More than 150 global business leaders call for end of death penalty

Declaration, part of the Business Leaders Against the Death Penalty campaign, first launched in March by Sir Richard Branson

More than 150 global business leaders have signed a declaration calling for the end of the death penalty around the world and criticizing capital punishment for perpetuating inequality.

The declaration, part of the Business Leaders Against the Death Penalty campaign, was first launched in March at the virtual South by Southwest festival by Sir Richard Branson, one of the campaign’s founders. Initial signatories included the billionaire fashion mogul Francois-Henri Pinault, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s, Arianna Huffington, and the leaders of Unilever and Bayer.

Ahead of World Day Against the Death Penalty on 10 October, the campaign announced on Thursday that over 100 additional signatories have signed the declaration. Among the new signatories are Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, and Sally Jewell, former US secretary of the interior and former chief executive of recreational goods company REI.

“As an irreversible and extreme form of punishment, the death penalty is inhumane, and it is irreconcilable with human dignity. Its worldwide abolition is a moral imperative that all of humanity should support,” reads the declaration.

More than 170 UN member states have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. In the US, 23 states have outlawed the death penalty and four have moratoriums on executions. Over a dozen have not used the death penalty in years.

While executions have become rare in the United States, a handful still happen every year. Seventeen people were executed in 2020, including 10 people who were executed on federal charges. This year has seen seven executions to date, including the execution of Ernest Johnson in Missouri on 5 October despite pleas for clemency, including from Pope Francis.

Celia Ouellette, the chief executive of the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, a nonprofit who helped coordinate the campaign, said she hopes the new batch of signatories will give momentum to campaigns to end the death penalty in the US.

“The controversiality of the death penalty has been massively reduced,” Ouellette said. “The death penalty used to be this very politically touchy subject that people would run away from as fast as they could.”

Activists against the death penalty have been focusing on pressuring Joe Biden to follow up on his campaign promise of passing legislation that would end the death penalty at the federal level. While Biden’s justice department reinstated the moratorium on all federal executions, which the Trump administration had previously lifted to carry out a wave of controversial executions, the president has so far not taken further action to address the death penalty.

“We’ve yet to see any kind of meaningful and enduring action come out of his administration,” Ouellette said. “Not executing people now doesn’t mean that the next president will not execute people.”

While there has been little legislation on the federal level, state governments have been for years slowly outlawing the death penalty, particularly as ending capital punishment has become an increasingly bipartisan issue. Most recently, Virginia became the first southern state to ban the death penalty in February. Similar legislation is currently going through the state legislatures in Utah and Ohio.

“I have a lot of hope in our state that we’re going to end the death penalty,” said John Rush, a business owner based in Columbus, Ohio, and one of the new signatories to the campaign. “It’s extremely important that the momentum be kept up by the business community … to kind of keep pushing the momentum forward.”

Source: theguardian.com, Lauren Aratani, October 7, 2021

🚩 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.

Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!

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

California | Becerra vows to extend moratorium despite past support for capital punishment

SACRAMENTO—Democrat Xavier Becerra defended the death penalty while serving as California’s attorney general, a punishment his office actively sought in the case of a gunman convicted of an Orange County mass shooting, but as the front-running candidate for governor, he has vowed to block executions if elected in November. Becerra said he will extend the blanket reprieve for all death row inmates that Gov. Gavin Newsom enacted by executive order in 2019, saying he supported “moving our state away from a costly, flawed system that disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities and too often gets it wrong.”

Iran | Afghan Citizen Executed in Wheelchair Due to Severe Mobility Disability

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Iranian authorities have reportedly executed an Afghan citizen, identified as Valijan Nourzay, at the central prison in Rafsanjan, according to the human rights organization Hengaw. Hengaw said in a statement on Sunday, September 6, that Nourzay was executed early Wednesday last week at Rafsanjan Central Prison. According to the organization, Nourzay had a severe mobility disability and was executed while in a wheelchair. Hengaw, citing informed sources, reported that Nourzay had been pursued by Iranian authorities three years ago over an alleged murder. He was reportedly seriously wounded after Iranian security forces opened fire on him in Rafsanjan before being arrested and later sentenced to death.

Egypt TV presenter and 11 others sentenced to death in major drugs case

Egyptian television presenter Sarah Khalifa and 11 others have been sentenced to death by hanging after being convicted of drug trafficking and rape, while nine defendants received life sentences and seven were acquitted. Egyptian television presenter Sarah Khalifa, 39, has been sentenced to death by hanging along with 11 other defendants after being found guilty in a drugs case involving a criminal gang accused of importing ingredients used to manufacture narcotics for sale.

He Spent 27 Years on Death Row as a Wrongfully Convicted Man. What Comes Next?

23-hour solitary confinement. 115-degree heat. Jimmie Duncan is haunted by the decades he spent in Louisiana’s Angola Prison—and how, even after being released, he still isn’t truly free. Jimmie “Chris” Duncan wiped the sweat off his forehead as he assessed his temporary home from the parking lot of a rundown motel in central Louisiana. Sure, there’s drug dealing and prostitution, he said on a recent summer afternoon. And he suspected his neighbors were cooking meth on a floor below the room he paid $350 a week to rent.

Hanging, confinement and the sentencing debate India won’t have

Ask anybody what a “death sentence” in India actually means, and the honest answer is that it can mean three quite different things. It can mean the noose—hanging by the neck until death; it can mean permanent confinement in jail—a term the courts now call imprisonment for the remainder of one’s natural life, and, far more often than either of the first two, it can simply mean delay in delivery of justice—a death sentence that is neither carried out nor commuted, waiting for completion of investigation, trial before the sessions court, hearing of a confirmation proceeding in a high court, appeal against conviction in the Supreme Court, or hearing of a mercy petition nobody has decided for years, sometimes for decades, until age or illness does what the state never got around to doing itself.

California | He spent 19 years on death row. His conversion to Judaism helped him endure

Johnny Morales struggled to find sleep. He dozed off for a few moments, but officers came to his death row cell and woke him a little after midnight. They needed to inventory and box up his belongings. He was leaving San Quentin. Hands cuffed behind his back, he walked across the empty upper yard in the dim gray hours before daylight. An officer walked alongside him step for step, black latex-gloved fingers holding onto Morales’s arm. For almost 20 years, Morales could only experience the world outside his 4-by-11 foot cell in the condemned housing unit like this—chained and escorted by officers. Security protocols required all death row residents be handcuffed or shackled any time they were out in open space with staff.

Arizona AG seeks execution date for man convicted in 1995 trooper killing

Trooper Bob Martin was killed during a traffic stop on the Beeline highway; execution for his killer could be as soon as January PHOENIX (AZFamily)—The Arizona Attorney General is asking for an execution date to be set for a man convicted in the killing of an Arizona State Trooper over 30 years ago. On Aug. 15, 1995, Trooper Bob Martin was shot and killed while performing a traffic stop along the Beeline Highway.

Ex-corrections officials urge governor to commute Kansas death sentences

Former Kansas corrections officials are urging Governor Laura Kelly to grant clemency to the state's death row inmates. Former Kansas Corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz has several reasons why he thinks the state should abolish the death penalty. Werholtz, who served as secretary from 2002 to 2010 and returned on an interim basis in 2019, uses his discussions with peers and family members of victims as well as experiences of seeing wrongly convicted people getting exonerated as his guiding points.

Florida executes Harold Gene Lucas

Florida state officials executed 74-year-old Harold Gene Lucas by lethal injection on Tuesday evening, concluding a 50-year legal saga stemming from the 1976 murder of a 16-year-old girl in Bonita Springs. STARKE, Fla. -- A man convicted of killing a teenage girl who rejected his romantic advances and wounding two of her friends was put to death Tuesday in the first of three executions planned this month in Florida. Harold Gene Lucas, 74, was pronounced dead at 6:18 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, authorities said. He was sentenced to death for the 1976 shooting attack on Jill Piper and the wounding of her friends, Richard Byrd Jr. and Terri Rice.

Florida set to carry out 14th execution this year in the nation's busiest death chamber

MIAMI (AP) — A Florida man convicted of fatally shooting a 16-year-old girl who rejected his romantic advances and wounding two of her friends is set to be executed Tuesday in the first of three lethal injections scheduled this month in the state. Harold Gene Lucas, 74, is set to receive a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke starting at 6 p.m. He would be the 14th prisoner put to death this year in Florida, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has already signed death warrants for two more executions set for later this September.

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog