10 of 12 LA DA candidates split evenly on whether to pursue the death penalty if elected
Five of the 12 people running for Los Angeles District Attorney polled by the Los Angeles Daily News said they would not seek the death
Five of the 12 people running for Los Angeles District Attorney polled by the Los Angeles Daily News said they would not seek the death
Giovanni Hernandez was 14 when he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Miguel Solorio was 19 when
In a phone interview from the 48-square-foot cell on San Quentin’s death row, where he has lived since he was sentenced to death in 1985,
In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom sent last month, American Bar Association President Mary Smith expressed her organization’s “ongoing concerns regarding the case
The American Bar Association (ABA) has sent a compelling letter to Governor Gavin Newsom concerning the case of death-row inmate Kevin Cooper. In this letter,
U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker rejected Kenneth Smith’s request for an injunction to stop Alabama from executing him with nitrogen gas late last month,
Florida prosecutor seeks death penalty in sex abuse case in a test of a new state law A Florida prosecutor announced late last month that
“Texas remained an unfortunate outlier as just one of five states to carry out executions in 2023, leading the nation with eight people put to
Our conversation on “Making a Murderer: False Confessions, Wrongful Convictions” was such an enlightening discussion between DPF President Mike Farrell and Dr. Richard Leo, Professor
The Louisiana Board of Pardons rejected clemency hearings for the first five people sentenced to death who submitted applications earlier this month. The five men and the only woman on the state’s death row were the first hearings to come before the board since Gov. John Bel Edwards, whose term is up at the end of this year, publicly expressed his opposition to the death penalty in May, nola.com reported.
“Does CDCR have solitary confinement?” is the first question on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s “restricted housing” webpage. The answer? “No.” That answer would surprise the thousands currently held in solitary confinement (CDCR uses the euphemism “restricted housing’) in California’s prisons and jails. (The United Nations Nelson Mandela Rules define solitary confinement, which it stipulates is torture, as locking a person in a cell with no meaningful human
In a 2-1 ruling, a state appeals court upheld California’s Racial Justice Act earlier this month. The law, which took effect in 2021, prohibits the state from seeking or obtaining a criminal conviction or from imposing a sentence based on race, ethnicity, or national origin. But it was prospective only, excluding judgments rendered before January 1, 2021. The Racial Justice Act for All, which was signed into law by Gov.
As of 2020, 12 states automatically housed death-sentenced people in indefinite solitary confinement, in violation of the UN’s Nelson Mandela Rules. The rules “restrict the use of solitary confinement as a measure of last resort, to be used only in exceptional circumstances.” Watch our thought-provoking and lively discussion on yet another example of how cruel, barbaric, and unjust capital punishment is. Our panelists, including DPF President Mike Farrell, former United
Scott Panetti, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia 35 years ago, was convicted of killing his wife’s parents in 1992 and sentenced to death in 1995 in Texas. But late last month, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled that Panetti cannot be executed by the state because of his severe mental illness. “The Eighth Amendment demands more than a single thread of arguably rational thought in a sea of otherwise disorganized thoughts
The Intercept reports that four companies that manufacture medical equipment, including Baxter International Inc., B. Braun Medical Inc., Fresenius Kabi, and Johnson & Johnson, are refusing to sell their products for use in executions. The companies produce “IV catheters, syringes, medical tubing, and IV bags, products states rely on to administer lethal injection,” according to the Intercept. With death penalty states already scrambling to find lethal injection drugs, an inability
“Under the Eighth Amendment, execution by nitrogen is surely unusual because it has never been used as a method of execution in this country or elsewhere, as far as we know. It is also likely to cause needless agony and suffering in the execution chamber,” Bernard Harcourt writes in his New York Times op-ed, “Alabama Has a Horrible New Way of Killing People on Death Row.” Harcourt knows what cruel
Alabama South Carolina In Tennessee, the only woman on the state’s death row is asking to have her death sentence vacated. Christa Pike was 18 when she was sentenced in 1996, the youngest woman to be sent to death row in the United States since 1972. Her lawyers argue that last year’s ruling by the Tennessee Supreme Court in State v. Booker that mandatory life sentences for juveniles in homicide
Two men, one in Oregon and the other in Oklahoma, both initially sentenced to death, who spent a combined 73 years in prison, have been released in the past couple of months based on evidence of their innocence. Jesse Johnson Jesse Johnson, who spent 17 years on Oregon’s death row and 25 years in custody for a crime he didn’t commit, was freed earlier this month. He is the 194th