“Black-led organizations are working to stop the spread of legislation reinstating the death penalty” in “a response to a resurgence of legislation in states controlled by Republicans that seek to step up the use” of capital punishment, The Hill reported. The paper cites states including Tennessee, Florida, which would make it easier to sentence defendants to death, and New Jersey and Illinois, that are considering reinstating the death penalty, as evidence of a trend by Republicans that people of color need to resist. The Hill noted that Black people comprise approximately 13% of the U.S. population but account for 38% of jail and prison populations.
“In an unsettling paradox, the laws bestow valuable rights on persons it designates as crime victims before any legal process determines whether a crime has in fact been committed against them and if so by whom,” Walter Olson writes in the Cato Institute blog, “Cato at Liberty,” about “Marsy’s Law,” a bill purporting to protect the rights of crime victims. The law, first passed in California in 2008, and named in honor of UC Santa Barbara student Marsalee Ann Nicholas, who was killed in 1983, is in effect in a dozen states. While it has been challenged “with at best spotty success,” Olson argues that, “advocates and policymakers should be on notice that Marsy’s Law generates outcomes that are hard to defend in principle.”
“The historical use of capital punishment in Tennessee shows a clear connection between the extrajudicial lynchings of the 1800s and 1900s and the state-sanctioned death penalty practices of today,” is how the Death Penalty Information Center introduces its new report, “Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty.” The state called a temporary halt to executions in 2020 when it was discovered that its lethal injection process was seriously flawed, and commissioned a 166-page report from a law firm to analyze its protocol and make recommendations. The 166-page report was damning, and while the state vowed to implement at least some of the recommendations the law firm made, there is skepticism that the problems with state killing can be fixed. And, as DPIC notes in its report, “Best practices for execution protocols may change, but the state cannot change the history of capital punishment and how the legacies of racial injustice influence its modern capital punishment scheme.”
