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In brief: October 2018

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

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Watch Now: Women on Death Row Webinar

Watch a recap of the first of our fall webinar series with “Women on Death Row,” moderated by Diann Rust-Tierney, Executive Director of the National Coalition To Abolish the Death Penalty, in conversation with two women who wrongfully spent time on death row.

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Voices: Bethany Webb

“Ten years seem so long, but when I think about the shooting, about losing Laura, it seems both like it happened yesterday and a million years ago.” On Tuesday, Bethany Webb and other victims’ family members gathered at a memorial service in Seal Beach to remember the eight people killed 10 years ago in the worst mass shooting in Orange County history. Webb’s sister, Laura, was killed, and her mother

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While we’re on the subject . . .

In his op-ed, “Oklahoma’s rush to execute harms culture of life,” in the Oklahoman, Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul S. Coakley writes that a court case pending in federal court on the legality of the state’s lethal injection protocol is an “opportunity” for Oklahoma to end its use of capital punishment. “There is little doubt that society has moved past the need for the death penalty,” he writes. It “is an immoral and

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In brief: October 2021

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law last week a bill that expands another criminal justice reform bill that became law two years ago. The San Jose Mercury News reports State Sen. Josh Becker’s (D-San Mateo/Santa Clara) bill, SB 775, will make it possible for as many as 2,000 people who were charged under the old felony murder law but were ineligible for resentencing under a reform bill passed in 2019, to

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Oklahoma Executions Loom

When the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 against clemency for John Grant last week, it cleared the way for the state to resume executions for the first time since 2015. The 60-year-old Grant is scheduled to be executed on October 28. He has been on death row since 2000 for the 1998 killing of Gay Carter, an Oklahoma corrections center employee. Carter had been serving time for armed

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Oregon Supreme Court ruling likely to clear death row

The Oregon Supreme Court issued a ruling last week which will likely overturn the death sentences of all 23 prisoners on death row. In State v. Bartol, the court struck down the death sentence of David Bartol, a gang member who killed another prisoner, Gavin Siscel, in 2013. Bartol’s lawyers argued that his death sentence was invalid because he was sentenced before the state legislature changed its death penalty law in 2019,

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“In the extreme: Women serving life without parole and death sentences in the United States”

“The circumstances that lead women to commit violent crimes are often complicated by a history of sexual and/or physical trauma….We know, for instance, that almost all who commit violence have first experienced it.” This is according to a new report, In the Extreme: Women Serving Life Without Parole and Death Sentences in the United States, which also found that “Women serving life sentences have high levels of psychiatric disorders, histories of physical and

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While we’re on the subject…

In her Nevada Independent op-ed, “Nevada is preparing to execute a man with significant organic brain damage,” Dr. Natalie Novick Brown, a licensed clinical psychologist who evaluated Nevada death row prisoner Zane Floyd, states that Floyd was born with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). The disorder is “similar in severity to intellectual disability … which has broad implications regarding his behavior, impulse control, and decision-making.” She points out that Floyd is “categorically

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In brief: September 2021

In California, the Los Angeles Daily News reports that Stanley Bernard Davis, sentenced to death in 1989 for the murder of Los Angeles college students Michelle Ann Boyd and Brian Harris in 1985, was resentenced last week to life without parole. Los Angeles prosecutors stipulated that Davis’s claim of intellectual disability was legitimate, making him ineligible for the death penalty. Also, in California, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of death row prisoner Edward Wycoff.

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