Death Penalty News

Executions would be reserved for those convicted of certain sexual assaults against children under 13 A pair of Republican state lawmakers wants to bring the death penalty back to Wisconsin for the first time in more than 170 years. It would be reserved for those convicted of certain sexual assaults against children under 13 years old. The bill being introduced by state Sen. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, and state Rep. Elija Behnke, R-Town of Chase, would give prosecutors and judges the option of seeking the death penalty for people convicted of having sexual contact or intercourse with a person under 13 years old and causing great bodily harm. It would also be an option for all people convicted of having sex with a child under the age of 12.

Nov 20, 2021 -- Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal on murder charges on Friday opened yet another front in America's longstanding fight over gun rights: Is it acceptable for a teenager to bring an assault-style rifle to a protest? Conservatives hailed Rittenhouse as a hero for exercising his right to self-defense when he fatally shot two demonstrators and wounded a third who he said attacked him last year at a racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Gun control advocates warned the jury's verdict could inspire a new wave of armed vigilantism, after Rittenhouse traveled in August 2020 from his Illinois home to Kenosha after demonstrations erupted following the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake. Guns have long been a potent political issue in the United States, where permissive laws have led to the highest rate of civilian firearm ownership in the world. Mass shootings, which are far more rare in other wealthy nations, have plagued the country for decades. Rittenhou...

A voice cried out in the night, desperate: “Oh, John, spare me!" and "Oh, John, save me!" Neighbors alarmed by the commotion rushed to help as John McCaffrey walked back toward his home from the yard, his clothes wet and covered in mud. It was about 11 p.m. July 22, 1850, but at least a few residents of Kenosha had been stirred awake “by the cry that a murder had been committed,” according to a half-column article published later that same week in the Kenosha Telegraph, a local newspaper. The body of McCaffrey’s wife, Bridget, was found inside a barrel sunk into the ground in the yard, completely submerged beneath water collected from a nearby well. “On raising the body, they found it still warm, although life was extinct,” according to an account published in the Wisconsin Magazine of History in 1952 . Bridget McCaffrey was badly beaten and her bruises seemed to indicate she had been strangled, said Jon Martens, collection and exhibitions specialist at the Kenosha Histo...

Like many organizations in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the board of the American Institute of Architects issued a statement the other day expressing solidarity with protesters — and offering a mea culpa. “We were wrong not to address and work to correct the built world’s role in perpetuating systemic racial injustice,” the statement said. But “we support and are committed to efforts to ensure that our profession is part of the solution.” To that end, the statement added, “we will review our own programs” and “ask our community to join us and hold us accountable.” That’s good to hear. So, for starters, how about stop repeating that it’s OK by you for architects to design death chambers and solitary confinement cells in racially biased prisons that incarcerate and execute an overwhelmingly disproportionate percentage of African-Africans? Several years ago, I wrote about a petition filed with the A.I.A. by an organization called Architects/Planners/Designers for Soc...

An investigation by graduate students at Northwestern University suggests that Wisconsin police may have planted evidence in order to frame a man for murder. Ken Hudson was convicted in 2001 for the stabbing murder of Shanna Van Dyn Hoven, based on what police said was blood found on his hand, leg and foot, a bloody knife found in his truck, and the testimony of a witness who said he saw Hudson standing near Van Dyn Hoven’s body before getting into his truck and speeding away. For 17 years Hudson has maintained his innocence, saying Van Dyn Hoven was already stabbed when he found her. He said he fled the murder scene because he had a suspended driver’s license and marijuana on his person. He claims that, after his arrest, police poured a red substance onto his leg and foot. He alleges that the knife, which was behind the seat of his truck, was removed from its packaging, smeared with the victim’s blood and planted on the floor of his truck. Several inconsistencies seem t...

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit granted qualified immunity to Lowell Thomas Johnson and Raymond Rawson, the 2 bite mark specialists whose testimony helped convict Robert Lee Stinson of raping and murdering an elderly Wisconsin woman in 1984. Stinson spent 23 years in prison before DNA testing exonerated him in 2009. Further testing implicated a man named Moses Price, who then confessed to the crime. The only real evidence against Stinson was the testimony of Johnson and Rawson, who claimed they could match bite marks on the victim's body to Stinson, to the exclusion of everyone else. Johnson claimed that the marks on the woman "had to have been made by teeth identical in all of these characteristics" to Stinson's. Rawson claimed the marks matched Stinson's teeth "to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty." Stinson claims to have been severely beaten when he was arrested. Before trial, Stinson's attorneys ...

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) reintroduced legislation to abolish the death penalty at the federal level. According to the Senators April 2009 e-newsletter to his constituents, Feingold's Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act of 2009 would put an immediate halt to federal executions and forbid the use of capital punishment in cases where federal law is violated. Feingold states that he opposes the death penalty "because it is inconsistent with basic American principles of justice, liberty and equality." Wisconsin is 1 of 15 states that does not use the death penalty, having abolished capital punishment in 1853. In the past 2 years 3 states have enacted laws abandoning the practice. New Jersey and New York abolished capital punishment in 2007, and New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson signed a bill in March of this year ending capital punishment in that state. The use of the death penalty in the U.S. has been controversial for a long time. In 2007, the Am...