American Bishops Join the Culture Wars
July 7, 2021
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
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
by Stephen Rohde When the story is told about how the death penalty was abolished in California, the work of a little-known legislative committee will
Stating that the Justice Department “must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact:Mary Kate DeLucco415-243-0143mary@deathpenalty.org US Attorney General Merrick Garland Calls for a Moratorium on Federal Death Penalty Sacramento (July 2, 2021) — Stating
In Arizona, corrections officials are preparing to execute death row prisoners with the same gas the Nazis used in mass killings at its concentration camps,
“I am confident there will come a day when we will have abolished the death penalty, and we will wonder how we could possibly have
For Joe Giarratano, Virginia’s abolition of the death penalty was a personal victory. He was on Virginia’s death row for 38 years before being released
Last week, the California Racial Justice Act for All (AB 256), which addresses institutionalized and implicit racial bias in criminal cases, passed the state Assembly and
The California Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments from both sides on an appeal by a Los Angeles man who says his death sentence violated
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
California has the largest female death row in the U.S., with 23 condemned women imprisoned at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. Four women have been executed in the state since 1893, with the last, Elizabeth Duncan, killed in 1962.* Texas is second with six women on its death row. There are 54 condemned women in the U.S. as of October 2017, about two percent of the total death
In the words of Bob Dylan, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, replacing Anthony Kennedy, is not a setback for those who hoped the Court would in the near future finally rule that the death penalty is a barbaric punishment that has no place in a civilized society, it’s a death knell. Describing Kavanaugh as a “doctrinaire law-and-order
“The eighth amendment isn’t just a window. It’s a mirror. And what the Court has said is that our norms, our values are implicated when we do things to really fragile, really vulnerable people. And what we’ve argued is that dementia in this case renders Mr. Madison frail, bewildered, vulnerable in a way that cannot be reconciled with executing him,” Equal Justice Initiative attorney Bryan Stevenson told the U.S. Supreme
(This is a developing story. We will continue to update it as events unfold.) Yesterday, just a few hours before Edmund Zagorski was scheduled to be executed, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam granted him a 10-day reprieve. It was just one of many significant developments in a week full of legal rulings and decisions. In fact, Haslam’s reprieve was in response to a federal district judge’s earlier order barring the state from executing
Although court documents state that a member of the Oklahoma jury that sentenced Julius Jones to death for the July 1999 fatal shooting of 45-year-old Paul Howell said in front of another juror that “They should just take that [n-word] out and shoot him behind the jail,” and a witness reportedly informed the judge of the comment, but the judge did not take any action, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed
In his column, “Justice Delayed, With a Life on the Line,” in last Sunday’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof again writes about the case of Kevin Cooper, who has been on California’s death row for 33 years for a quadruple murder he didn’t commit. Clearly frustrated, Kristof again asserts that Gov. Jerry Brown is at fault for not giving the go-ahead for advanced DNA testing on the evidence in Cooper’s case,
In North Carolina, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation released a report, “Unequal Justice: How Obsolete Laws and Unfair Trials Created North Carolina’s Outsized Death Row,” that found that approximately three quarters of the men and women on the state’s death row were convicted under obsolete laws before numerous reforms were enacted to ensure fairness and prevent wrongful convictions. North Carolina has the sixth largest death row in the nation, with