Death Penalty News

Earlier this week in a tweet posted by Rev. Bernice King after she heard about the renewed effort to call on the federal government to end the death penalty, Dr. Martin Luther King’s daughter wrote, “I believe that [Protest] honors both of my parents. Most importantly, we need to abolish the death penalty.” Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year coincides with the 45th anniversary of the first current-era execution, on January 17, 1977. There have now been 1540 executions in 45 years. Without a doubt, some of those killed were innocent, and many are like the two men lined up to be killed next in this country; Black, poor, mentally ill and intellectually challenged.  As Dr. King famously said, “Capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology, and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.” Think about that statement. The death penalty is a pragmatic and moral failure. The only real question is: What must we do to end it? Faith comm...

Organizers dedicated to ending federal capital punishment will deliver a petition to all three branches of government in Washington D.C. on Monday, January 17 at 10 a.m. The Abolitionist Action Committee will gather on the sidewalk in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building. On a day honoring the life and legacy of Dr. King, anti-death penalty activists will call on the U.S. to end the practice of killing its own people. The group will ask for the swift passage of the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act, according to a press release from Death Penalty Action. “We are calling for immediate passage of the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act,” said Rev. Sharon Risher. Her mother and cousins were among those murdered in the 2015 racist massacre by white supremacist Dylann Roof. The horrific shooting took place after a prayer at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in North Carolina.  “We are calling on the Attorney General to stop seeking death in all federal cases and o...

“The Court has allowed the US to execute 13 people in 6 months...without resolving the serious claims the condemned individuals raised. Those whom the Government executed during this endeavor deserved more from this Court. I respectfully dissent.”  - J. Sotomayor, US v Higgs "Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent tonight in U.S. v. Dustin Higgs will be remembered long into the future as one of the most thorough, resounding indictments of this administration’s reckless, immoral, illegal effort to execute as many people as possible, as quickly as possible." - Sister Helen Prejean The 13th and last execution of a federal inmate under Donald Trump’s presidency has taken place in Terre Haute, Indiana. Dustin Higgs, 48, had been sentenced to death for the killings of three women in a Maryland wildlife refuge. His lawyers argued it was “arbitrary and inequitable” to execute him while Willis Haynes, the man who shot the women in 1996, was spared a death sentence. The federal judge who pr...

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis called George Floyd by name, twice, and offered support to an American bishop who knelt in prayer during a Black Lives Matter protest. Cardinals black and white have spoken out about Floyd’s death, and the Vatican’s communications juggernaut has shifted into overdrive to draw attention to the cause he now represents. Under normal circumstances, Floyd’s killing at the hands of a white police officer and the global protests denouncing racism and police brutality might have drawn a muted diplomatic response from the Holy See. But in a U.S. election year, the intensity and consistency of the Vatican’s reaction suggests that, from the pope on down, it is seeking to encourage anti-racism protesters while making a clear statement about where American Catholics should stand ahead of President Donald Trump’s bid for a second term in November. Francis “wants to send a very clear message to these conservative Catholics here who are pro-Trumpers that, ‘Li...

A teachable moment about capital punishment occurs in the 1992 film The Unforgiven when “Schofield Kid,” a boastful young outlaw, ingloriously guns down “Quick Mike” – who ultimately wasn’t quick enough – in an outhouse. Shaken and dejected, Schofield Kid admits to Clint Eastwood, who plays notorious killer “William Munny,” that his own prior exaggerated tales of killing had all been bluster. Tearfully, Schofield Kid exhorts Munny to take his gun from him because he says: “I’m never going to use it again. I don’t kill nobody no more. I ain’t like you, Will.” Tasting the blood of vengeance to which death penalty proponents cling – for Quick Mike had savagely disfigured a woman with a knife after she giggled at his penis – Schofield Kid decides the killing was a vile endeavor. Munny, though too far gone for redemption himself, agrees, observing: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.” Vainly trying to assuage his guil...

This story was first published in January 2018. In a New Year’s Eve display of liberal newspaper death penalty abolition harmony – buoyed by the release of the Death Penalty Information Center’s (DPIC) annual report evidencing another year in the long-observable trend of capital punishment’s disuse and disfavor in America – both the Washington Post and New York Times’s editorial boards published opinion pieces arguing for an end to what the Times called a “cruel and pointless” practice; one that is “savage, racially biased, arbitrary,” and which “the developed world agreed to reject…long ago.” On her well-followed Twitter account, intrepid anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean opined that the Times “opened the New Year with a bang: a full-throated exhortation against the death penalty. The editorial hit all the right notes.” While I hardly disagree with Sister Helen on anything concerning death penalty abolition – and, despite all the truthful and pointed invective...

When, in October 2016, I wrote “[d]eath row inmates in Alabama are human guinea pigs” because the state’s capital punishment regime — specifically its barbaric, often bungled lethal injection protocol — is already so dark, so depraved, so outrageously cloaked in lies and officious secrecy, I never could have predicted the situation could get worse. But it has. In glaring contrast to the heavily circulated, smiling picture of exonerated former Alabama death row inmate Anthony Ray Hinton, ebullient after voting for the first time in a midterm election since being freed in 2015, after a hellacious 30 years on Alabama’s death row, it’s important to understand: the death penalty in Alabama has gotten far worse since Mr. Hinton’s release — not better. First, because of the cynically named “Fair Justice Act,” convoluted legislation hacksawing fundamental constitutional rights of (overwhelmingly indigent) death-sentenced defendants, signed into law last year — over the varied, voc...

Above the din of disturbing news – that discordant banging you’re hearing, steadily getting louder and louder, that you can no longer ignore – that’s the drumbeat of the unfree. Dehumanized by the labels “prisoner,” “inmate,” and “convict,” even reduced to serial numbers like Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean in Les Misérables , these men and women are, just like you and me, or any mortal – irrespective of flaws, frailties, even felonious acts and misdemeanors – endowed with the right to be treated with dignity, decency, and respect. Advancing ten specific demands as a rallying cry in prisons nationwide, these brave incarcerated souls are striking by: not eating, refusing to do prison work, engaging in sit-ins, and taking part in myriad other acts of nonviolent resistance that could, nonetheless — given the carceral, contentious environment they’re taking place in — quickly trigger violence (even reprisals, including the nefarious, all-too-frequent imposition of solitary confineme...