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Biden Fails a Death Penalty Abolitionist’s Most Important Test

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The mystery of Joe Biden’s views about capital punishment has finally been solved. His decision to grant clemency to 37 of the 40 people on federal death row shows the depth of his opposition to the death penalty. And his decision to leave three of America’s most notorious killers to be executed by a future administration shows the limits of his abolitionist commitment. The three men excluded from Biden’s mass clemency—Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers—would no doubt pose a severe test of anyone’s resolve to end the death penalty. Biden failed that test.
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California | Death Row Inmate Louis Peoples Dies at San Quentin

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A 58-year-old man on death row at San Quentin State Prison for killing four people in the Stockton area in 1997 died Sunday after being found unresponsive in his cell, state correctional officials announced Wednesday.

Louis Peoples was pronounced dead at about 4:15 a.m. Sunday. 

The Marin County coroner's office will determine his cause of death, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Peoples, a former tow truck driver, killed his victims with a gun stolen from the van of an off-duty Alameda County sheriff's deputy who was watching his son play baseball at a park in Stockton.

The victims, killed in three separate shootings in the Stockton area in October and November 1997, were James Loper, a driver at the tow truck company that suspended Peoples from working there, liquor store employee Stephen Chacko, and grocery store workers Besun Yu and Jun Gao.

Pretrial publicity about the case prompted its move from San Joaquin County to Alameda County, where a jury convicted Peoples of the four murders and he was sentenced to death.

The death penalty sentence was upheld in 2016 by the California Supreme Court, which rejected various arguments in which Peoples claimed his trial was unfair. 

His attorneys had argued at his trial that his reasoning and self-control were impaired by methamphetamine use and childhood abuse.

Source: nbcbayarea.com, Staff, January 27, 2021


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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: San Quentin, CA, USA
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