In brief: September 2021
September 7, 2021
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
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
Death Penalty Focus lost a dear friend and one of its most loyal supporters last week. Actor, activist, and all-around good guy, Ed Asner, died late last month at his home in Los Angeles. He was 91.
Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor has tentatively scheduled executions for seven men in five months, starting in October and continuing into February. If carried out, they will be the first executions in the state since 2015.
Two bills that would go a long way toward reforming California’s seriously flawed criminal justice systems are on hold until January.
When the California Supreme Court, late last month, upheld a state law that does not require a unanimous jury vote when sentencing a defendant to death, it not only disappointed many criminal justice advocates it surprised them as well.
“We are disappointed the Court didn’t take this step to address one of the many serious flaws in California’s capital punishment system,” Death Penalty Focus Board Chair Sarah Sanger stated. “The Court could have taken a big step toward confronting a deeply biased death penalty system.”
Read DPF’s statement here regarding the disappointing decision announced by the CA Supreme Court today.
“After the execution of 13 federal prisoners by the Trump administration last year, we knew we had to redouble our efforts to abolish the death
In “The Trump Executions,” in a University of Texas Law, Public Law Research Paper, Lee Kovarsky analyzes the Trump Administration’s killing spree from July 2020 to January
In California, a 22-year-old man who pleaded guilty to a fatal shooting at a San Diego synagogue in April 2019 will be sentenced to life
“New death sentences and executions remained near historic lows in 2018 and a twentieth state [Washington] abolished capital punishment, as public opinion polls, election results, legislative actions, and court decisions all reflected the continuing erosion of the death penalty across the country,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s annual report released today. In 2018, 14 states and the federal government imposed death sentences, with 57 percent of the projected 42 sentences
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice obtains its lethal injection drugs “from a pharmacy that regulators have repeatedly cited for dangerous practices,” according to a report by BuzzFeed News. Like other death penalty states, Texas passed a law that keeps the source of its lethal injection drugs secret, but reporter Chris McDaniel obtained documents which he says reveal that Greenpark Compounding Pharmacy in Houston was one source. “Its license has
“Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate,” then-Governor George Ryan said after announcing a moratorium in 2000. Ryan cited a series of articles in the Chicago Tribune that revealed a broken system, riddled by racism, wrongful convictions,
In her article, “This Is What Wrongful Conviction Does to a Family,” in Politico, Lara Bazelon looks at the arrest of two men for the 1982 rape and murder of Debbie Sue Carter in Oklahoma. But after Ron Williamson was sentenced to death, and Dennis Fritz to life without parole in 1988, DNA evidence exonerated both, and implicated another man, who was eventually sentenced to life without parole. The case rocked
In Texas, three men were executed in the space of four weeks: 43-year-old Alvin Braziel was executed on Tuesday for the 1993 murder of Douglas White during a robbery. The Houston Chronicle reports that defense attorneys attempted to obtain a stay based on a last-minute admission of prosecutorial misconduct, but both the trial court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the appeal, with two justices on the high
Thanks so much to all of you who have signed our petition to California Gov. Jerry Brown asking him to remove as many people as possible from Death Row before he leaves office in January. But if you haven’t yet signed it, here’s a video from DPF President Mike Farrell explaining why he thinks it’s important. The state Constitution allows the governor to exercise mercy by granting clemency and commuting
Representatives from Catholic and other organizations opposed to the death penalty delivered six thousand signatures to California Gov. Jerry Brown yesterday asking him to commute the sentences of the hundreds of men and women on death row before he leaves office. The effort, coordinated by the California Catholic Conference, involved delivering six thousand letters signed by individuals from around the state. A staff person in the governor’s office accepted the
There was much to celebrate after this week’s election, especially the strides made in criminal justice reform. In Louisiana, Amendment 2 passed easily, which means that a unanimous jury is now required for a conviction in a felony trial. Previously, a jury only needed 10 of 12 votes, even to sentence a defendant to life in prison. Amendment 4 passed in Florida, which means nearly 1.5 million former felons who
He spent 14 years, 10 of them on death row, and on Monday, Florida prosecutors announced they would not proceed with a retrial for Clemente Javier Aguirre for the murder of two people in 2004. An immigrant from Honduras with no criminal history, Aguirre was convicted of killing his former neighbors, Cheryl Williams and her mother, Carole Bareis, and was sentenced to death in 2006. His conviction was unanimously overturned