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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.

Arizona Disbars Former Maricopa County Homicide Prosecutor Juan Martinez

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Former Maricopa County homicide prosecutor Juan Martinez
NEWS (7/17/20) — Arizona: Former Maricopa County homicide prosecutor Juan Martinez, who has repeatedly been cited for misconduct in death-penalty prosecutions, has been disbarred. 

Martinez consented to the action by the State Bar of Arizona, avoiding a public hearing on multiple charges of sexually harassing female co-workers in the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. 

The disbarment trial was also expected to include evidence that, during the high-profile capital murder trial of Jodi Arias, Martinez leaked information to a blogger with whom he was having a sexual relationship and then lied to investigators about their relationship.

Martinez’s disbarment comes less than three months after the Arizona Supreme Court had reprimanded him on findings of prosecutorial misconduct in five different capital cases. 

Martinez is one of at least six prosecutors who have been named prosecutor of the year by the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys Advisory Committee whom appellate courts have later found to have committed prosecutorial misconduct or other inappropriate behavior during capital prosecutions.

RELATED | Read the Juan Martinez Judgment of Disbarment.

Source: deathpenaltyinfo.org, Staff, July 17, 2020


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Location: Arizona, USA
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