Fourteen years ago, the Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment issued a report recommending 85 reforms designed to minimize the possibility that an innocent person would
Angela Corey, the Florida State Attorney for the Fourth Judicial Circuit, whose jurisdiction included Duval County, which had the highest number of death sentences per
“I described to the jury how I had to tell my six-year old daughter that she would never see her daddy again. I told them about her putting a flower on the coffin, hugging his coffin. I pulled no punches, let me tell you. I made that jury understand how much pain I was in, how much pain my family was in. I was very persuasive.”
A man who was wrongfully convicted of murder in New Orleans, and served 18 years, 14 on death row, in Angola State Prison before being
Last week, the Delaware Supreme Court issued an order declaring that the state’s death penalty law was unconstitutional. This makes Delaware the 20th state (plus
“If putting him to death would bring my mama back, I’d want him dead. But that won’t happen, so what’s the point of killing him? I’m just trying to do the best I can and honor the memory of my mama. I believe in my heart she wouldn’t want this boy put to death.”
In Utah, legislators are planning to introduce a bill that would “fast-track” the death penalty appeals process to compete with a bill calling for repeal
Former President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter. California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. Former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp. Former California Supreme Court Justice
Quin Denvir, a long-time criminal defense attorney — with significant stints as the State Public Defender and the Federal Defender for the Eastern District of California
“I have represented several death row inmates who were able to avoid execution, and I lost one, Tom Thompson. He was very likely innocent of capital murder, and his case has been chronicled by Judge Reinhardt as a miscarriage of justice.”
“I’m doing the best I can through letters,” Nancy remembers. “I just kept thinking that they’re going to figure out they’ve got the wrong guy. And Mom wrote that everything was going to be fine.”
“Enough of a flawed system that disproportionately targets minorities; that cannot prevent the killing of innocents; that doesn’t have any impact on crime rates, that
Dear Supporters, A couple of years ago, campaigning with the New Hampshire Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, I met Republican State Sen. Kevin Avard,
Charles Ray Finch left North Carolina’s Greene Correctional Institution in a wheelchair last Thursday, 42 years after first being sentenced to death for a crime
Florida plans to kill Bobby Joe Long tomorrow for the murder of Michelle Sims in 1984, although he pleaded guilty to killing eight women and
(Tennessee is planning to execute Don Johnson tonight for the murder of his wife, Connie, in 1984. Johnson is a very different man from the
Douglas Stankewitz, the longest serving prisoner on California’s death row, was re-sentenced to life without parole last Friday. Stankewitz, who is 60, was sentenced to
It was the first death sentence a Georgia jury has delivered in five years, and it was handed down last week to a woman who
Seventeen years after the U.S. Supreme Court found in Atkins v. Virginia that executing intellectually disabled prisoners constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of
Five years after a statewide task force appointed to study Ohio’s death penalty released a report with 56 recommendations to improve the state’s deeply flawed
In Virginia, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld a district court ruling that death row prisoners’ long-term detention in solitary confinement creates a
