News & Updates

For Joe Giarratano, Virginia’s abolition of the death penalty was a personal victory. He was on Virginia’s death row for 38 years before being released in December 2017, and practically from the day he got out, he’d been working to get the death penalty abolished. It was a victory that reverberated beyond the commonwealth and across the country, not only because it is the first Southern state to do so

Last week, the California Racial Justice Act for All (AB 256), which addresses institutionalized and implicit racial bias in criminal cases, passed the state Assembly and has moved on to the Senate. The bill, sponsored by Assemblymember Ash Kalra, would make retroactive a similar law that was adopted in January, giving those with prior, racially biased convictions and sentences the right to seek relief. The RJA was a first-of-its-kind law in

The California Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments from both sides on an appeal by a Los Angeles man who says his death sentence violated state laws because the jury did not agree unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt on the aggravating circumstances that justified his sentence. Don’te LaMont McDaniel and a co-defendant were convicted of killing a rival gang member and an eyewitness to the attack in Los Angeles

It was unanimous. “Eliminating the death penalty is a critical step towards creating a fair and equitable justice system for all in California, as the ultimate punishment is plagued by legal, racial, bureaucratic, financial, geographic, and moral problems that have proven intractable,” the California Committee on Revision of the Penal Code said in a report released last month. The recommendation reverberated through the political, criminal and social justice, and legal communities,

Declaring that, “In cases where the government seeks to impose the ultimate punishment of death, I need to be satisfied that all relevant evidence is carefully and fairly examined,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom late last month ordered an independent investigation of death row prisoner Kevin Cooper’s case as part of Cooper’s application for clemency. For Cooper, who has insisted on his innocence since his arrest in 1983, and whose high-profile

Last year we passed the Racial Justice Act & vowed to come back to make the bill retroactive. We must pass #RJA4All to #ConfrontRacism not only in the future, but for Black & Brown people languishing in jails & prisons right now. Justice delayed is justice denied. #AB256

We have a real chance to end the policy that enabled the former president to rush the killing of the most prisoners in the shortest amount of time in over a century. The bill has already been introduced by Rep. Ayanna Pressley in collaboration with Senator Dick Durbin, who has indicated he will introduce a companion bill in the Senate.  Everyone who wants to abolish the death penalty is asked