Death Penalty News

NEW YORK – As time runs out for California Governor Gavin Newsom to act on legislation that would limit the use of solitary confinement in the state, a diocese has reignited a push for faith-based organizations to sign a letter urging him to make the measure law. Despite passing the California State Assembly and Senate last September, Assemblymember Chris Holden decided to keep AB 280 pending in the legislature to prevent a potential Newsom veto and to allow negotiations to continue with the governor, who had already vetoed a prior version.

The use of solitary confinement, says Pope Francis, is a form of torture. On March 15, Brian Rodenas, a prison inmate in Rhode Island, wrote a note to his mom from “your favorite son.” “I hope you’re doing good. I got in trouble so I’m in [segregated housing], get out of seg on April 18th. Don’t worry, I’m fine. I’m still coming home next year, that is my promise to you. 2024 will be my year.” But Rodenas did not get out of “seg” in April, and he won’t keep his promise to his mother. He was returned to solitary confinement because of other minor prison infractions. On May 2 he took his own life, the third Rhode Island inmate—and the second in solitary confinement—to kill himself over a three-month period this spring.

The Bar Council has called on the government and Home Minister Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail to immediately take steps to abolish solitary confinement of prisoners, and for prison authorities to implement appropriate reforms to improve the living conditions of inmates, especially those on death row. Its president Karen Cheah Yee Lynn told theSun the call is particularly important as it is “psychologically traumatic” for convicts on death row with a moratorium in place. She added that on Jan 13, the Bar Council met Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, “and prison reforms were among the matters discussed”. Cheah was commenting on theSun’s report on April 7 quoting eminent forensic psychiatrist Datuk Dr Suarn Singh, who said: “It is cruel and inhumane to keep a prisoner in solitary confinement for years as it could cause mental disorders in those who do not have any, and a relapse in others with pre-existing conditions.”

The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), with the support of the Foreign Office of the Federal Government of Germany, recently undertook a project examining the U.S. death penalty through a human rights lens.  DPIC has added a series of human rights pages to its website, reframing three aspects of the death penalty – race, conditions of confinement, and executions – in light of human rights norms and treaties. The page on U.S. executions highlights various human rights issues related to methods of execution, including lethal injection, and the international community’s response.  The conditions of confinement page discusses ongoing practices that vary from the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners , more commonly known as the “Nelson Mandela rules.” 

On January 21, 2023, Texas death row prisoner Terence Andrus hanged himself at the age of 34, a little more than 6 months after the U.S. Supreme Court denied review of his case for a second time. His lawyer, Gretchen Sween, told the Los Angeles Times that “he’d been careening toward the abyss,” since their decision. “He was broken.” In 2008, at the age of 20, Andrus killed two people during an attempted carjacking while high on PCP-laced marijuana. He was sentenced to death in 2012 by a jury that was unaware of his diagnosis of affective psychosis – a mood disorder causing hallucinations for which he was diagnosed in elementary school – parental neglect as a child, or the trauma he endured in juvenile detention. Beginning at the age of 16, he spent 18 months at an overcrowded juvenile detention center, where he was given high doses of psychotropic drugs and placed in solitary confinement, consisting of a cold and filthy cell for extended periods, either for engaging in self-mutilation,...

“It is inhumane, and by its design it is driving men insane. Solitary confinement makes the criminal justice system the criminal.” These words were testimony presented to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on solitary confinement June 19, 2012, by death row exoneree #138, Anthony C. Graves. (tinyurl.com/5cs4s59y) Graves spent 18.5 years wrongfully incarcerated in Texas, most of them on death row. Like all those on death row in Texas, Graves was housed in solitary confinement. “Death-sentenced prisoners in 12 states are automatically placed in indefinite solitary confinement, based solely on their death sentence. These prisoners spend between 21 and 24 [hours] per day in their cells, with very limited meaningful human contact. There is no possibility in any of these states for death-sentenced prisoners to have their placement reviewed, to be placed in a less restrictive custody level.” (Merel Pointier, “Cruel but not unusual: The automatic use of indefinite solitary confineme...

More than half of all U.S. death-row prisoners are or have recently been incarcerated in prolonged conditions of solitary confinement that are likely unconstitutional and that violate international human rights norms, a DPIC analysis of data in a recent law review article has found. In Cruel but not Unusual: The Automatic Use of Indefinite Solitary Confinement on Death Row , published in fall 2021 in the Texas Journal on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights, Merel Pontier catalogues the conditions of confinement in each of the U.S. states that authorizes capital punishment. Pontier, who as legal director of the Clinton Young Foundation is working to free a Texas death-row prisoner whose prosecutor also secretly worked as a law clerk for the judge in his case, found that, as of late 2020 twelve U.S. states automatically housed death-sentenced prisoners in indefinite solitary confinement. She also found that, since 2017, another five states that had been sued for unconstitutional death-row ...

In North Carolina prisons, inmates in solitary confinement typically spend 22 to 23 hours a day inside cells that are smaller than a parking space. This cell, at Central Prison in Raleigh, is smaller than 100 square feet. Photo: J. Miller In North Carolina’s prisons, about half a dozen inmates have been in solitary confinement for more than a decade. But the state doesn’t want you to know who they are. State officials say they’ve been working to reduce their use of the punishment as awareness grows about the dangerous psychological effects of isolating prisoners. Roughly 2,500 North Carolina inmates are in solitary at any given time. As of early March, the most recent date for which state prison officials provided information, seven inmates had been in solitary for more than 10 years – a practice that human rights experts say amounts to torture. A prison spokesman rejected the Observer’s request for the names of those inmates, citing a court ruling about the conf...