Staff Archives

With a hood over his head and a target pinned over his heart, Brad Sigmon will face a firing squad in South Carolina on Friday

March 6, 2025

If things go as planned, South Carolina will kill Brad Sigmon on Friday by firing squad. It will be the state’s first execution by shooting in its history. The 67-year-old Sigmon chose a firing squad over the state’s two alternative options: electrocution (the default method) or lethal injection. Sigmon’s lawyer told NBC News that just the fact that Sigmon had to choose how to be killed “is horrifying.” Sigmon was

Trump’s shocking Executive Order

January 24, 2025

Like many of you, we’re shocked at President Trump’s executive order, “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” and believe it is a publicity stunt based on his usual rhetoric of fear and hatred. His intention is to reverse the progress that has been made in slowing down and, in some places, ending the killing of those imprisoned by the state. But knowledge is power. We know that the

President Biden Commutes Death Sentences of 37 of the 40 Men on Federal Death Row in a “macabre lottery”

December 30, 2024

President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row today, declining to commute the sentences of Robert D. Bowers, convicted of killing 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018; Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, with his brother, killed three people and

“There are few forms of torture worse for the human soul than isolation.”

October 2, 2024

California Gov. Gavin Newsom “has demonstrated a callous disregard for the dark history” of the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons and jails, Jack Morris writes in his powerful CalMatters essay Morris points to Newsom’s two-time veto of of the California Mandela Act in 2022 and 2023, which would have limited the practice, and again this year when he killed AB280, which would have limited solitary confinement to

Another death sentence was overturned in Alameda County because of prosecutorial misconduct

August 6, 2024

Curtis Lee Ervin was sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder-for-hire of Carlene McDonald in 1986. Late last month, Federal Judge Vince Chhabria, at the request of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who “conceded that a Batson violation occurred” in Ervin’s case, ruled that Ervin should either be released or retried within 60 days. Ervin, now 71, has been on death row for 33 years. His case is one

No heat relief in California prisons and jails

July 10, 2024

A woman incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla died earlier this month during a heat wave that sent Chowchilla’s temperatures over 111 degrees during the Fourth of July weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Elizabeth Nomura, an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, told the Chronicle that her organization had received “distressing” messages from several women at the prison, who reported temperatures over 95 degrees

Amnesty International releases its 2023 annual global report on the death penalty

May 29, 2024

“Amnesty International’s monitoring shows that in 2023 the lowest number of countries on record carried out the highest number of known executions in close to a decade,” AI states in its annual report, “The Use of the Death Penalty in 2023.” “These figures confirm trends of recent years that pointed to the ever-increasing isolation of retentionist countries.” Global use of the death penalty in 2023 increased 31% from 2022. The

Tennessee is second state to pass a bill making child rape a capital offense

May 15, 2024

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee on Tuesday signed into law a bill that will allow a person to be sentenced to death for the rape of a child, the Center Square reports. Tennessee now joins Florida, which passed a similar bill in 2023, defying the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008). That decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy for the 5-4 majority, found that “a death sentence for

Trump plans to execute all 42 people on federal death row if reelected

May 9, 2024

Donald Trump is promising that if he is reelected in November, he will execute every one of the 42 men on federal death row. The declaration is included in an 877-page document released by the Trump campaign, “Project 2025,” laying out all the monstrous plans the administration will unleash if he is not defeated. On page 554 is a paragraph promising to “do everything possible to obtain finality for the

News & Updates

Filter & Search