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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
A Kentucky Circuit Judge ruled last week that it is unconstitutional to sentence to death a defendant who is under the age of 21. He
“It is clear that there are overwhelming ethical, financial, and religious reasons to abolish the death penalty,” former president Jimmy Carter wrote in a 2012 op-ed titled “Show Death Penalty the Door”
“I have an obligation. I have a charge to keep. I don’t get tired. I won’t sell out. I won’t be bought out.”
A story that has stuck with me over the decades comes from a school civics text. A criminal came into the town of Milwaukee and killed a man. He was arrested in the morning, tried in the afternoon, and that evening was already serving his life sentence in the State Penitentiary. Sadder but wiser, he expressed admiration for Milwaukee as a place which stood up for justice. This brand of
The second trend which has been percolating beneath the surface for more than two decades is a recognition of the full cost of the death penalty, fiscal and human, and the devastating opportunity costs our futile machinery of legal death inflicts on other law enforcement measures which can effectively reduce crime and punish its perpetrators more swiftly and consistently. As early as March 1988, only a year and half after