Death Penalty News

“You have to learn how to deal with yourself.” For 27 years, Keith LaMar has survived solitary confinement in a supermax prison in Ohio, isolated for 23 hours a day in a space the size of a bathroom. From his bed, if he crooks his neck at just the right angle, he can look out through a slit of a window a few inches wide at a parking lot. But in all these years, he hasn’t touched a blade of grass or a tree; the closest he’s come to the outdoors is in a below-ground concrete “rec cage,” covered by a steel grate ceiling. If he’s lucky, he might catch a glimpse of the sun. LaMar, 50, was locked up as a teenager after killing someone in a dispute during a drug deal. A few years later, he was moved to solitary confinement and sentenced to death after he was convicted of murdering five inmates in a prison riot known as the Lucasville Uprising. He says he did not kill them. Activists in Ohio and around the country have rallied to his cause by writing op-eds and staging solidarit...

On 27 January 1945, Soviet troops cautiously entered Auschwitz. Primo Levi - one of the most famous survivors - was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the liberators arrived. The men cast "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive", he would later write. "They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by... the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist." "We saw emaciated, tortured, impoverished people," soldier Ivan Martynushkin said of liberating the death camp. "We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell." In less than four years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. Almost one million were Jews. Those deported to the camp complex were gassed, starved, worked to death and even killed in medical experiments. The vast ma...

The violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville reflects the dangerous, vicious, open-the-floodgates culture that having a Bully-in-Chief in the White House has created in America. Hundreds of protesters descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017 for a “Unite the Right” rally.  The rally was dispersed by police minutes after its scheduled start at noon, after clashes between rallygoers and counter-protesters, and after a torchlit pre-rally march Friday night descended into violence. But later that day, as rallygoers began a march and counterprotests continued, a reported Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19. Self-described “pro-white” activist Jason Kessler organized the rally to protest the planned removal of a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville.  Kessler is affiliated with the alt-right movement that uses internet trolling tactics t...