In brief: April 2024
April 24, 2024
In Oklahoma, Michael Dewayne Smith was executed earlier this month. He was convicted of murdering Janet Moore, a 40-year-old mother, and Sharath Pulluru, a 24-year-old
In Oklahoma, Michael Dewayne Smith was executed earlier this month. He was convicted of murdering Janet Moore, a 40-year-old mother, and Sharath Pulluru, a 24-year-old
CDCR says it has moved approximately 222 of the individuals on San Quentin’s death row to 20 prisons throughout the state since February 26, when
As many as 35 death penalty cases in California’s Alameda County from the past 30 years are under review after a deputy district attorney discovered
This week, a coalition of prominent civil rights and legal organizations filed a writ petition at the CA Supreme Court stating that “Extensive empirical evidence
Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced earlier this month that he had filed a motion in Superior Court to recall the 15 death
The death penalty “is state-sanctioned homicide, wholly ineffective, often botched, and a much more expensive punishment than life imprisonment. There is no ethical, scientifically supported,
In Georgia, corrections officials killed Willie James Pye last week, the state’s first execution since 2000. The 59-year-old Pye was sentenced to death after being
Texas killed Ivan Cantu late last month by lethal injection despite legitimate questions about his trial and conviction. Cantu’s original defense attorneys didn’t call any
Idaho corrections officials attempted to kill 73-year-old Thomas Creech late last month, but after an hour of repeated attempts to find a vein for its
When the jury in the death penalty trial of Nikolas Cruz, who pled guilty to killing 17 students and teachers and wounding 17 others at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, returned a verdict of life without parole earlier this month, the shock waves reverberated across the country. “Families shocked as jury spares life of Parkland killer,” the New York Times headline read. “Families of Parkland massacre victims
In California, a new report from the U.S. Department of Justice describes how the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department “systematically violated criminal defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and Fourteenth Amendment right to due process of law” in its longtime use of a secret jailhouse informant program. “The failure to protect these basic constitutional guarantees not only deprives individual defendants of their rights, it
In his piece, “The Supreme Court Shows No Signs of Slaking Its Thirst for Capital Punishment,” in The New Republic, Matt Ford points out that the U.S. Supreme Court “does not consider every contentious legal issue in every term,” except “perhaps” for capital punishment. “Since the court effectively abolished capital punishment in 1972 and then brought it back in 1976, the justices have served as de facto administrators of America’s
On Monday, October 10, 2022, at noon Pacific/3 p.m. Eastern, in recognition of World Day Against the Death Penalty, DPF presented “A Conversation with Death Penalty Focus President Mike Farrell and Professor Juan E. Mendez, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.”
The murder convictions of two East Contra Costa men were reversed by a Superior Court judge last week, who ruled that the prosecutor and police testimony violated the Racial Justice Act of 2020, the San Jose Mercury News reports. The Racial Justice Act prohibits the state from seeking or obtaining a criminal conviction or from imposing a sentence based on race, ethnicity, or national origin. But it was prospective only,
(Update: Today, just two weeks after Alabama corrections officials botched the execution of Alan Miller, the state wants to try again. According to AL.com, the attorney general confirmed that he has asked the Alabama Supreme Court to set another execution date for Miller.) As reported in last week’s Focus, for the second time in two months, Alabama corrections officials botched an execution on September 22, when they rushed to kill Alan
“Cole is a man who is so debilitated by paranoid schizophrenia and brain damage that he barely speaks or moves, crawls on his cell floor or drags himself into and out of a wheelchair, and cannot care for his most basic hygiene. It should shock our collective conscience” that Oklahoma plans to kill Benjamin Cole on October 20, Catholic Conference of Oklahoma executive director/state coordinator for Oklahoma Conservatives Concerned About
South Carolina’s plan to execute men and women by electrocution or firing squad constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the state Constitution, a state judge ruled earlier this month. The legislature “ignored advances in scientific research and evolving standards of humanity and decency” when it voted last year to force people to be killed by electric chair or firing squad if they refuse to choose a method of
Last week, the Oklahoma law firm Reed Smith released a third supplemental report on its investigation into the case of Richard Glossip. He was sentenced to death for his alleged role in the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, the owner of the Oklahoma motel Glossip managed. The actual killer was Justin Sneed, a motel maintenance worker who admitted to beating Van Treese to death with a baseball bat. But