As of 2020, 12 states automatically housed death-sentenced people in indefinite solitary confinement, in violation of the UN’s Nelson Mandela Rules. The rules “restrict the use of solitary confinement as a measure of last resort, to be used only in exceptional circumstances.”
We hope you will join us for what promises to be a thought-provoking and lively discussion on yet another example of how cruel, barbaric, and unjust capital punishment is. Our panelists, including DPF President Mike Farrell, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E. Méndez, and ACLU lawyer Rachel Meeropol, have worked on abolishing the inhumane practice of placing people in solitary confinement for many years.
Panelists
Rachel Meeropol
Rachel Meeropol is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Racial Justice Program of the ACLU. Prior to joining the ACLU, Rachel was the Associate Director of Legal Training and Education at the Center for Constitutional Rights (“CCR”). Rachel’s work focuses on Indigenous Justice, Prisoners’ Rights and other issues. For over a decade, Rachel has represented California prisoners organizing against solitary confinement in Ashker v. Governor. Rachel was also lead counsel on Turkmen v. Ashcroft, a class action lawsuit against high-level federal officials for the post-911 detention and abuse of Muslim non-citizens, which she argued in the Supreme Court in 2016. Rachel has co- edited and written three editions of the Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook, a do-it-yourself llitigation manual for prisoners distributed free by CCR and the National Lawyers Guild, and was the contributing editor of “America’s Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees, and the War on Terror,” published in 2005 by Seven Stories Press. Rachel completed her undergraduate degree at Wesleyan University, and graduated from NYU School of Law in 2002.
Juan Méndez
Because of his experience as a young human rights lawyer in Argentina in the 1970s, the issue is personal as well as professional for Méndez. He was arrested by the military dictatorship because he represented political prisoners. Imprisoned and subjected to torture for more than a year, he knows the urgency of a universal protocol prohibiting these practices.
Méndez is now Faculty Director of the Anti-Torture Initiative at American University Washington College of Law. He will be joining his longtime friend Farrell in a discussion of how the death penalty is, in and of iitself, torture and how many men and women who are on death row are there as a result of being tortured physically or psychologically into making a false confession, or are the victims of false testimony provided by witnesses who were threatened with torture, or tortured themselves.
Mike Farrell
President of the Board of Death Penalty Focus, Mike Farrell is also a spokesperson for Concern America, an international refugee aid and development organization, Co-Chair Emeritus of the California Committee of Human Rights Watch, and, occasionally, a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
A refugee aid and human rights activist for over 35 years, in the late ’90s, with Human Rights Watch, he took part in a mission to the U.S./Mexico border areas investigating claims of abuse against the undocumented by U.S. Border Patrol agents. In 1999, again with an HRW investigator, he toured and interviewed prisoners at McAlester State Prison in Oklahoma, with particular attention to its segregation and death row facility, the infamous H-Unit.
