Drew Havens
May 9, 2024
Drew Havens is a Deputy Federal Public Defender in the Central District of California based in Los Angeles, where he represents indigent clients facing federal
Drew Havens is a Deputy Federal Public Defender in the Central District of California based in Los Angeles, where he represents indigent clients facing federal
Alex Ketley is an independent choreographer, filmmaker, and the director of The Foundry. Formerly a classical dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, he left the company The Foundry as a platform to explore his interests in alternative methods of devising performance.
Sherry Frumkin has been combining her passion for art and social justice for nearly three decades.
Most children dream of a profession. Few, unlike Charles Windon, however, actually realize that dream. On a routine day like any other, while in the
Over a ten year career at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Emily Caesar has managed large scale program and policy development, implementation, and evaluation projects centered on a variety of issues including obesity prevention, cannabis regulation, oil and gas policy, and substance use treatment and prevention. Since 2014, Emily has volunteered as a core leader with Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, Southern California, working alongside other leaders and coalition partners to transform the criminal legal system at the state and local levels. Emily holds a BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley and a dual Master’s in Social Work and Public Health from Washington University in St. Louis.
Toni Trucks comes from a strong and varied acting background with roots in the theatre. Toni spent her early career in New York before making
Ed Redlich is currently a television writer/producer working for Paramount Television. He was an Executive Producer on “Without a Trace,” “Felicity” and as a Producer on “The Practice.”
Born and raised in Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, Lawanda moved to California and became an Investigator with the Santa Barbara County Public Defender’s Office. She was the first African American woman in California to earn the title of Chief Investigator, and she served in this role from 1995 until she retired in 2016. She is a founding member of the Defense Investigator Training Accreditation Academy, currently serves on the Executive Board of the Democratic Club of Santa Maria Valley, and is the President the Santa Maria/Lompoc National Association of Colored People, among many other affiliations.
Linda Fox has been an advocate of death penalty abolition for more than three decades. Now retired, she is a former Research Librarian at the California Appellate Project, where she aided in post-conviction appeals for people on death row. In addition to her work with DPF, Linda also organizes around a number of cases of people in prison for crimes they did not commit.
The State of South Carolina killed Brad Sigmon earlier this month. The 67-year-old Sigmon was seated in a chair with a hood over his head and a target pinned over his heart as a firing squad of three people aimed at him and fired their rifles. His death “was horrifying and violent,” Gerald “Bo” King, one of Sigmon’s attorneys, told CNN after witnessing the execution. Sigmon’s firing squad execution is
If things go as planned, South Carolina will kill Brad Sigmon on Friday by firing squad. It will be the state’s first execution by shooting in its history. The 67-year-old Sigmon chose a firing squad over the state’s two alternative options: electrocution (the default method) or lethal injection. Sigmon’s lawyer told NBC News that just the fact that Sigmon had to choose how to be killed “is horrifying.” Sigmon was
Like many of you, we’re shocked at President Trump’s executive order, “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” and believe it is a publicity stunt based on his usual rhetoric of fear and hatred. His intention is to reverse the progress that has been made in slowing down and, in some places, ending the killing of those imprisoned by the state. But knowledge is power. We know that the
President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row today, declining to commute the sentences of Robert D. Bowers, convicted of killing 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018; Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, with his brother, killed three people and
California Gov. Gavin Newsom “has demonstrated a callous disregard for the dark history” of the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons and jails, Jack Morris writes in his powerful CalMatters essay Morris points to Newsom’s two-time veto of of the California Mandela Act in 2022 and 2023, which would have limited the practice, and again this year when he killed AB280, which would have limited solitary confinement to
Curtis Lee Ervin was sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder-for-hire of Carlene McDonald in 1986. Late last month, Federal Judge Vince Chhabria, at the request of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who “conceded that a Batson violation occurred” in Ervin’s case, ruled that Ervin should either be released or retried within 60 days. Ervin, now 71, has been on death row for 33 years. His case is one
A woman incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla died earlier this month during a heat wave that sent Chowchilla’s temperatures over 111 degrees during the Fourth of July weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Elizabeth Nomura, an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, told the Chronicle that her organization had received “distressing” messages from several women at the prison, who reported temperatures over 95 degrees
“Amnesty International’s monitoring shows that in 2023 the lowest number of countries on record carried out the highest number of known executions in close to a decade,” AI states in its annual report, “The Use of the Death Penalty in 2023.” “These figures confirm trends of recent years that pointed to the ever-increasing isolation of retentionist countries.” Global use of the death penalty in 2023 increased 31% from 2022. The
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee on Tuesday signed into law a bill that will allow a person to be sentenced to death for the rape of a child, the Center Square reports. Tennessee now joins Florida, which passed a similar bill in 2023, defying the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008). That decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy for the 5-4 majority, found that “a death sentence for
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