Saying there were “fundamental flaws” in his sentencing, Ohio Gov. John Kasich commuted Raymond Tibbetts’ death sentence to life without parole late last month. The
In St. Louis, six civil rights organizations filed an amicii brief with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals last week on behalf of Charles Rhines
In his book, Making Habeas Work: A Legal History, Eric Freedman analyzes how essential the writ of habeas corpus is to a free society, going back
On Sunday, September 23, in Los Angeles, Death Penalty Focus will honor the Reverend James Lawson, a civil rights icon whom Dr. Martin Luther King,
From the team behind the award-winning One For Ten comes a feature documentary to lift the lid on the human cost of the death penalty
Pope Francis today, in what could be a decisive turning point for the future of the death penalty in not just the United States, but
Britain Home Secretary Sajid Javid is being accused of taking “the power of life and death into his own hands” over his plan, made in
A state commission appointed to study Pennsylvania’s death penalty system released its report late last month, almost five years after its original deadline. The 280-page
Two-and-a-half years ago, Kevin Cooper’s lawyer, Norman Hile, submitted to Governor Jerry Brown a 235-page clemency petition, pleading for advanced DNA testing of evidence from
Tennessee, which hasn’t put anyone to death since 2009, is now hoping to execute eight people before June 1. That means eight executions in four months. The reason? State Attorney General Herbert Slatery says the state needs to act soon because lethal injection drugs may not be available after that date. The Nashville Scene reports that the plan was announced even though corrections officials were warned in January, in emails
Thirty-five years ago, the American Bar Association was one of the first organizations to call for abolition of the death penalty for those under the age of 18. This week, stating that “it is now time to revise its dated position,” the ABA is calling on death penalty states to rule out sentencing or executing any individuals who were 21 years or younger when they committed the crime. The ABA’s
Four U.S. Senators introduced a bill this week that would allow federal prosecutors in death penalty cases to impanel a second jury for sentencing if the first jury fails to reach a unanimous vote for death. The senators, all Republicans, named the bill, “Eric’s Law,” for Eric Williams, a federal correctional officer in a Pennsylvania penitentiary, who was killed by a prisoner. The prisoner, who was already serving a life
Texas executed John Battaglia last week, the third person executed this year, and the second of the week. The 62-year-old was sentenced to die in 2002 for the murders of his two daughters, whom he shot in 2001 while their mother listened on the phone. The Texas Tribune reported that Battaglia’s lawyers filed a last-minute appeal on the grounds that the lethal injection drugs officials planned to use had expired,
Two years ago, we reported on the use of “ethnic adjustment” by prosecutors in death penalty cases, which artificially raises minority defendants’ IQ scores. In an interview with DFP at the time, death penalty attorney (and DPF board member) Robert M. Sanger described the practice as “a symptom of a dysfunctional death penalty system where prosecutors seek to ‘win’ by executing the mentally disabled and people of color at all
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation released its revised lethal drug protocol late last month, and it doesn’t address the problems that plagued its previous versions. “It’s unfortunate the CDCR released a new lethal drug protocol that still contains so many flaws, and completely ignores the fact that these drugs are either banned or unavailable,” says Death Penalty Focus Community Outreach & Education Director David Crawford. The revised single-drug
In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich granted a reprieve to Raymond Tibbetts, who was scheduled to be executed next Tuesday for the 1997 murder of his wife, Judith Sue Crawford, and their landlord, Fred Hicks, in Cincinnati. Kasich’s action came in the wake of a letter sent by a juror in TIbbetts’ trial asking Gov. Kasich to commute his sentence to life without parole. Ross Allen Geiger says that during the
In the March issue of Reason, reporter C.J. Ciaramella writes of how state officials have decided the “black hood of anonymity also covers the pharmacies that mix the deadly compounds used to kill prisoners.” Thanks to the “dogged work of investigative journalists,” Ciaramella says we know that the states “have turned to untraceable cash transactions, unregulated pharmacies, and overseas scammers to buy drugs to fill the veins of condemned inmates.
Nicola White is a London-based artist whose work is fashioned from the fragments of wood, glass, pottery, and other artifacts she finds on the banks of rivers in London. It’s called “mudlarking,” a term dating from the late 19th century to describe the poor who would scavenge the banks of the Thames for anything they could find that could be sold. White takes these objects she pulls from the mud
