In a surprise announcement, the US Department of Justice says it will investigate the scandal-plagued Orange County District Attorney and Sheriff’s office.
Not quite a year after Nebraska legislators repealed their death penalty, voters brought it back last month, while Nebraska residents voted to enshrine their death penalty statute in the state constitution.
In New Jersey, two legislators want to bring back the death penalty, while in Nevada an assemblyman wants to abolish it. And those are just two of the capital punishment debates raging across the country in the past month. Executions, death penalty cases, legal rulings, and capital cases were front and center in several states. We look at some of the more significant developments.
He has devoted his life to ending the death penalty. After heading the campaign for Proposition 62, Mike Farrell returned this month to Death Penalty Focus, where he has served as president for almost 30 years. He talks about the campaign, its defeat, and where he thinks we should go from here.
It is the highest number of executions since Georgia reinstated the death penalty 43 years ago. But the execution was even more controversial because of the circumstances of the case, a miscarriage of justice so severe, a former chief justice of the state supreme court protested in an editorial in the New York Times.
The Justice That Works Act of 2016 did not receive majority support in the November election. We look at the campaign, some of the factors that led to its loss, and what the future of abolitionism may look like.
A lawsuit challenging the measure has already been filed, and criminal defense experts are predicting it will cost taxpayers additional millions of dollars, while exacerbating the problems inherent in an already broken system.
The first woman appointed to the California Supreme Court, and the first and last chief justice to be ousted, she was the target of death penalty supporters and big business.
The Los Angeles City Council announced its support for Prop 62 on Friday. The council joined 38 newspapers from all over the state, representing rural and urban areas, conservative and liberal ideologies, with large and small readerships, that have urged readers to vote Yes on 62 and No on 66.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case of 50-year-old Russell Bucklew, a Missouri death row prisoner who came within a few hours of his execution in March when the Court granted a stay, in a 5-4 decision, to give it time to study his appeal. Bucklew suffers from cavernous hemangioma, a rare medical condition that causes blood-filled tumors in his head, throat and lips. Because of
In Mississippi, a man who has been on death row for over 20 years, after being tried six times for a quadruple murder in 1996, will get a hearing in the U.S. Supreme Court. APM Reports, which has produced an 11-episode podcast on Flowers’ case, reports that the Court will review whether District Attorney Doug Evans deliberately excluded African-Americans from Flowers’ jury in each of his trials. In four of his
In his op-ed in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, “It’s Wrong for an Imperfect System to Impose an Irreversible Punishment,” former district attorney Tim Cole notes that two Texas counties, Tarrant and Dallas, are responsible for returning a combined 181 death sentences in the modern death penalty era — “more than any major metropolitan area in Texas except for Houston” — and says “district attorneys owe it to their constituents to
Tennessee’s nine-year break in executions ended in August when the state killed Billy Ray Irick by lethal injection. Last week, Edmund Zagorski was executed by electric chair, and David Earl Miller is scheduled to die next month. Tennessee’s machinery of death is back in operation, and it’s had a profound effect on the prisoners. “We’re on new ground and we’re trying to process it,” the Rev. Joseph Ingle says. “There’s
Edmund Zagorski was executed in Tennessee last night by electric chair, the first time in 11 years the state has used that method. The 63-year-old Zagorski had been on death row for 34 years for the April 1983 murder of two men, John Dotson and Jimmy Porter, during a drug deal. At the time of his sentencing, Tennessee didn’t have the option of a sentence of life without parole, and
When the state has gotten the go-ahead to execute a man by electrocuting him, it’s difficult to understand why they would fight a request by the prisoner’s attorney to have access to a phone during the execution. But that’s exactly what attorneys for the state are doing right now – arguing against a federal judge’s order to provide Edmund Zagorski’s attorney with access to a phone so she can communicate
It’s foolish to hope for any sort of measured or nuanced response from Donald Trump, but his thoughtless, knee-jerk, all-too-predictable immediate demand that the man accused of killing 11 people in a synagogue during Shabbat services last weekend be charged with the death penalty did nothing but inflame emotions and further poison our sick and violent society. As DPF President Mike Farrell said, “A president who refuses to recognize his own
The Tennessean has a story today on how the state will test the electric chair it will use to kill Edmund Zagorski next Thursday. The details are gruesome, and should compel every one of us to question what kind of society we live in that we would allow human beings to be executed by the state. Electrocution is a particularly barbaric way to kill someone, but make no mistake, there
The majority of Americans no longer believe the death penalty is applied fairly. For the first time since Gallup polled on this issue in 2000, 49 percent believe it is applied fairly. 45 percent say it’s applied unfairly. Gallup says the new low “reflects a gradual decline” over the past ten years, while the number who believe it is applied unfairly has been edging higher, “with this year’s four-point gap