In Brief: November 2016
November 4, 2016
Capital punishment was at the center of debates in states including Kansas, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama the past few weeks.
Capital punishment was at the center of debates in states including Kansas, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama the past few weeks.
“You know it’s hard every day sitting in a courtroom knowing you’re totally innocent,” Graham says. “I was framed because of my beliefs and because I was outspoken about prison conditions.”
The case of Caryl Chessman reverberated throughout the US and around the world, as California’s 12-year battle to execute him was fought in the courts and in the media.
The UN releases a new book on the death penalty, and again calls for worldwide abolition.
States around the country continue to tinker with the “machinery of death.” Here are a few of the more interesting developments around the country in the past few weeks.
Support for the death penalty is the lowest it’s been in more than 40 years.
As the cost of executions rises, state officials are scrambling to find the money to pay for them.
Newspapers are unanimous in their endorsement of Prop 62 and the repeal of California’s death penalty.
“We actually thought at the time, naively, that a broader death penalty would deter criminals,” Briggs says. “We truly believed the bill would reduce crime in California.”
There is nothing new about comics depicting tragedy. Comics and graphic novels have been covering serious topics for years. Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel, Maus, the story of how Spiegelman’s father survived the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home, about growing up with a closeted father who was the town funeral home director, are two examples of powerful stories told in comics form. So it’s no
Update: On October 10, 2018, the Malaysian government announced that the country will abolish the death penalty for all crimes. Around 1,200 people are on death row in Malaysia, and many of them were sentenced for drug offenses, a sentence highlighted in the 13th Annual World Day Against the Death Penalty in 2015. The country had already placed a moratorium on executions, and the new announcement may have been prompted by
In the words of Bob Dylan, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, replacing Anthony Kennedy, is not a setback for those who hoped the Court would in the near future finally rule that the death penalty is a barbaric punishment that has no place in a civilized society, it’s a death knell. Describing Kavanaugh as a “doctrinaire law-and-order
“The eighth amendment isn’t just a window. It’s a mirror. And what the Court has said is that our norms, our values are implicated when we do things to really fragile, really vulnerable people. And what we’ve argued is that dementia in this case renders Mr. Madison frail, bewildered, vulnerable in a way that cannot be reconciled with executing him,” Equal Justice Initiative attorney Bryan Stevenson told the U.S. Supreme
(This is a developing story. We will continue to update it as events unfold.) Yesterday, just a few hours before Edmund Zagorski was scheduled to be executed, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam granted him a 10-day reprieve. It was just one of many significant developments in a week full of legal rulings and decisions. In fact, Haslam’s reprieve was in response to a federal district judge’s earlier order barring the state from executing
Although court documents state that a member of the Oklahoma jury that sentenced Julius Jones to death for the July 1999 fatal shooting of 45-year-old Paul Howell said in front of another juror that “They should just take that [n-word] out and shoot him behind the jail,” and a witness reportedly informed the judge of the comment, but the judge did not take any action, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed
In his column, “Justice Delayed, With a Life on the Line,” in last Sunday’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof again writes about the case of Kevin Cooper, who has been on California’s death row for 33 years for a quadruple murder he didn’t commit. Clearly frustrated, Kristof again asserts that Gov. Jerry Brown is at fault for not giving the go-ahead for advanced DNA testing on the evidence in Cooper’s case,
In North Carolina, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation released a report, “Unequal Justice: How Obsolete Laws and Unfair Trials Created North Carolina’s Outsized Death Row,” that found that approximately three quarters of the men and women on the state’s death row were convicted under obsolete laws before numerous reforms were enacted to ensure fairness and prevent wrongful convictions. North Carolina has the sixth largest death row in the nation, with
Yesterday, the Washington supreme court acknowledged that the state’s death penalty scheme is imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner and struck it down. The law lacks “fundamental fairness” the court said. African Americans make up 13 percent of the population, but they make up 42 percent of Washington’s death row — black defendants in Washington are four and a half times more likely than white defendants to receive a sentence of death,