Death Penalty News

"Capital punishment is a macabre folly that swings between tragedy and idiocy. " The following text is an excerpt from: Abolishing the Death Penalty: Why India Should Say No to Capital Punishment ; Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Aleph Books; Rs 270. In its last and most defining and irreversible stage a death penalty case gets to be scrutinised for its wider, non-judicial ramifications, by politically wired brains. The death sentence when implemented is not a coin made of law’s pure gold but an alloy, in fact, a coarse alloy of many ores, of high, medium and low grade, that have passed through the smelteries of reason, emotion, pride, prejudice, a state’s hubris, a society’s moods that swing between pity for the victim and rage at the culprit in an unspooling of feelings that are as old as that of the Plebeians who ran amok in 44 BCE in Rome following Caesar’s assassination and killed Cinna the poet mistaking him for Cinna the assassin, the mob that bayed for Christ’s blood in...

A hanging outside Newgate Prison, early 19th century On the 27th of November 1835, a crowd of people gathered outside Newgate prison in the City of London to watch the first hanging there in two years. Two men were hanged for “the abominable crime of buggery” and became the last men in Britain executed for homosexuality. James Pratt, aged 30, was a horse-groomer, who lived in Deptford, London with his wife and children. John Smith, 40, was from Southwark. Some reports say he was an unmarried labourer, though others sources state he was married and worked as a servant. On an afternoon in late August 1835, Pratt met Smith, and a man called William Bonill in a pub in Blackfriars. The three men returned to Bonill’s room that he rented in Southwark, from landlords George and Jane Berkshire. They had no way of knowing that by that night they would all be arrested. In three months two of them would be dead. Mr Berkshire later claimed that Bonill had frequent m...

Solitary Housing Unit (SHU) It is brutal. It is torture by definition. It destroys the mind, body, and soul, making rehabilitation next to impossible. It is also outrageously expensive, and it doesn't work. Yet at the end of the Obama era, and the dawn of Trump's, isolation is as widely used as ever in the American penal system. And this is what it feels like. "I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers.... I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body." —Charles Dickens, on visiting prisoners in solitary confinement at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, 1842. Javier Panuco (over 5 years in solitary): Sometimes I can still smell it: the same soap everybody used, the smell of mildew, the smell of the algae that we had on our concrete yard...

The Adjustment Center cells housing death row inmates inside San Quentin A group of death row inmates has sued the state for keeping them in solitary confinement for years or even decades, locked in windowless cells with no phone calls or human contact. It's treatment, they said, that "amounts to torture." The suit was filed in federal court Wednesday by 6 condemned prisoners, who said they were among about 100 inmates, out of 750 on death row, who are kept in isolation in the Adjustment Center at San Quentin State Prison as suspected gang members or associates. The suit said they are held in their cells 21 to 24 hours a day, with no natural light, no access to education or work programs, no phone calls and no contact visits from family members, who must speak to them by phone across a glass barrier. One of the men has been in solitary confinement for 26 years, and 2 others for more than a decade, the suit said. Condemned prisoners in California spend an aver...

The Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment this week released its final report, calling for an end to capital punishment and making Maryland the latest state in the nation to move toward abolishing the death penalty. "After a thorough review of this information, the Commission recommends that capital punishment be abolished in Maryland," the report reads. The commission's chairman, former U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, said during a press conference held for the report's release, "There is no good and sufficient reason to have the death penalty and plenty of reasons against it." Later, in an exclusive interview with WEAA/AFRO First Edition radio talk show, Civiletti said, The death penalty is a difficult and complex issue regardless of who considers it, whether it is our court of appeals or the Supreme Court." In reaching its conclusion, the commission's report cited among its primary concerns the existence of racial and jurisdictional...

October 27, 2008 Hello folks, I quit writing this column a few years back because we had a decent warden who was trying to run this place professionally (actually we had two (2) in a row – Biscoe and Massey) and I didn’t want to be disparaging them. Things since have taken a serious down turn for the worse, to the point that now that I feel compelled to once again take up my pen and deal with it. Running a prison is a difficult endeavor, I’d be the first to agree. Death Row is even more difficult due mainly to the attendant publicity of high profile capital cases. The prisoners themselves are some of the easiest to manage. However, we’re a laid back bunch. Kids grow up playing cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. Pow, Pow! with their cap pistols. It’s quite a different thing though, when the caps are live bullets, blood flies and people die. As I’ve told y’all 10,000 times in the past, I’m innocent of the crime I’m here for and I have evidence to prove it --- but I’m not here th...