In brief: June 2022
June 27, 2022
In Texas, a state district judge rejected a request by Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez to cancel a death warrant for a man scheduled
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In Texas, a state district judge rejected a request by Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez to cancel a death warrant for a man scheduled
In her piece, “How the Supreme Court Stopped Fighting the “Machinery of Death,” in Balls and Strikes, Yvette Borja looks at how far the U.S.
On Tuesday, June 14, 2022, at 12 p.m. (Pacific) / 3 p.m. (Eastern), Death Penalty Focus hosted a one-hour webinar on the role district attorneys
Arizona killed Frank Atwood by lethal injection on Wednesday morning, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal. The 66-year-old Atwood was sentenced
In a decision that dissenting Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor called “perverse” and “illogical,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 late last month that death
Texas state Rep. Jeff Leach, who led a bipartisan effort in the legislature to commute Melissa Lucio’s death sentence last month, told the host of
Frank Atwood, imprisoned on death row since 1987 for the killing of an eight-year-old girl, is scheduled to be executed on June 8 in Arizona’s
A little over a week after Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced he was staying five state killings planned for this year, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine
Closing the Slaughterhouse: The Inside Story of Death Penalty Abolition in Virginia is a comprehensive account of the remarkable effort that resulted in the abolition of
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.
“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
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
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
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
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,
“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
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
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.
