Death Penalty News

Before the storm In 1898, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld circulated a petition to abolish [Paragraph 175 criminalizing homosexual relations in Germany]. He obtained the signatures of prominent writers, lawyers, politicians, and church dignitaries. The petition was discussed in the Reichstag and rejected. Only the Social Democratic Party, under the guidance of August Bebel, pleaded the reform. Most deputies were outraged and did not hide their abhorrence.

OSLO, Aug 18 (Reuters) - Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik is suing the state for allegedly violating his human rights due to his being held in "extreme" isolation, and has filed another application for parole, his lawyer said on Friday. The right-wing militant killed 77 people, most of them teenagers, in shootings and a bombing in Norway's worst peacetime atrocity in July 2011 . Breivik, now 44, is serving Norway's longest sentence, 21 years, which can be extended if he is still considered a threat.

John Oliver condemned the continued use of solitary confinement in American prisons on the latest episode of Last Week Tonight . The incarceration method, used any given day on 50,000 inmates in the US (almost definitely an undercount, given poor data collection), keeps people in a solitary cell that’s roughly 6ft by 9ft. “Which is way too small for a person to be stuck in for days, weeks, months or even years on end,” the HBO host said on Sunday evening. In 2011, the UN declared solitary confinement to be a form of torture due to its physical toll and mental anguish, and called on all countries to abolish indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement in excess of 15 days. “Which really is not asking that much, but is also something that we in the US have, to put it mildly, not done,” Oliver explained, calling solitary confinement in the US “just appalling, as solitary really takes a toll on people”.

Americans' right to legal counsel protects all of us against the government's power to lock us away, confiscate our possessions and deny us the ability to earn a living. Sixty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court's Gideon v. Wainwright decision established one of the most vital components of our justice system by recognizing that people accused of a crime have a Sixth Amendment right to effective legal counsel. That right protects all of us against the government's power to lock us away, confiscate our possessions and deny us the ability to earn a living. But six decades after the Gideon decision was handed down, the promise of that ruling – America's promise – remains unfulfilled.

One of President Joe Biden's most powerful tools for advancing criminal justice reform is his voice and yet, despite his campaign promises, he has been mostly silent on the issue while in office, frustrating criminal justice reform advocates. Advocates for ending mass incarceration and mandatory minimum sentencing would have liked Biden to do more than just talk about criminal justice reform in his first six months in office, but they are even more frustrated by the fact that he isn't loudly advocating for reform and isn't letting people know when he will act on his reform promises. Andrea James, a former criminal defense attorney turned activist who voted for Biden, attended a White House virtual discussion in May about how the Biden administration can reduce incarceration and better help the formerly incarcerated reenter society, shortly after Biden's first 100 days in office. At the time, the administration didn't give her any indication when Biden would start gr...

In March 2012, six state senators and Gov. Dannel Malloy’s criminal justice point person, Michael Lawlor, visited two prisons: Northern Correctional Institution, a “supermax” prison where the men on death row were incarcerated, and MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, the largest maximum security prison in New England. The goal: to convince lawmakers on the fence — all Democrats  — to vote to repeal the death penalty. The legislature had already sent a bill to end capital punishment to the governor’s desk in 2009, but it was vetoed by then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell. Fast forward three years, however, and the math had changed. Several lawmakers were reconsidering their earlier votes, hesitant to go against the wishes of Dr. William Petit, whose wife and two daughters were murdered at their Cheshire home just a few years earlier, in 2007. “At every point of every conversation on criminal justice after July 2007, the Cheshire murders were the focal point,” Lawlor said in a recent inter...

On December 10, Attorney General William Barr will put Brandon Bernard to death, the ninth person on his execution wish list. Wasting no time, he will execute number 10, Alfred Bourgeois, the very next day. These 2 will be followed by Lisa Montgomery on January 12, Cory Johnson on January 14, and Dustin Higgs, one day later. Barr gave the green light to re-start federal executions this past July, after a 17-year hiatus. And they really are his executions since he’s the ultimate decider: he gets to chose who and how many will die, and when. The only fixed aspect is where they’ll happen, since federal executions are carried out at the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Barr had to squeeze in 2 of his executions in September – one was on the day before and the other on the day after he got an award from the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast event for his “Christ-like behavior.” All told, he will have killed 13 inmates before he packs his bags on January 20. Must Barr execute these 13 based ...

After weeks of assuring the public there are no cases of coronavirus among the state’s nearly 95,000 prisoners — without saying whether significant numbers of prisoners had been tested — the Florida Department of Corrections acknowledged its first positive test involving an inmate. That was quickly followed by a second. One lawmaker, a Democrat, called the situation in the state’s prison system, which employs 24,000 staffers, a “ticking time bomb,” although another, a Republican, said the department was doing an “exceptional job.” Michelle Glady, a prison system spokeswoman, would not say how many inmates have been tested because “testing numbers are constantly changing.” The first prisoner with the positive test, whose name was not released, had been locked up at the Blackwater River Correctional Facility near Pensacola, a private prison under the state’s purview run by the GEO Group. The information was posted on the department’s website Saturday. The website was updat...

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) confirmed late Saturday night that a federal inmate has died from COVID-19—the first known death of an inmate in the federal prison system. Reuters reports that Patrick Jones, 49, an inmate at a low-security federal prison in Oakdale, Louisiana, died from complications after contracting COVID-19. According to the latest numbers from the BOP, 14 inmates and 13 staff members are infected with the virus. Civil liberties groups, criminal justice advocates, and families of inmates have been begging the Justice Department to get elderly and at-risk inmates out of federal prisons, saying the effects of outbreaks inside prison walls could be catastrophic. There are roughly 20,000 inmates over the age of 55 in the federal prison system. On Thursday, Attorney General William Barr announced that he was directing the Bureau of Prisons to expand home confinement for at-risk inmates, but civil liberties groups say the Justice Department guidelines will excl...