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Activists Call on President Biden to End the Federal Death Penalty Before Leaving Office

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A conversation with Death Penalty Action Co-founder and Executive Director Abe Bonowitz. Now that Joe Biden is a lame duck president, activists are holding him accountable to make good on his promise to end the federal death penalty during his remaining six months as president. Biden’s election campaign in 2020 had pledged to end the federal death penalty and incentivize the remaining 27 states that still allow executions to do the same. While he made history as the first president in the United States to openly oppose the death penalty, there has been no movement to actually end federal executions during his nearly four years in office.

Governor McDonnell will not stop scheduled execution of Teresa Lewis

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Teresa Lewis
Gov. Bob McDonnell will not stop next week's scheduled execution of Teresa Lewis sentenced to death for the 2002 murder-for-hire slayings of her husband and stepson.

"Having carefully reviewed the petition for clemency, the judicial opinions in this case, and other relevant materials, I find no compelling reason to set aside the sentence . . . accordingly, I decline to intervene and have notified the appropriate counsel and family of my decision," said McDonnell in a prepared statement released Friday evening,

Lewis, 41, is scheduled to die by injection at 9 p.m. Thursday at the Greensville Correctional Center, in Jarratt. Barring action by the U.S. Supreme Court, her execution would be the first of a woman in Virginia since 1912 and only the 12th of a woman in the nation since executions resumed in 1977. More than 1,200 men have been put to death during the same period.

Her lawyers and many supporters and advocates had asked McDonnell to commute her death sentence to life in prison, the sentence given the two triggermen.

Using sex and promises of money, Lewis, then 33, plotted with her then 22-year-old lover, Matthew Shallenberger, and his friend Rodney Fuller, to murder her husband, Julian Lewis, 51, and stepson, C.J. Lewis, 25, a soldier visiting the Lewises' mobile home on Oct. 30, 2002.

Lewis was to be the beneficiary of her stepson's $250,000 life insurance policy if both he and her husband died. She left a door unlocked so Shallenberger and Fuller could enter early that morning. When the two arrived armed with shotguns paid for by Lewis, she left the bed she shared with her husband and waited in the kitchen during the shooting.

Lewis, Shallenberger and Fuller each pled guilty. The triggermen were sentenced to life (Shallenberger committed suicide in prison). But Lewis, held by the judge to be the mastermind of the scheme, was sentenced to death.

Her lawyers and supporters say she was incapable of being the mastermind and cited her low IQ, history of drug abuse, personality disorder and good prison record in asking McDonnell to spare her life.

Source: Richmond-Times Dispatch, September 18, 2010
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