News & Updates

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

At least two moderate criminal justice reform bills stalled in the California legislature this month, a surprising development in a state perceived to be so progressive.  California Assembly Bill 280 would have limited the time corrections officials could restrict those imprisoned in the state’s jails, prisons, and immigration centers in solitary confinement. Senate Bill 94 would have allowed judges to review life-without-parole sentences for people convicted of the offense before

Almost immediately after being elected Los Angeles County District Attorney in 2020, George Gascón issued a “Death Penalty Policy” promising that his office would not seek the death penalty and, in addition, “will not seek an execution date for any person sentenced to death. . . . will not defend existing death sentences and will engage in a thorough review of every existing death penalty judgment from Los Angeles County