Death Penalty News

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson rarely slows down, friends and family say. It seems he’s always looking over details on death penalty cases from his Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative. If he’s not speaking on the criminalization of black men, Stevenson is researching another historical site connected to an episode of racial violence. But a new HBO documentary on Stevenson attempts to get him to sit, speak and explain why he believes the legacy of lynchings of African Americans in the U.S. is directly linked to those who have wrongly been put on death row. In his mind, racial structures of oppression have remained in the U.S. judicial system since the Jim Crow-era and the death penalty is merely their direct descendant. “Most people don’t know about our history of lynching,” Stevenson told The Associated Press in a phone interview shortly after receiving news Friday that the Supreme Court had overturned the death sentence for Curtis F...

COLUMBIA - The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened last month in Montgomery, commemorating 4,400 confirmed lynchings in the United States between 1877 and 1950, and documenting lynching as a form of terrorism used to maintain white supremacy in the Jim Crow era. Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative that built the memorial, said its purpose is to encourage Americans to wrestle with that legacy and its lingering effects on the criminal-justice system - and all of society for that matter. According to Stevenson, "our goal is not to be divisive" but to "encourage people to confront the truth of our past with more courage." South Carolinians should heed Stevenson's call. At the center of the memorial are 800 weathered, reddish steel monuments - one for each county in which a lynching took place. South Carolina is well represented with 35 monuments - some listing more than a dozen lynching victims. It is impera...

A bill moving through the Louisiana legislature could change the way juries in felony cases reach a verdict. Senate bill 243, authored by Sen. J.P. Morrell (D-New Orleans), would require unanimous verdicts in felony cases. As the law stands now, only 10 of 12 jurors need to agree. Louisiana is 1 of only 2 states that don't require a unanimous decision, Oregon being the other. But, it's the only state that allows a 10 out of 12 vote in murder cases, with the exception of death penalty trials. "I just made it a personal commitment that I would do everything I could to see that this law was repealed," said Ed Tarpley, a former district attorney in Grant Parish and a current criminal defense attorney in Central Louisiana. After 35 years practicing law, Tarpley said it took a book called "Jim Crow's Last Stand" to open his eyes to the origins of the state's non-unanimous jury verdict law. "This was something that was shameful and d...

Alabama Senator Hank Sanders Hank Sanders closed his eyes, pressed his hand to his forehead and tried to recall the first time he petitioned the state of Alabama to abolish the death penalty. Was it 2000? Or maybe 1998, shortly after the American Bar Association called for a moratorium on capital punishment? The 74-year-old senator from Selma couldn't say for sure, so he asked his secretary to dig into the files. For nearly two decades, Sanders has introduced bills to end Alabama's ability to take a person's life — an unsuccessful endeavor in a state that has defied national trends away from capital punishment and still houses one of the country's largest death row populations. Sanders is undeterred, arguing that the death penalty unfairly targets poor African-Americans. Again this year, as he has since 2000, he put forward legislation to stop executions in the Deep South state. "You don't fight whether you'll win or not," Sanders ...