Death Penalty News

July 2 (UPI) -- Religious leaders across Florida have penned a letter asking Gov. Ron DeSantis to pause executions after more prisoners were put to death in a single year since the death penalty was reinstated half a century ago. The letter will be sent to DeSantis on July 8, when hundreds of faith leaders are expected to gather at First Presbyterian Church in Tallahassee before marching to the State Capitol to deliver the letter. The demonstration will be livestreamed beginning at 11 a.m. local time. The demonstration comes after Florida scheduled its eighth and ninth executions for the year. Last month, Florida executed its seventh prisoner of the year, Thomas Gudinas, who was convicted for the 1994 rape and murder of a woman outside an Orlando bar.

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”.

As the oldest constitutional democracy in the world, the United States is often criticized for continuing to carry out state-sanctioned executions. Over the past couple of generations, every European country, with the exception of Belarus, has outlawed the death penalty. The principle is enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. But we have not always been the throwbacks. In fact, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the English colonies had far fewer capital laws than England and other European states. My students have been reading the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, written in 1641 as a guide for the colony's General Court. It included 12 capital laws. Religious crimes such as witchcraft and blasphemy came first, then murder (three different types), then sex crimes (rape was not among them), followed by kidnapping, bearing false witness in a capital case, and treason. That seemed like a lot, until we discovered that the list of capital crimes ba...