“Everyone has a breaking point. Anyone can be convinced to confess, to lie. And it’s not only that they can but they do it at
It’s called the Golden Rule argument because it’s used by prosecutors to put jurors in the shoes of the victim. And according to Pepperdine Caruso
“I now believe that the death penalty should absolutely not be a punishment delivered by the state of Florida or for that matter, any place in the
Donna Doolin Larsen is tired. She hasn’t rested since 1995, when she, her mother-in-law, and her then 22-year-old son Keith walked out of her doctor’s
In his new book, A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays, Marc Bookman, the co-founder and executive director of the Atlantic Center for Capital
In Virginia, there is no death row anymore. The Virginia Mercury reports that last weekend, prison officials announced the last two prisoners facing death sentences were
“The first half of 2021 spotlighted two continuing death-penalty trends in the United States. On one hand, the continuing erosion of capital punishment in law
It’s taken 28 years, but William Richards is officially an innocent man. Three weeks ago, a San Bernardino Superior Court judge declared Richards “factually innocent”
By Mike Farrell Sloughing off a warning from the Vatican, the American Conference of Catholic Bishops seem to have enlisted in the Culture Wars with
The acclaimed documentary is now on Amazon’s video streaming platform.
In 1986, my 70-year-old mother was asleep in her own bed when a teenaged neighbor broke into her home, raped her, and then beat her to near death and left her face down in a partially filled bathtub. It was a spectacularly brutal, banner headline crime, called by the District Attorney one of the most heinous in the history of the county. Even in light of what happened, I am
The Department of Justice announced today that it has scheduled five executions in December and January; the first federal executions since 2003. “The federal death penalty is a disgrace,” says Death Penalty Focus President Mike Farrell. “Riddled with the same problems we find in the state systems, it is racially biased, arbitrary, and applied not to the ‘worst of the worst,’ but to those who suffered traumatic childhoods, are mentally
Death penalty lawyer and DPF board member Robert M. Sanger believes that the moratorium Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in March created “a paradigm shift in the reality of California’s death penalty.” And the result is that “a California jury in a capital case cannot be expected to provide a fair and reasoned penalty-phase determination free from speculation.” The California Supreme Court thinks his argument might be worth considering. Sanger is
“In Los Angeles County, which is known as a bastion of progressivism, we have a system that is churning out more death sentences than any other county in the country. And by seeking death in a discriminatory way, they are perpetuating a racist system,” says the Justice Collaborative’s Senior Legal Counsel Summer Lacey. “Bryan Stevenson says the death penalty is modern day lynching, and you picture him talking about Alabama,
Three weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 2010 conviction of Curtis Flowers, who has been tried six times for a 1996 quadruple murder in Mississippi. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the seven-justice majority, noted “the extraordinary facts of this case.” Over the course of those six trials, he wrote, “The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to
Two milestones were reached in June, starkly illustrating how broken the death penalty in the United States is. In North Carolina, prosecutors formally dismissed all charges against Charles Ray Finch on June 14, making him the 166th person to be exonerated in the U.S. since 1973. Six days later, Georgia executed Marion Wilson, the 1500th person to be executed in the U.S. since 1976. Or, to put it another way:
New Mexico closed its death row late last month. The last two condemned prisoners, Timothy Allen and Robert Fry, had their sentences vacated by the NM Supreme Court on June 28, and will be resentenced to life in prison. New Mexico actually abolished its death penalty in 2009 — 10 years ago — but because Fry and Allen’s convictions and sentencing occurred prior to 2009, they remained on death row.
In his chapter, “Capital Punishment,” in the American Bar Association’s The State of Criminal Justice 2019, Ronald J. Tabak reviews significant developments through the past year up to and including the May 30 abolition of the death penalty in New Hampshire. He notes that since the death penalty resumed in 1972 after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia, “There was not in 2018 a single county in
