An Interview with Michael Radelet, Ph.D. Michael Radelet is a sociologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he served as chair of the Sociology Department
By Jessica S. Henry Walter “Arkie” Barton is scheduled to be executed by the State of Missouri on Tuesday, May 19th. Missouri may well be
In Louisiana in 1974, at the age of 16, Gary Tyler was sentenced to die for a crime he did not commit. He was arrested for allegedly shooting a white boy during racially-charged protests over school integration in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. Convicted and sentenced to die by an all-white jury, he was, at the time, the youngest person on death row in the United States, and spent eight years
I am furious! I am disgusted. I am an American and this perfidy is being carried out in my name. That the would-be ruler of this country could be so twisted as to conceive of a policy that forcibly separates children from their parents is an outrage, a barbarity, an atrocity. That his sinister, cretinous batboy could enact such a policy under the guise of protecting me from the purported
The State of Texas plans to execute 34-year-old Christopher Young next month. He was sentenced to death in 2006 for the murder of 55-year-old convenience store owner Hasmukhbhai Patel. But the Christopher Young who was sentenced to death 12 years ago is not the same person. That 22-year-old was a gang member, and a self-confessed alcoholic and drug abuser. This Chris Young is a thoughtful, caring, gifted artist, who says,
In a unanimous vote, the San Francisco Labor Council, which is affiliated with 150 unions, and represents more than 100 thousand union members and their families, passed a resolution this week calling on Gov. Jerry Brown to grant Kevin Cooper’s appeal for advanced DNA testing, “and grant him a reprieve from the death penalty.” The resolution lists 13 reasons why Cooper’s case needs to be investigated, and DNA testing to
The DPF Board of Directors announced this week that longtime social and criminal justice advocate Magdaleno Rose-Avila has been appointed to the position of Executive Director. Announcing the decision, DPF President Mike Farrell said,”I couldn’t be happier to announce that Leno has signed on to lead Death Penalty Focus, an organization he has supported for many years. Leno’s commitment to social and criminal justice is demonstrated by his lifelong work
Bobby James Moore will not be leaving Texas’ death row any time soon. On Wednesday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Moore is not too intellectually disabled to execute. The state’s high court said it was basing its 5-3 ruling on current clinical standards, as mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court. In a March 2017 ruling, SCOTUS found that Moore was improperly sentenced to death because the state
When the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled to overturn the death sentence of Robert Lewis Jr. late last month finding “substantial evidence” that he is intellectually disabled, it “set a strong precedent on Atkins law,” Lewis’s attorney, Robert M. Sanger, says. In Atkins v. Virginia (2002), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing the intellectually disabled constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. However, the decision left it
“In 34 years at the New York Times, I’ve never come across a case in America as outrageous as Kevin Cooper’s,” Nicholas Kristof wrote in a recent column about Kevin Cooper and the stunning injustice of his case. Cooper, who is 59, was sentenced to death for the murder of four people in a suburb of Los Angeles in June 1983. He has been on San Quentin’s death row for
The ACLU of Northern California won a round in court late last month when a Marin County Superior Court judge ruled that its challenge to California’s new lethal injection protocol could go forward. The California Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation had tried to adopt the new protocol without revealing details and without opening it up to public comment. “The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has a history of issuing