“Despite a decades-long decline in public support for capital punishment, the political tug-of-war on capital punishment is heating back up,” Melanie Kalmanson writes in her article, “The Continued Political Tug-of-War on Capital Sentencing,” in the Duke University Press. Kalmanson writes that in the aftermath of President Biden’s grant of clemency to 37 of the 40 men on federal death row shortly before he left office in December 2024, President Trump’s response was to order states to “vigorously pursue and enforce the death penalty.” As a result, “more states are conducting executions and even experimenting with new (and old) execution methods.”
“Conviction Integrity Units within prosecutors’ offices have doubled in number over the last 10 years,” but “official misconduct continues to be a leading cause of wrongful convictions,” Sarah Gottlieb writes in her Colorado Law Review article, “The Indelible Flaws of Conviction Integrity Units.” Gottlieb’s analysis of multiple CIUs “reveals that legitimate claims of innocence are often rejected, and response to scandal is insufficient and slow when time is of the essence.” The result is they’re “not functioning as the reform many had hoped. They suffer from a lack of transparency and inconsistency in leadership that can frustrate even the best intentions.” What’s more, according to Gottlieb, the CIUs “operate under the guise of a legal reform while truly functioning as a cloak of legitimacy for prosecutors and the criminal legal system.”
In her op-ed, “I sentenced a man to die in Alabama. I was wrong,” in AL.com, Priscilla Townsend writes eloquently of being a juror in 1992 on the trial of Charles “Sonny” Burton, who was tried and convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. She explains how Burton wasn’t at the scene of the crime but was tried for murder because prosecutors believed he was the ringleader of a robbery at an Auto Zone during which a customer, Doug Battle, was shot and killed by one of the robbers, Derrick DeBruce. Both DeBruce and Burton were convicted of capital murder, but DeBruce’s conviction was overturned on appeal, and he was resentenced to life without parole. Earlier this month, the Alabama Supreme Court authorized Burton’s execution. “Clemency exists for cases like this. When the punishment simply does not fit the crime, when time has revealed flaws in how a sentence was reached, mercy serves justice better than death. I personally feel Mr. Burton has served his time and even deserves to be home with his family and loved ones. But, at the very least, he does not deserve to die for a shooting he did not commit,” Townsend writes.
“For over three decades, my art has focused on confronting the realities of the death penalty and its human cost,” Toby Lee Greenberg explains in the introduction to her most recent installation, “Biography: Unwritten,” at Philadelphia’s CFEVA at The Science Center. Greenberg “addresses wrongful convictions through 202 cemented, empty artist’s books—each representing a person exonerated from death row since the 1970s. On the final page of each book is a single sentence spotlighting something uniquely missed by that person during their incarceration, a personal milestone or moment lost.” The installation will be on view through March 20, or you can view “Biography Unwritten” online at https://www.tobyleegreenberg.com/