Death Penalty News

Louisiana residents should speak out before Gov. Edwards leaves office in January 2024. Louisianans have a chance to prevent innocent people from being executed on death row. At least 190 innocent people have been exonerated from death row nationwide and 12 in Louisiana alone. There are currently 57 defendants on Louisiana’s death row, including Innocence Project client Jimmie “Chris” Duncan , who has maintained his innocence in the 1993 death of his girlfriend’s baby. Gov. John Bel Edwards, who opposes the death penalty, has the authority to grant clemency to everyone on Louisiana’s death row. Attorneys for 55 of these defendants have requested modified sentences of life without parole. To avoid further injustice, residents of Louisiana must urge the Louisiana Parole Board to hold clemency hearings now and recommend clemency to the Governor so that the Governor can commute death sentences to life in prison before he leaves office in January 2024.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has overturned a South Carolina death-row prisoner’s death sentence after finding that the sentencing judge in his case had ignored uncontested evidence of the defendant’s mental illness and history of severe childhood abuse and neglect. In a 2-1 ruling on July 26, 2022, a panel of the Fourth Circuit vacated the death sentence imposed on Quincy Allen by Richland County Circuit Court Judge G. Thomas Cooper in March 2005 for the murders of Dale Hall and Jedediah Harr. Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Roger Gregory, joined by Judge Pamela Harris, wrote: “The sentencer in this case excluded, ignored, or overlooked Allen’s clear and undisputed mitigating evidence, thereby erecting a barrier to giving this evidence meaningful consideration and effect and eviscerating the well-established requirements of due process in deciding who shall live and who shall die.” In so doing, they wrote, Judge Cooper “violate[d] the Eighth Amendment’s guarant...

It has been five years since California voters approved Proposition 66 , a measure that ostensibly was going to speed up the time between handing down a death sentence and an execution. But as a practical matter, nothing has really changed. In fact, it has been 15 years since California last executed someone , leaving us with a Death Row population of nearly 700 people , none of whom face execution in the foreseeable future. So much for the fix that death penalty advocates promised. Here’s a better one: End the death penalty in California once and for all. Of course, there are stronger reasons for getting rid of capital punishment than the slowness of the legal process. The moral arguments align against killing even convicted murderers, and a legal system as imperfect as ours has proved to be should never be used to determine whether someone lives or dies. In fact, the California Committee on Revision of the Penal Code finalized a report last month calling for abolition primarily beca...

SINGAPORE - The Attorney-General's Chambers (AGC) has issued a letter of demand to lawyer M. Ravi to apologise and retract comments he had made about a case involving a drug runner who escaped the gallows. In a video interview with alternative news site The Online Citizen (TOC) on Monday (Oct 19), Mr Ravi had made "false and highly inflammatory" allegations against the prosecution in the case, the AGC said on Tuesday. This came after the five-judge Court of Appeal on Monday reversed a 2018 decision to convict Mr Ravi's client, Gobi Avedian, on a capital charge. Mr Ravi had told TOC the prosecutor had been "overzealous" in prosecuting Gobi, which "has led to the death sentence" for his client. He also said "it was troubling" that the prosecution ran different cases before the High Court and the Court of Appeal. Mr Ravi called on the public prosecutor and others to apologise to Gobi for the suffering he experienced and added that "the...

PETALING JAYA: Singapore’s Court of Appeal has set aside a previous death sentence it meted out to Gobi Avedian, a Malaysian who was convicted of drug trafficking. Lawyer M. Ravi said that Singapore’s top court reviewed its previous decision of sentencing Gobi to death on the account of a miscarriage of justice. Gobi, 32, will instead serve a 15-year-jail sentence that the High Court had given him in 2017. “The Court of Appeal concluded that the previous decision is demonstrability wrong and Gobi has suffered from a miscarriage of justice, ” said Ravi on Monday (Oct 19). Ravi said the case made judicial history in Singapore because all legal avenues had run their course, including a clemency appeal that had been rejected by the Singapore President. “It is very difficult to succeed in getting leave to reopen the case in the Court of Appeal aside from the fact that it is not easy to set aside a death sentence, ” said Ravi, who has been fighting for the reopening of several similar cases....

On June 30, the Supreme Court of Belarus has upheld the appeal of Viktar Skrundzik, a resident of Slutsk district. The criminal case will be sent to Minsk Regional Court and reviewed, human rights centre Viasna reports. In 2019, Viktar Skrundzik, together with Valyantsin Bushnin and Vitaly Metezh, burned several pensioners alive and stole their money.  According to the verdict, the men committed the crime in a state of intoxication.  In February 2020, the court passed a death sentence on Skrundzik, but today it has been reversed.  The reasons for the revision have not been reported. In his appeal, Viktar Skrundzik pointed out the incorrect choice of the measure of restraint as well as violations of Belarusian and international procedural norms that occurred during the investigation.  He also asked to re-define the charge and mitigate the sentence. According to his defence lawyer, Skrundzik is quite young and heavy charges had not been p...

Louisiana prison, 1965. Credit Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos The last time a white person in Louisiana was executed for a crime against a black person was in 1752, when a soldier named Pierre Antoine Dochenet was hanged after attempting to stab two enslaved black women to death with his bayonet. This is just one of many grim facts in a new report describing the history of capital punishment in Louisiana and analyzing the outcome of every death sentence imposed in that state since 1976, when the Supreme Court  reversed its brief moratorium on executions and allowed them to resume. Racism has always been at the heart of the American death penalty. But the report, in the current issue of The Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty, drives home the extent to which capital punishment, supposedly reserved for the “worst of the worst,” is governed by skin color. In Louisiana, a black man is 30 times as likely to be sentenced to death for killing a white woman as for killing ...

Louisiana death row Louisiana, which has led the nation in homicide rates every year since 1989, sentences plenty of murderers to death but rarely executes them, in part because a huge proportion of death verdicts are reversed on appeal, according to a new study slated to come out Thursday. The report, to be published in the Southern University Law Center's "Journal of Race, Gender and Poverty," examined each of the 241 death sentences handed down in Louisiana over the past 30 years. Just 28 of those sentenced to death - less than 12 % - have been executed. Meanwhile, 127 of the death verdicts, more than 1/2 the total, have been reversed, meaning that either a new trial was ordered or the death sentence was rescinded. That number includes 9 exonerations. The "extremely high" reversal rates in parishes throughout Louisiana, combined with what political science professor Frank Baumgartner and statistician Tim Lyman call "shocking" racial...