Governor Newsom, Do you have ANY IDEA how refreshing it is to the SOUL to have a politician seek public office, who promises to
If Alabama were to go ahead with its plan to execute 68-year-old Vernon Madison, he wouldn’t know why. Because of several strokes over the past
The headlines say it all. “The Stench of Prejudice in Keith Tharpe’s Death Sentence,” in the New York Times. “A juror used the N-word. Did
In the space of one week last month, two men walked out of prison, each of whom had spent decades on death row. Freddie Lee
“Yay Gavin Newsom. I’m very thankful to him for having the courage, the guts, to stand up and say before California murders anyone on my
In New Hampshire on Thursday, by a veto-proof vote of 279-88, the House repealed the state’s death penalty and replaced it with a sentence of
In their paper, ” ‘A World of Steel-Eyed Death’: An Empirical Evaluation of the Failure of the Strickland Standard to Ensure Adequate Counsel to Defendants
Last month we reported on a case that may have enormous implications for the future of the death penalty in California. Death Penalty Focus has since submitted an amicus letter asking the California Supreme Court to take up the case. Below you will find an excerpt to our story about the case and the amicus letter itself. To download and read the letter right now, click here. —– —– —–
The mass shootings last weekend have caused unimaginable pain and suffering. Dozens of people are dead. Hundreds of family members and friends are grieving. Entire communities are traumatized. We offer our deepest sympathies to all who are grieving. President Trump has called for the death penalty in response to our country’s epidemic of mass shootings. But, as the statistics bear out, the death penalty will not curtail the scourge of
The acclaimed documentary is now on Amazon’s video streaming platform.
In 1986, my 70-year-old mother was asleep in her own bed when a teenaged neighbor broke into her home, raped her, and then beat her to near death and left her face down in a partially filled bathtub. It was a spectacularly brutal, banner headline crime, called by the District Attorney one of the most heinous in the history of the county. Even in light of what happened, I am
The Department of Justice announced today that it has scheduled five executions in December and January; the first federal executions since 2003. “The federal death penalty is a disgrace,” says Death Penalty Focus President Mike Farrell. “Riddled with the same problems we find in the state systems, it is racially biased, arbitrary, and applied not to the ‘worst of the worst,’ but to those who suffered traumatic childhoods, are mentally
Death penalty lawyer and DPF board member Robert M. Sanger believes that the moratorium Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in March created “a paradigm shift in the reality of California’s death penalty.” And the result is that “a California jury in a capital case cannot be expected to provide a fair and reasoned penalty-phase determination free from speculation.” The California Supreme Court thinks his argument might be worth considering. Sanger is
“In Los Angeles County, which is known as a bastion of progressivism, we have a system that is churning out more death sentences than any other county in the country. And by seeking death in a discriminatory way, they are perpetuating a racist system,” says the Justice Collaborative’s Senior Legal Counsel Summer Lacey. “Bryan Stevenson says the death penalty is modern day lynching, and you picture him talking about Alabama,
Three weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 2010 conviction of Curtis Flowers, who has been tried six times for a 1996 quadruple murder in Mississippi. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the seven-justice majority, noted “the extraordinary facts of this case.” Over the course of those six trials, he wrote, “The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to
Two milestones were reached in June, starkly illustrating how broken the death penalty in the United States is. In North Carolina, prosecutors formally dismissed all charges against Charles Ray Finch on June 14, making him the 166th person to be exonerated in the U.S. since 1973. Six days later, Georgia executed Marion Wilson, the 1500th person to be executed in the U.S. since 1976. Or, to put it another way: