In our June Focus newsletter, we covered how Oklahoma’s attorney general has asked for execution dates for 25 men who have exhausted their appeals, but
(Updated July 4, 2022) On Friday, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals scheduled execution dates for 25 men on death row, including individuals with claims
Fifty years ago this week, the United States took a historic step toward a more fair, humane, less racist criminal justice system. On June 29,
The Oklahoma City law firm that conducted a pro bono independent investigation into the case of Richard Glossip, the second in line of the 25
Three California district attorneys are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that denied their right to intervene
The death penalty is off the table for Cleamon Johnson, an alleged Los Angeles gang leader accused of killing five people during the 1990s. Now,
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
In Virginia, the Washington Post reports that progressive challengers defeated longtime incumbent prosecutors in Fairfax and Arlington counties on Tuesday. “The shift marks a stunning change: Neither challenger has prosecuted a case in state court, but they bested incumbents with more than 60 years of experience between them in the court system,” the Post reports. In North Carolina, the Winston-Salem Journal reports that two experts, Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal
In his New York Times column, “When We Kill: Everything You Think You Know About the Death Penalty is Wrong,” Nicholas Kristof cites cases (including Kevin Cooper’s and Todd Willingham’s), and statistics to show just how wrong — morally, spiritually, and practically — the death penalty is. It is a powerful and emotional indictment of a punishment so barbaric it is incomprehensible that it wasn’t abolished in this country long ago.
Dear Supporters, A couple of years ago, campaigning with the New Hampshire Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, I met Republican State Sen. Kevin Avard, a good man who listened and gave the issue a lot of thought. He then voted with us on a bill to abolish state killing in his state that lost by one vote. To add insult to injury, Sen. Avard lost his seat in the
Charles Ray Finch left North Carolina’s Greene Correctional Institution in a wheelchair last Thursday, 42 years after first being sentenced to death for a crime he was wrongfully convicted of committing. Finch was released after a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found in January that the “totality of the evidence, both old and new, would likely fail to convince any reasonable juror of his guilt beyond
Florida plans to kill Bobby Joe Long tomorrow for the murder of Michelle Sims in 1984, although he pleaded guilty to killing eight women and sexually assaulting dozens of others during eight months of that year. But Long had an abusive childhood and a traumatic brain injury and, as the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a letter to Gov. Ron DeSantis: “Since his sentencing [1985], modern medicine has
(Tennessee is planning to execute Don Johnson tonight for the murder of his wife, Connie, in 1984. Johnson is a very different man from the one who walked onto death row all those years ago. He became a Seventh Day Adventist, and was ordained by that church as a deacon because of the ministry work he has been doing with other condemned prisoners, which includes Bible study classes. Church officials
Douglas Stankewitz, the longest serving prisoner on California’s death row, was re-sentenced to life without parole last Friday. Stankewitz, who is 60, was sentenced to death in 1978 when he was 19. In 2012, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Stankewitz’s death sentence, agreeing with a district court that he had had ineffective assistance of counsel during the penalty phase, the Fresno County DA’s office indicated it would
It was the first death sentence a Georgia jury has delivered in five years, and it was handed down last week to a woman who insisted on representing herself during the trial, presented no evidence, never addressed the jury, and didn’t ask witnesses any questions. “What is clear from her actions and her emotionless response at the end of the trial is that, whether it is a mental health issue
Seventeen years after the U.S. Supreme Court found in Atkins v. Virginia that executing intellectually disabled prisoners constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment, the Texas House last week approved by voice vote a bipartisan measure that would put in place a system to determine whether a defendant has intellectual disabilities and is therefore ineligible for execution. The bill is in response to the U.S. Supreme