Advocating for Safe & Just Alternatives to the Death Penalty
Finding that the death penalty “is imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner,” a unanimous Washington Supreme Court has struck down the state’s capital-punishment statute as violating Washington’s state constitutional prohibition against “cruel punishment.” The court’s ruling, authored by Chief Justice Mary E. Fairhurst and issued on October 11, 2018, declared: “The death penalty, […]
Marking World Day Against the Death Penalty, the government of Malaysia on October 10, 2018 announced its intention to abolish capital punishment in the Muslim nation of 30 million people. A continent away, the Council of Europe and the European Union issued a joint declaration reaffirming Europe’s “strong opposition to capital punishment in all circumstances.” […]
Junk science is “enabling and perpetuating grave miscarriages of justice” in Texas death-penalty cases. So concludes Professor James Acker in his article, Snake Oil With A Bite: The Lethal Veneer of Science and Texas’s Death Penalty, published in the latest issue of the Albany Law Review. Acker’s article highlights the heightened risks of injustice from […]
The Tennessee Supreme Court heard oral argument on October 3, 2018 of an appeal brought by 32 death-row prisoners challenging the constitutionality of the state’s execution protocol. In a move criticized by one of the court’s justices as a “rocket docket,” the court removed the case from a lower court and set argument for one […]
American political commentator and Pulitzer Prize winner, George F. Will, is out with a fantastic new article in the Washington Post calling for the abolition of the death penalty. In the piece, Will details the case of an Alabama man, Vernon Madison, who the state has repeatedly tried to execute through unconstitutional means. Madison’s first […]
