Death Penalty News

Unexpectedly, the 2020 presidential campaign is drilling down on petty crime and homelessness. Donald Trump and his Republican allies are reviving law-and-order themes similar to those used effectively by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the late 1960s and early 1970s to demonize racial minorities. To this end, Republicans seek to discredit liberalized law enforcement initiatives adopted by a new breed of Democratic prosecutors. These Democratic district attorneys — in cities, counties and suburbs from Philadelphia, Orlando, Chicago and St. Louis to Contra Costa County, Calif., Suffolk County, Mass., and Durham County, N.C. — are pursuing policies intended to decriminalize vagrancy, and eliminate cash bail, and they are aggressively pursuing charges in cases of shootings by police officers. They are playing a key role in a hotly politicized movement to curb mass incarceration and to roll back what has become known as “the carceral state.” The decarceration movement i...

It’s easy to underestimate the brutality of boredom, but people in prison will tell you that keeping your mind occupied is essential to survival. Paulette Fiedler, a 69-year-old prisoner at Logan Correctional Center in Illinois, keeps her mind alive by reading — she plows through book after book. So, Fiedler said, when she got cataracts in both eyes, she wanted them fixed as soon as possible. But the prison doctor told her that she’d have to make a choice. Which eye did she want fixed, the right one or the left one? Multiple Illinois prisoners say they have been denied eye surgery because of a “one good eye” policy that only entitles them to have one functioning eye. James Cox said he entered Illinois’ prison system with perfect eyesight. But in 2015 he got in a fight with another inmate at Pinckneyville Correctional Center who knocked him upside the head with a hardcover book, hitting his eyeball. The pupil dilated so wide, it looked as if one of his blue eyes had chang...

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden answered critics of his support for the 1994 federal crime law by proposing elimination of the federal death penalty and other changes at odds with the earlier legislation, the Washington Post reports. Biden’s plan would also offer states incentives to abolish the death penalty, with death row prisoners receiving life-without-parole sentences instead. Other provisions in Biden’s new policy proposal: decriminalize marijuana and expunge past cannabis-related convictions; end the disparity between sentences for powder and crack cocaine; do away with all incarceration for drug use alone; end cash bail; terminate the federal government’s use of private prisons. It includes a provision to ensure that people who are imprisoned are treated humanely and that women in custody are provided health-care protections.  The plan would invest $1 billion annually in juvenile justice reform, give states incentives to stop incarcerating mi...

"Architects should not design spaces for solitary confinement. It's a form of torture that's recognized by the entire international human rights community. We're enabling and frankly participating in human rights abuse." The number of prisons in the U.S. has exploded from nearly 500 in the 1970s to almost 2,000 today, becoming a source of business for the architects who design them. But some in the profession are urging fellow architects to stop designing solitary confinement units in prison, saying that doing so perpetuates human rights abuses.  NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent David Tereshchuk reports. DAVID TERESHCHUK: California-based architect Raphael Sperry has mounted a campaign. He wants his fellow-architects to stop designing solitary confinement units in prisons – and execution chambers, too. RAPHAEL SPERRY: If you're hiring an AIA architect, we are like the best. We're committed to the highest standard… DAVID TERESHC...

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...

TALLAHASSEE – If elected governor, Chris King said Tuesday, he would fight to outlaw capital punishment and refuse to sign death warrants. An underdog candidate in a crowded primary with three other Democrats, King of Winter Park released his plans to end the death penalty as part of a broader set of criminal justice reforms. As governor, King said he will seek to repeal the death penalty legislatively and work with Cabinet members to commute death sentences to life in prison. Both options would likely face fierce resistance in a GOP-dominated Legislature and a Cabinet that has had one Democratic member in 20 years. But King also said he would refuse to sign death warrants – essentially putting a moratorium on capital punishment in Florida as long as he held office. Other criminal justice reform proposals proposed by King include legalizing marijuana, setting a goal of reducing incarceration rates by 50 percent in 10 years by eliminating mandatory minimums for non-vi...

TOLEDO, OHIO - Ohio will not be relocating its death row for the third time in little more than a decade, state officials said Friday. A shift in population strategies makes the move from Chillicothe in southern Ohio to a newer prison in Toledo unnecessary, according to the prisons department. The move announced last October and expected to be finished before the end of last year was opposed by the union representing Ohio prison guards. A death row inmate who killed himself in March didn't want to make the move to a new prison and was upset about a legal setback, records showed. But the change of plans came about because the state found it could shift some high-security inmates to a privately operated prison in Youngstown and turn its Toledo prison into a maximum-security facility, said Ed Voorhies, operations director for the state prisons department. Abandoning the move will allow the prison system to reduce inmate density in high level security prisons, he sai...

As the state's chief executive, the governor of Florida wields significant power over the court system and has great influence on how the state keeps the public safe. Rick Scott and Charlie Crist have different views of how that power should be employed. Though both men say they endorse the death penalty, by and large, Scott advocates a harder line on crime. Crist says he, too, is tough but that he favors a more balanced approach. These differences in tenor are evident in the 2 candidates' positions on guns, prison sentences, civil rights and judicial appointments. A former Republican now running as a Democrat, Crist used to embrace the nickname "Chain Gang Charlie," earned as a state senator when he sponsored legislation to revive chain gangs. Now, he says, times are different. In addition to long prison sentences, the state should consider what works and how to reintegrate felons into society to make them less likely to commit more crimes, he says. As...