World Day Against the Death Penalty 2018
October 12, 2018
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
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
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
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
“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
(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,
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
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
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
Yesterday, the Washington supreme court acknowledged that the state’s death penalty scheme is imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner and struck it down. The
There are a number of free events in Southern California celebrating the movement to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.
The California Supreme Court’s decision last month to uphold Proposition 66, possibly green-lighting the resumption of executions in the state, was not surprising, but it was, as the LA Times said in an editorial, “Terribly depressing.” California hasn’t executed anyone in more than 10 years, and to resume now is to revert to a method of punishment that is so barbaric, it is, as so frequently noted, no longer practiced
In two weeks, Scott Dekraai, who confessed to killing eight people and wounding another in October 2011, in the worst mass killing in Orange County history, will be sentenced to eight consecutive life terms. And, with that sentence, Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals will end a six-year legal nightmare for many of the victims’ family members, who have pleaded with prosecutors to accept the defense offer of a
Mark James Asay was executed in Florida late last month, the first execution in the state since January 2016, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Hurst v. Florida put its death penalty scheme in turmoil. Asay was sentenced to death for killing Robert Booker, a black man, and Robert McDowell, who was Latino, in 1987. It was the first time Florida has executed a white man for killing a
Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens issued a stay of execution late last month for Marcellus Williams based on new DNA evidence. The stay was issued hours before Williams was scheduled to die by lethal injection. At the same time, the governor announced the creation of a new five-person Board of Inquiry, which will review Williams’s case, and make a recommendation as to whether he should be granted clemency. Williams was scheduled
In Ohio, 45-year-old Gary Otte is scheduled to be executed next Wednesday for two murders in 1992. Otte’s lawyers are challenging both the state’s lethal injection method and the constitutionality of its death penalty scheme in two separate appeals. They argue that Ohio’s use of midazolam is unconstitutional because corrections officials can’t prove that the drug is preventing the inmate from suffering serious pain, and that because Otte was under
John T. Thorngren is 76 years old, and has had three heart attacks and two open heart surgeries. But he had one last item on his “bucket list”: to finish a book he started seven years ago about convicted murderer, Pamela Perillo, who spent 20 years on death row in Texas before her sentence was commuted to life in prison. He succeeded; “Salvation on Death Row” will be released in
In a guest editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Stephen Cooper calls on Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, who late last month stayed the execution of Marcellus Williams, not only to commute Williams’s sentence to life without parole, but that of every condemned inmate in Missouri, and declare a moratorium on the death penalty. “The history of the death penalty in America is hewn from the hell of slavery, subjugation and
The California Supreme Court today upheld Proposition 66, which will radically change the state’s current death penalty law, and will most likely open the door for executions to resume after a 10-year hiatus. Today’s decision was the result of a lawsuit brought by former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp and Ron Briggs, and filed on their behalf by the law firm Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe immediately after Prop