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,
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
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
(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
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
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
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
Five years after a statewide task force appointed to study Ohio’s death penalty released a report with 56 recommendations to improve the state’s deeply flawed
In Virginia, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld a district court ruling that death row prisoners’ long-term detention in solitary confinement creates a
In his op-ed in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, “It’s Wrong for an Imperfect System to Impose an Irreversible Punishment,” former district attorney Tim Cole notes that two Texas counties, Tarrant and Dallas, are responsible for returning a combined 181 death sentences in the modern death penalty era — “more than any major metropolitan area in Texas except for Houston” — and says “district attorneys owe it to their constituents to
Tennessee’s nine-year break in executions ended in August when the state killed Billy Ray Irick by lethal injection. Last week, Edmund Zagorski was executed by electric chair, and David Earl Miller is scheduled to die next month. Tennessee’s machinery of death is back in operation, and it’s had a profound effect on the prisoners. “We’re on new ground and we’re trying to process it,” the Rev. Joseph Ingle says. “There’s
Edmund Zagorski was executed in Tennessee last night by electric chair, the first time in 11 years the state has used that method. The 63-year-old Zagorski had been on death row for 34 years for the April 1983 murder of two men, John Dotson and Jimmy Porter, during a drug deal. At the time of his sentencing, Tennessee didn’t have the option of a sentence of life without parole, and
When the state has gotten the go-ahead to execute a man by electrocuting him, it’s difficult to understand why they would fight a request by the prisoner’s attorney to have access to a phone during the execution. But that’s exactly what attorneys for the state are doing right now – arguing against a federal judge’s order to provide Edmund Zagorski’s attorney with access to a phone so she can communicate
It’s foolish to hope for any sort of measured or nuanced response from Donald Trump, but his thoughtless, knee-jerk, all-too-predictable immediate demand that the man accused of killing 11 people in a synagogue during Shabbat services last weekend be charged with the death penalty did nothing but inflame emotions and further poison our sick and violent society. As DPF President Mike Farrell said, “A president who refuses to recognize his own
The Tennessean has a story today on how the state will test the electric chair it will use to kill Edmund Zagorski next Thursday. The details are gruesome, and should compel every one of us to question what kind of society we live in that we would allow human beings to be executed by the state. Electrocution is a particularly barbaric way to kill someone, but make no mistake, there
The majority of Americans no longer believe the death penalty is applied fairly. For the first time since Gallup polled on this issue in 2000, 49 percent believe it is applied fairly. 45 percent say it’s applied unfairly. Gallup says the new low “reflects a gradual decline” over the past ten years, while the number who believe it is applied unfairly has been edging higher, “with this year’s four-point gap
There is nothing new about comics depicting tragedy. Comics and graphic novels have been covering serious topics for years. Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel, Maus, the story of how Spiegelman’s father survived the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home, about growing up with a closeted father who was the town funeral home director, are two examples of powerful stories told in comics form. So it’s no
Update: On October 10, 2018, the Malaysian government announced that the country will abolish the death penalty for all crimes. Around 1,200 people are on death row in Malaysia, and many of them were sentenced for drug offenses, a sentence highlighted in the 13th Annual World Day Against the Death Penalty in 2015. The country had already placed a moratorium on executions, and the new announcement may have been prompted by
