Death Penalty News

We, the 3,800+ members of the group “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty” wish to respond respectfully to Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Lieberman’s Feb. 15th Jerusalem Post op-ed entitled “Should Israel execute Hamas terrorists for war crimes on par with the Nazis?” In his thoughtful, powerful and nuanced essay, Rabbi Dr. Lieberman expresses how difficult it has been for him as a rabbi and physician to even ask this question, given the sanctity of life to which he has devoted his laudable career. We profoundly honor Rabbi Dr. Lieberman’s sacred callings, as well as his courage in sharing his feelings so openly and vulnerably in the public square. We also empathize with his suffering and understand and respect his position. Indeed, like Jews everywhere, we too have been shocked beyond belief by the horror and barbarity that continue to unfold in the wake of the Oct. 7th, 2023 pogrom. The mutilated bodies of the youngest members of the Bibas family that Hamas just released are a palpable remi...

A former secretary who worked for the commander of a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted of complicity in the murders of more than 10,500 people. Irmgard Furchner, 97, was taken on as a teenaged shorthand typist at Stutthof and worked there from 1943 to 1945. Furchner, the first woman to be tried for Nazi crimes in decades, was given a two-year suspended jail term. Although she was a civilian worker, the judge agreed she was fully aware of what was going on at the camp. Some 65,000 people are thought to have died in horrendous conditions at Stutthof, including Jewish prisoners, non-Jewish Poles and captured Soviet soldiers. Furchner was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people and complicity in the attempted murder of five others. As she was only 18 or 19 at the time, she was tried in a special juvenile court. At Stutthof, located near the modern-day Polish city of Gdansk, a variety of methods was used to murder detainees and thousands died in gas chambers...

44 years after ASU student's brutal murder, family waits for justice. Her killer is scheduled for execution Wednesday. The family of Deana Bowdoin has waited 44 years for justice. Next week, the man who brutally murdered the 21-year-old Arizona State University honors student in 1978 is scheduled to be executed at the state prison in Florence. It's the 1st execution in Arizona in 8 years, and it casts a spotlight on what one critic has called the state's "relentless search" for ways to put condemned inmates to death. Arizona is moving ahead with executions again, even as most states are backing off. Over more than a decade, Arizona's search for new execution methods has skirted the law, seen the state refurbish a gas chamber, and operated largely behind a veil of secrecy. A botched execution in 2014 proved to be a turning point that tested the state's commitment to enforcing the death penalty. 'Gasping and gulping' One dose of a lethal injection wa...

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is again asking the Arizona Supreme Court to set briefing schedules for the execution of death row prisoners Frank Atwood and Clarence Dixon.  Once briefing schedules are established, the attorney general said in a statement his office would file warrants of execution for both men, an action which starts a strict timetable for legal responses, testing of execution drugs, and the carrying out of the death sentences. "Justice has been a long time coming in some of the most heinous crimes committed in our state,” Brnovich said in a statement. “It is our solemn duty to fulfill these court-ordered sentences on behalf of the victims, their loved ones, and our communities.” Atwood, 65, was sentenced in Pima County in 1987 for the murder of an 8-year-old girl, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson. Dixon, 65, was convicted in 2008 for the 1978 murder of Deana Bowdoin, a 21-year-old senior at Arizona State University found dead inside her apartment with a belt around...

This year the US saw the fewest executions since 1988, but those states sticking with judicial killings are displaying grotesque aberrations More than half the states in the US have either abolished the death penalty or have formal suspensions in place, as the country’s use of the brutal punishment continues to wither on the vine. When Virginia became the first southern state to scrap capital punishment in March, it raised to 23 the number of states that have abolished the practice outright. In a further three states, governors have imposed a moratorium on executions. Virginia’s seismic shift away from judicial killings has created a death penalty-free zone on the north-east seaboard of the US that runs from Maine’s border with Canada down to the edge of the Carolinas. A similar zone now runs all the way down the west coast of the US. The growing block of states where capital punishment is no longer welcome is one of the headline findings of the annual review of the Death Penalty In...

The history books are always ultimately our judge. But how many people must die before this savage practice is halted? I have watched 6 people die in front of me. All of them I knew well, as human beings. None had a fatal illness; they were simply slated for death by the US government. 2 died in the gas chamber, with Zyklon B, the nasty name given to the cyanide previously used in the Holocaust. 2 died in the electric chair, with 2,400 volts of electricity running from the skull to the ankle, the most overtly savage way imaginable to kill someone. And 2 on the lethal injection gurney, a deceptively unpleasant way to die – else why would the 2nd injection be a paralytic agent to prevent the witnesses from watching a man in agony in front of them? I went to the US in 1978 to battle capital punishment. I have spent a lifetime opposing it. When people ask me what I think the strongest argument is against executions, I tell them they are asking the wrong question: of course it’s not a deter...

The Arizona Supreme Court has rejected the efforts of Arizona prosecutors to expedite the executions of two death-row prisoners and further limit appeals judicial review of legal issues in their cases. The Arizona Attorney General’s office had sought to shorten judicial review in the cases of death-row prisoners Frank Atwood and Clarence Dixon after learning that the shelf life of the drugs it intended to use in the executions would expire before the executions could be carried out. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich urged the state court in April 2021 to set expedited filing deadlines in advance of issuing execution warrants for Atwood and Dixon so the courts could review the prisoners’ challenges to Arizona’s lethal-injection protocol and other legal issues in their cases in the 90-day window before the pentobarbital the Arizona Department of Corrections Rehabilitation and Reentry (ADCRR) spent $1.5 million to obtain went bad. The compressed schedule was necessary, Brnovich said...

As South Carolina and Arizona prepare to resume executions using gruesome methods of the past, Alabama prosecutors say the state is nearly ready to perform executions using a new, untested method, nitrogen hypoxia. In court filings on June 8, 2021, in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, the Alabama Attorney General’s office said the Alabama Department of Corrections “is nearing completion of the initial physical build for the nitrogen hypoxia system and its safety measures.”  “Once the build is completed,” prosecutors wrote, “a safety expert will make a site visit to evaluate the system and look for any points of concern that need to be addressed.” The filings, which came in the case of a prisoner who is seeking to have a spiritual advisor present during his execution, did not indicate whether Alabama intended to carry out nitrogen-gas executions by flooding a specially constructed chamber with the gas or by administering a lethal dose of the gas through a b...

"We're basically saying what the Nazis did was OK," said Phoenix Holocaust Association vice president Janice Friebaum. Major Jewish organizations have harshly condemned a recent measure by the US state of Arizona to execute death row convicts through the use of a Zyklon B gas chamber, the same poison used by the Nazis to kill Jews in concentration camps during the Holocaust. The state has had a gas chamber since 1949, and since then it has only been used twice, the most recent of which was in 1999 to execute German national Walter LaGrand. The use of Zyklon B is seen by the state as being an "upgrade" of their preexisting gas chamber. Jewish organizations have come out against this, however, and have drawn comparisons to its use in the Holocaust. "Uniformly, Holocaust survivors and their descendants are nothing short of horrified of this form of execution being utilized," said Janice Friebaum, vice president of the Phoenix Holocaust Association whose f...