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As clock ticks toward another Trump presidency, federal death row prisoners appeal for clemency

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President-elect Donald Trump’s return to office is putting a spotlight on the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, which houses federal death row. In Bloomington, a small community of death row spiritual advisors is struggling to support the prisoners to whom they minister.  Ross Martinie Eiler is a Mennonite, Episcopal lay minister and member of the Catholic Worker movement, which assists the homeless. And for the past three years, he’s served as a spiritual advisor for a man on federal death row.
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Executing Human Dignity: U.S. Death Penalty System Dominates IACHR Report

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The U.S. death penalty system does not meet the rigid requirements of international human rights law: as we note in our statement, the penalty is applied in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner without affording vital due process rights such as access to effective counsel and the right to remedy to halt executions - not to mention that methods of execution and death row conditions have been condemned as cruel, inhuman, or degrading.

The U.S. cannot continue to bury its head in the sand and ignore the evolving international consensus against the death penalty, or discount sound jurisprudence from around the world, which clearly shakes the legal and moral foundation of the penalty.

But people are still being executed. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, as of December 2012, 1,320 people have been executed since the death penalty was restored in 1976. Yet international scrutiny is mounting and the U.S. is left in the sorry company of countries like China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen as top imposers of the death penalty.

Click here to read the full article

Source: ACLU, April 21, 2013
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