16 January 2021 :

Dustin Higgs was executed by lethal injection at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. EST on January 16.

The Trump administration executed Dustin Higgs, 48, early Saturday morning, shortly after the Supreme Court lifted a stay from a lower court.
The government killed Higgs with a lethal injection of pentobarbital, over objections by his lawyers that lung damage from his recent bout of COVID-19 could make the execution extraordinarily painful. They had asked that the execution be delayed until his lungs recovered.
Higgs was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. EST at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
He was the 13th person executed under President Donald Trump’s unprecedented execution spree, and the third to die during Trump’s final week in office. Lisa Montgomery, who was the only woman on federal death row, was killed on Wednesday morning, and Corey Johnson, who had an intellectual disability and was also recovering from COVID-19, was put to death on Thursday. The final two executions took place after Trump was impeached, for the second time, for inciting violent rioters to storm the U.S. Capitol.
One-third of the justices on the Supreme Court — which has repeatedly overturned decisions by lower courts to halt executions — were appointed by Trump. The decision to allow Higgs’s execution to proceed came down to a 6-3 split, with the liberal justices opposing the move.
Higgs, who is Black, was executed just four days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who has said he will work to end the death penalty. Until the very end of his life, Higgs maintained his innocence.
In the months leading up to his execution, Higgs’s lawyers filed a flurry of appeals in an attempt to spare his life.
In December, he contracted COVID-19, as the virus swept through the prison complex in Terre Haute, where death row is located. At one point, the penitentiary had more cases of COVID-19 than any other federal prison in the country.
Higgs and Corey Johnson, who was also sick with the coronavirus, sued to stop their executions, arguing that recent lung damage from COVID-19 made it more likely they would feel excruciating pain during the execution.
When individuals are injected with a lethal amount of pentobarbital, it can cause pulmonary edema ― a condition in which fluid enters the lungs while the person is still conscious — inducing a painful sensation similar to suffocating or drowning. Medical experts have warned that receiving an overdose of pentobarbital would likely be even more painful for individuals recovering from COVID-19 because the virus often damages the lungs.
Both men received stays of execution earlier this week after a federal judge found those concerns credible. But higher courts overruled those decisions, allowing the executions to go forward.
A separate class-action lawsuit filed by two prisoners at Terre Haute — who are not on death row — sought to stop the executions on the grounds that holding such large gatherings at the prison complex risked their lives by potentially exposing them to COVID-19.
The men asked for all executions to be halted until the pandemic was over or until they had been vaccinated. A federal judge ruled that the Bureau of Prisons could continue with the executions as long as staff followed COVID-19 protocols, such as wearing masks. But during Johnson’s execution on Thursday night, witnesses reported that two people working the execution did not wear a mask the entire time they were in the chamber.
On Friday, the two non-death row prisoners asked a judge to stop Higgs’s execution or ban the staffers who had removed their masks from participating, arguing the government had violated the court’s order. In response, the government admitted masks came off but claimed it was briefly so staffers could communicate clearly. The government argued it wasn’t a violation of the court’s order because the order did not explicitly define “mask requirements.”
The judge sided with the government and allowed Higgs’s execution to proceed as planned.
Higgs, 48, Black, was sentenced to death on October 26, 2000 for his role in the January 1996 murders of three women in Maryland. 19-year-old Tamika Black, 21-year-old Tanji Jackson, and 23-year-old Mishann Chinn, were all shot and killed at a federal wildlife center (Patuxent Wildlife Research Center), in Maryland. Because the murders occurred on the Patuxent Research Refuge, which is classed as federal land, Higgs was tried by the federal government rather than by the state of Maryland.
The main controversy surrounding Higgs's case is that Higgs did not personally kill any of the three victims. The man who fatally shot all three women to death, Willis Mark Haynes, was sentenced to life without parole plus 45 years, while Higgs, who remained in a vehicle when the killings took place, received a death sentence. The prosecution argues that although Higgs did not kill anyone, he was the ringleader, and not only ordered Haynes to kill the women but bullied him into it.
Higgs and Haynes were tried separately in 2000. A third man, Victor Gloria, pleaded guilty to being an accessory-after-the-fact to the killings, a charge that only carried a maximum penalty of fifteen years in prison.
Gloria cut a deal however and in exchange for his testimony against Higgs and Haynes on November 22, 2000, he was sentenced to seven years. His testimony was the main piece of evidence used in Higgs's trial. Gloria was released on February 4, 2006.
In his final statement, Higgs was calm but defiant, mentioning the victims by name. “I’d like to say I am an innocent man,” he said. “I did not order the murders.”

Higgs could become the last person who will be executed by the United States federal government before a long pause. Despite being in favor of capital punishment in the past, president-elect of the United States Joe Biden opposes capital punishment in the United States, meaning it is highly unlikely anyone else will be executed by the federal government during his presidential term.

Higgs becomes the 13th person executed by the federal system under the Trump administration, the 16th executed by the federal government since it resumed executions in 2001, the 3rd person executed this year in the United States, and the No. 1,532 since the United States reintroduced the death penalty in 1976 and resumed executions in 1977.

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-wildlife-coronavirus-pandemic-crime-terre-haute-28e44cc5c026dc16472751bbde0ead50

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/16/957559566/u-s-executes-dustin-higgs-in-13th-and-final-execution-under-trump-administration?t=1610782357604

15 January 2021 :

Corey Johnson was executed by lethal injection at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was pronounced dead at 11:34 p.m. ET on January 14.
Johnson was sentenced to die in 1993 after he was convicted of killing seven people in 1992 as a part of the drug trade in Virginia. The weeks preceding his execution were defined by a tense legal battle after he contracted Covid-19 while on death row.
In his final statement, Johnson apologized for his crimes and told the families of the victims that he hoped they would find peace. He also thanked the staff at the prison, the prison's chaplain, his minister and his legal team.
The Supreme Court denied a last-ditch effort late Thursday by Johnson's legal team that leaned on claims of an intellectual disability and his Covid-19 diagnosis, arguing that his infection paired with a lethal injection would amount to a cruel and unusual punishment.
That appeal came after an appellate court on Wednesday tossed out a lower court's decision to stay the executions of Johnson and another death row inmate who contracted the virus, Dustin Higgs, whose execution is scheduled to take place Friday.
Johnson's legal team has also said that he has an IQ of 69, which would be lower than one standard offered by the Supreme Court as a guide for states weighing whether such an execution met the Constitution's cruel and unusual punishment standards.
"He is a person with intellectual disability who cannot constitutionally be executed," Salzman argued Thursday morning. "The government should withdraw Corey's execution date, or President Trump should grant him clemency."
According to the US Justice Department, Johnson and several co-conspirators were partners between 1989 and 1992 in a "large drug-trafficking conspiracy" based in Richmond, Virginia.
As part of their operation, the department said, Johnson murdered seven people (Peyton Johnson, Louis Johnson, Bobby Long, Dorothy Armstrong, Anthony Carter, Linwood Chiles and Curtis Thorne) over "perceived slights or rivalry in the drug trade".
Johnson was found guilty of seven counts of capital murder in 1993, with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia jury unanimously recommending seven death sentences.
Thursday's execution, six days before President-elect Joe Biden takes office, coincides with a new push from more than three dozen members of Congress for Biden's incoming administration to prioritize abolishing the death penalty in all jurisdictions.
While Biden has pledged to abolish the federal death penalty and to give incentives to states to stop seeking death sentences as a part of his criminal justice plan, 40 members of Congress want to make sure the practice ends on his first day in office.
As part of his final words, Johnson made mention of his last meal.
"The pizza and strawberry shake were wonderful, but I didn't get the jelly-filled donuts that I ordered," he said. "What's with that? This should be fixed."
Johnson becomes the 12th person executed by the federal system since last year, the 15th executed by the federal government since it resumed executions in 2001, the 2nd person executed this year in the United States and the No. 1,531 since the United States reintroduced the death penalty in 1976 and resumed executions in 1977.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/14/politics/corey-johnson-executed/index.html#:~:text=Federal%20government%20executes%20Corey%20Johnson%20following%20prolonged%20legal%20fight&text=(CNN)%20Corey%20Johnson%20was%20executed,34%20p.m.%20ET%20on%20Thursday.

13 January 2021 :

Lisa Montgomery was executed.
Montgomery, 52, White, was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m. Wednesday after receiving a lethal injection at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. She was the 11th prisoner to receive a lethal injection there since July when President Donald Trump, an ardent supporter of capital punishment, resumed federal executions following 17 years without one.
It came after hours of legal wrangling before the Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution to move forward. Montgomery was the first of the final three federal inmates scheduled to die before next week’s inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who is expected to discontinue federal executions.
An appeals court granted Montgomery a stay of execution Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court lifted an Indiana judge’s ruling that found she was likely mentally ill and couldn’t comprehend she would be put to death. But both appeals were lifted, allowing the execution of the only female on federal death row to go forward.
As the execution process began, a woman standing over Montgomery’s shoulder leaned over, gently removed Montgomery’s face mask and asked her if she had any last words. “No,” Montgomery responded in a quiet, muffled voice. She said nothing else.
Kelley Henry, Montgomery's federal public defender, expressed her disappointment in the day's events, saying the federal government violated the Constitution, federal law and its own regulation to put her client to death.
“The craven bloodlust of a failed administration was on full display tonight. Everyone who participated in the execution of Lisa Montgomery should feel shame," she said in a statement provided to IndyStar of the USA TODAY Network after midnight.
Two other executions set for later this week also were halted because the inmates tested positive for COVID-19. The executions were to be the last before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the federal death penalty, is sworn-in next week.
A federal judge for the U.S. District of Columbia halted the scheduled executions later this week of Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs in a ruling Tuesday. Johnson, convicted of killing seven people related to his drug trafficking in Virginia, and Higgs, convicted of ordering the murders of three women in Maryland, both tested positive for COVID-19 last month.
The last woman executed by the federal government was Bonnie Brown Heady on Dec. 18, 1953, for the kidnapping and murder of a 6-year-old boy in Missouri.
The last woman executed by a state was Kelly Gissendaner, 47, on Sept. 30, 2015, in Georgia. She was convicted of murder in the 1997 slaying of her husband after she conspired with her lover, who stabbed Douglas Gissendaner to death.
Lisa Montgomery becomes the 11th person executed since last year by the federal system, the 14th executed by the federal government since it resumed executions in 2001, the 1st person executed this year in the United States, and the No. 1,529 since the United States reintroduced the death penalty in 1976 and resumed executions in 1977. Montgomery is the 4th inmate in 130 years to be executed during the transition period between two presidents, when, by custom, the outgoing government only handles routine business or, on the contrary, particular emergencies.

https://apnews.com/article/2-federal-executions-halted-d29e4250646d5e177df53efa64da6163

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/12/lisa-montgomery-first-us-execution-female-inmate-67-years-halted/6635530002/

24 February 2021 :

The U.N. human rights chief on 23 February 2021 welcomed a pledge by U.S. President Joe Biden to work towards abolishing the death penalty in the United States.
Biden, a Democrat, promised voters last year he would seek to end the federal death penalty, and took office last month as the country’s first abolitionist president.
“I welcome the pledge by the new U.S. Administration to work towards ending the death penalty, both at federal and state level,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said.
The punishment at a federal level was revived by Donald Trump last year after a 17-year hiatus caused in part by the increasing difficulty of obtaining drugs for lethal injections.
Merrick Garland, Biden’s nominee for U.S. attorney-general, on 22 February told Congress his support for the death penalty had eroded amid concerns it disproportionately affected Black Americans and other communities of colour and that too many were wrongfully convicted.
“Deterrence is often an argument of those who oppose its abolition. However, there is no evidence that it deters crime more effectively than any other punishment,” Bachelet said during a U.N. Human Rights Council debate.
“On the contrary, studies suggest that some states that have abolished the death penalty saw their murder rates unaltered or even decline,” she said.
The U.S. delegation, which has observer status, did not speak at the debate, held every two years.
The “vast majority” of countries have abolished the death penalty in law or do not carry out executions in practice, Bachelet said.
Iran and Saudi Arabia, among the top five countries carrying out executions according to Amnesty International, defended the practice during the debate as being only for the most serious offences, in line with sharia law.

22 December 2021 :

2021 Year End Report from the Death Penalty Information Center. 11 executions and 18 new death sentences in 1 year.
Virginia’s historic abolition of the death penalty highlighted a year in which support for capital punishment continued to erode, according to the 2021 Year End Report from the Death Penalty Information Center. Executions, death sentences, and public support for capital punishment were all at or near historic lows in 2021, the report said, while the executions and new death sentences that did take place exposed deep flaws in the administration of the nation’s capital punishment system.
Virginia, which had carried out more executions since colonial times than any other state in the country, became the first Southern state to end the practice. Abolition efforts explicitly linked the death penalty to the state’s history of slavery, lynchings, and Jim Crow segregation. The repeal made Virginia the 23rd state to legislatively or judicially abolish the death penalty, and the 11th to do so this century. Twenty-six states now have abolished the death penalty or imposed gubernatorial moratoria on executions and 34 have abolished capital punishment or not carried out an execution in more than a decade.
“The death penalty grew increasingly geographically isolated in 2021,” said Robert Dunham, DPIC’s Executive Director. “Virginia’s repeal created a death-penalty-free zone along the U.S. Atlantic coast that now runs from the Canadian border of Maine to the northern border of the Carolinas. In the west, an execution-free zone spans the Pacific coast from Alaska to Mexico. The handful of states that continue to push for capital punishment are outliers that often disregard due process, botch executions, and dwell in the shadows of long histories of racism and a biased criminal legal system.”
Executions, which peaked in 1999 with 98, have declined to 11 this year, the fewest since 1988. Only five states and the federal government carried out executions in 2021.
The 18 death sentences imposed as of December 16 matched 2020’s record low. Just three states — Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama — accounted for a majority of both executions and new death sentences in 2021, and just five counties — Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, and Bexar in Texas, and Oklahoma County in Oklahoma — now account for 20% of all executions in the United States in the past fifty years.
The few executions that were conducted went forward with apparent disregard for due process, judicial review of execution methods, or potentially meritorious claims of intellectual disability, incompetence to be executed, and innocence. Ten of the eleven people executed had one or more significant mental impairments (serious mental illness, brain damage or IQ in the intellectually disabled range, and/or chronic trauma). One execution was botched, another was carried out without media witnesses present, and three people who met the clinical definition of intellectual disability and so were constitutionally ineligible for the death penalty were executed without any diagnostically appropriate judicial review of their claims.
7 states imposed 18 new death sentences in 2021 — tying a record low. Alabama and Oklahoma imposed four each. California and Texas both imposed 3. Florida imposed 2 and Nebraska and Tennessee 1 each.
The year’s new death sentences were also badly flawed, with more than a quarter (27.8%) imposed either by non-unanimous juries or by judges after defendants waived jury sentencing or in states that denied defendants the right to a sentencing jury.
The Trump administration concluded its execution spree, carrying out three executions in the ten days before the inauguration of President Biden. The thirteen executions performed in a six-month period from July 2020 to January 2021 were historically anomalous in numerous ways, including the most executions ever carried out during a presidential transition period. In June, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a formal pause on all federal executions while the Department of Justice undertook a review of changes in executive branch death-penalty policies implemented under the Trump Department of Justice.
Two more innocent people were exonerated from death row in 2021. A DPIC study uncovered 11 additional exonerations, bringing the total number of death-row exonerations to 186. One person has been exonerated from death row for every 8.3 executions. Several prisoners with strong innocence claims also made news in 2021. Julius Jones came within four hours of execution in Oklahoma before Governor Kevin Stitt granted clemency, reducing his sentence to life without parole. Pervis Payne was removed from death row in Tennessee as a result of his intellectual disability, and continues to pursue further review of his innocence claims.
Public opinion polls and an historical index of polling on capital punishment found that support for the death penalty in the United States was the lowest it has been in a half-century. An index of nearly 600 death-penalty public opinion surveys conducted over the course of 75 years indicated that public support for capital punishment has steadily declined since the 1990s and was lower in 2021 than at any time since 1966. The 2021 Gallup poll measured public support for the death penalty at a half-century low, with 54% of respondents to the organization’s annual crime survey saying that they were “in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder.”

The Death Penalty in 2021: Year End Report | Death Penalty Information Center

20 December 2021 :

2021 Gallup Poll: Public Support for Capital Punishment Remains at Half-Century Low
Public support for the death penalty again polled at a half-century low, with opposition remaining at its highest level since May 1966, according to the 2021 Gallup poll on Americans’ attitudes about capital punishment.
Fifty-four percent of respondents to Gallup’s annual crime survey conducted between October 1 and October 19, 2021 told the polling organization that they were “in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder.” The figure was the lowest since 50% of respondents in March 1972 told Gallup they favored the death penalty. Gallup described the results as “essentially unchanged from readings over the past four years.” Support was marginally lower than the 55% reported in October 2017 and 2020, and two percentage points lower than in October 2018 and 2019.
Support for capital punishment has declined 26 percentage points from the high of 80% reported in Gallup’s September 1994 crime survey.
Forty-three percent of respondents told Gallup that they were opposed to the death penalty as a punishment for murder, matching the responses reported in the 2020 death penalty poll.
Opposition to capital punishment was the highest in 55 years, since 47% of Americans expressed opposition to capital punishment in the May 1966 Gallup survey. The number was marginally higher than the 42% level of opposition reported in 2019 and two percentage points higher than in 2017 and 2018.
The results followed the continuing pattern of declining death-penalty support found in the organization’s polling.
“A different death penalty question Gallup has asked occasionally, though not in the latest poll, finds lower support for the death penalty when life imprisonment with no possibility of parole is offered as an explicit alternative,” Gallup Senior Editor Jeffrey M. Jones said. “That question also shows declining support for the death penalty compared with the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s,” Jones said.
In Gallup’s 2019 crime survey, a record-high 60% percent of Americans asked to choose whether the death penalty or life without possibility of parole “is the better penalty for murder” chose the life-sentencing option. 36% favored the death penalty.
The Gallup topline numbers found substantial differences in support for capital punishment based on a respondent’s gender, race, age, political affiliation, and political ideology. Support for capital punishment dropped among women, respondents of color, younger and older Americans, Republicans, and Democrats. Support rose among those aged 35-54, college graduates, Independents, and moderates. It remained essentially unchanged among other demographic groups.
In the 2021 poll, 59% of men said they were in favor of the death penalty (the same as in 2020), while opposition was down one percentage point to 38%. By contrast, 50% of women favored and 48% opposed capital punishment, compared with 52%–47% in 2020.
Whites favored the death penalty 59%–38%, compared to 60%–39% in 2020. Non-whites opposed capital punishment 53%–45%, up two percentage points in each category from the previous year.
Opposition to the death penalty rose by 3 percentage points among younger Americans, while support fell by 7 percentage points. 55% of respondents to the 2021 crime survey aged 18-34, said they opposed the death penalty versus 41% who expressed support. In 2020, the numbers were 52%–48%. By contrast, support for the death penalty rose among respondents aged 35-54 from 53%–44% in the 2020 survey to 58%–41% in 2021. Support for capital punishment declined slightly among Americans 55 and older from 63%–35% in 2020 to 61%–36% in 2021.
Level of education also affected views on the death penalty, although not as much as in past years. Support for the death penalty increased by 5 percentage points and opposition fell by 6 percentage points among college graduates between the 2020 and 2021 crime surveys. In the 2020 crime survey, college graduates opposed capital punishment 53%­–45%; in 2021, they favored it 50%–47%. Those with some college education and those with a high school education or less both supported the death penalty 57%–41%. The numbers marked a slight decline in support, from 59%–40%, among those with some college education, but declined significantly among respondents with a high school education or less, who in 2020 supported the death penalty 62%–37%.
The greatest differences in Americans’ views continued to be along partisan and ideological lines, though support fell among both left and right while rising in the center. Support among those self-identifying remained strong, with 77% of Republicans saying they favored the death penalty, while 22% expressed opposition. However, the numbers represented a 5 percentage point shift from 2020 levels, when Republican overwhelmingly favored the death penalty by 82%–17%. Democrats underwent a comparable shift away from the death penalty, with 66% saying they opposed capital punishment versus 34% in support. In 2020, Democrats opposed the death penalty by 58%–39%. At the same time, those identifying as Independents moved in the other direction. While Independents narrowly opposed the death penalty, 50%–49% in 2020, they favored it by 55%–41% in 2021.
Those identifying themselves as conservatives were less supportive of capital punishment than those identifying as Republicans, with 70% saying they were in favor of the death penalty versus 27% saying they were opposed. That represented small declines both in support and in opposition from their views in 2020 (72%–28%). Those describing themselves as liberal opposed the death penalty, 69%–28%, up from 67%– 32% in 2020. By contrast, support for capital punishment increased among those identifying themselves as moderate by two percentage points, 57%–41%, compared to 55%-42% in 2020.

2021 Gallup Poll: Public Support for Capital Punishment Remains at Half-Century Low | Death Penalty Information Center

Death Penalty Support Holding at Five-Decade Low (gallup.com)

28 October 2021 :

Published the latest edition of "Death Row USA" updated to April 1, 2021.
After 20 Years of Decline, Spring 2021 Death-Row Population Matches Level in 1991
The number of people on death row or facing possible capital resentencing across the United States now matches a three-decade low, according to data compiled by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and analyzed by the Death Penalty Information Center.
The Spring 2021 edition of LDF’s Death Row USA (DRUSA), the organization’s quarterly death-row census, reports that 2,504 people were imprisoned on state, federal, or military death rows in the United States or still faced jeopardy of death in pending capital retrial or resentencing proceedings on April 1, 2021, matching the total LDF reported in August 1991 as death row was climbing towards its peak of 3,717 people in July 2001. The number of people sentenced to death or facing reimposition of the death penalty in pending capital proceedings has declined by 32.6% since that time and has fallen every year since 2001.
The capital convictions or death sentences of 223 people listed in the LDF report have been overturned, leaving roughly one in eleven cases awaiting retrial or resentencing or with grants of relief still subject to prosecutorial appeal. Excluding those individuals, the number people in the United States facing active death sentences fell to 2,281.
34.4% (861 people) of those on death row or facing capital resentencing as of April 1, 2021 were in states with moratoria on executions. Including those in other states whose whose death sentences have been reversed, LDF calculated that there were 1,036 currently unenforceable death sentences, comprising 41.4% of all active cases in which a death sentence has been imposed. LDF reported that 1,468 death-row prisoners had currently enforceable death sentences.
California’s death row declined to 704 prisoners but remained by far the largest in the nation. It was followed by Florida (343), Texas (205), and Alabama (170). Nationwide, 42.4% of death-row prisoners were white, 41.3% were Black, 13.5% Latinx, 1.8% Asian, and 1.0% were Native American. Among states with at least 10 prisoners on death row, Nebraska (75.0%), Texas (72.7%), Louisiana (72.4%), California (67.2%) and Pennsylvania (62.4%) were the states with the highest percentage of individuals of color on death row. Two percent of all death-row prisoners are women.
LDF released its Spring 2021 report on August 31, 2021.
The April 1, 2021 report includes the following statistics:
The number of prisoners on death rows or facing capital retrials or resentencings across the nation was 2,504, a decrease of 24 from January 1, 2021. It was down by 99 (3.8%) from the 2,603 reported on April 1, 2020. The convictions or death sentences of 223 death-row prisoners had been reversed pending retrial, resentencing, or completion of the appeals process.
That left 2,281 prisoners facing active death sentences, a decrease of 25 from the previous quarter, and down 92 (3.9%) from the 2,373 prisoners facing active death sentences on April 1, 2010.
34.4% of those on U.S. death row (861 prisoners) were in states with moratoria on executions, a decrease of 6 from the previous quarter. That left 1,468 prisoners in 25 states, or 58.6% of death row, with death sentences LDF classified as active and enforceable.
Jurisdictions with the most prisoners on death row:
California (704)
Florida (343)
Texas (205)
Alabama (170)
North Carolina (141)
Ohio (137)
Pennsylvania (133)
Arizona (118)
Jurisdictions (having 10 or more death-row prisoners) with the highest percent of minorities on death row:
Nebraska (75.0%)
Texas (72.7%)
Louisiana (72.36%)
California (67.2%)
Pennsylvania (62.4%)
Mississippi (61.0%)
North Carolina (60.3%)
Georgia (57.8%)
Ohio (57.7%)
U.S. Gov’t (56.5%)

DRUSA SPRING 2010 Tabled version (00021413-2).DOC (naacpldf.org)

23 October 2021 :

Azibo Aquart, the last federal inmate on death row from Connecticut, is spared execution, sentenced instead to life in prison. Azibo Aquart, now 40 years old, Black, was 23 in 2005 when he and others in his drug crew kidnapped three people he considered rivals, wrapped them in duct tape with only their eyes and noses uncovered and beat them to death with baseball bats. He was convicted in 2011 of more than a half dozen murder, racketeering and drug crimes. He was sentenced to death a year later and imprisoned on death row at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. A federal appeals court in New York reversed the death sentence in 2018 finding that prosecutors had improperly questioned an FBI agent during the trial. The appeals court ordered Aquart resentenced. After federal prosecutors decided against pursuing a second death sentence, U.S. Judge Janet Bond Arterton imposed the only alternative under the law, which is life in prison. She sentenced Aquart to life sentences on three of the murder counts and 40 years in three others, with another 50 years on conspiracy and drug dealing charges. The judge ordered the sentences to be imposed concurrently.

Connecticut abolished capital punishment for state crimes in 2015 and closed down the state’s death row. On the Aquart case se also HoC 17/12/2012 and 20/12/2018

https://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/2021/10/usa-last-federal-inmate-on-death-row.html

13 October 2021 :

Homicides increased by 29% in 2020, the year of Covid, but also of Black Lives Matter. The US last year endured the highest increase in murders since the FBI started tracking national crime records in 1960, a report said. In 2020, there were about 5,000 more homicides across the country than a year earlier — for a total of roughly 21,500, according to preliminary FBI data reviewed by The New York Times. Breaking the numbers down, the US saw a 30 percent rise in murders last year, well-above the previous record increase of 12.7 percent in 1968, according to the report. The grim data is set to be released by the FBI on Monday as part of the agency’s annual Uniform Crime Report. An overwhelming majority — 77 percent — of murders last year were committed with guns, which represents another record high number. The bloodshed was widespread, and the increase was seen in every US region last year, the report said. Big cities were particularly hard-hit. Those with populations over 100,000 that reported full data saw a 35 percent increase in killings. Despite the astronomical rise in murders compared to 2019, the number of killings is still far below the rates experienced in the US in the early 1990s, the report said.
Additional research suggests murders have continued to rise in many major cities this year, although at a slower rate.
Criminologists have been aware of the spike in homicides since it first emerged last summer, but the FBI data affirmed that the trend spread nationwide, seemingly without clear correlation to local policies or conditions. The frequency of several other types of crime declined at the same time, further complicating the analysis.
The shift was most pronounced in large cities, with communities larger than 100,000 people experiencing increases of more than 35%, but homicides were also up by an average of 25% in cities with fewer than 25,000 residents. According to the FBI, murders rose by at least 20% in every geographical region of the country.
Experts say it is difficult to attribute crime trends to specific causes, but there are several factors that likely contributed to the increase in homicides. Murder rates were already climbing in the early months of 2020, but they surged upward in the late spring and summer as communities began to ease COVID-19 shutdowns and protests against police over the killing of George Floyd intensified across the country.
“We assume much of it is just pandemic-related,” said Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor of law and police science at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “We have a lot of the mental health stressors that lead to violence, specifically gun violence.”
The economic, social, and emotional strain of the pandemic and closures of businesses and schools appear to have had a significant impact, as did temporary disruptions of community services that assist those who are at high risk to commit crimes. Experts have also pointed to a possible scaling back of proactive policing and a delegitimizing of law enforcement in some communities.
“We know the pandemic played a significant role in crime trends both positive and negative last year, but it’s very hard to untangle exactly how that worked,” said Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice and author of “Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets.”
According to the Council on Criminal Justice, murder rates did not rise in many other countries during the pandemic, suggesting at least some aspects of the problem are uniquely American. Legal firearm purchases and trafficking of illegal firearms in the U.S. surged, but it is not clear if the presence of more guns directly led to more shootings.
The pandemic forced jails to release inmates to prevent overcrowding and many court proceedings were delayed, but there is little evidence people who were released reoffended in large numbers. The broad increase in homicides across the country also casts doubt on claims that cuts to police department funding or progressive bail reforms in some cities played a major role.
Despite the alarming rise in homicides, overall crime rates continued to fall for the 18th straight year in 2020 as thefts and certain other crimes declined. That also appears to be pandemic-related, with restrictions on businesses and social activity limiting opportunities for some types of crime to occur for much of the year.
“We know that, while there was a spike in violent crime, there wasn’t a spike in crime generally,” Abt said. “Property crime and drug crime declined significantly during the pandemic.”
According to data collected from 87 cities by analyst Jeff Asher, murder rates are up by an average of about 10% so far this year compared to the same period last year. Variations from one community to another are stark, though, and some major cities like New York, Seattle, and Dallas have seen homicides fall in 2021.
Other cities are grappling with tragic waves of violence, with dozens of people shot every weekend in Chicago and places like Milwaukee and Austin facing their highest homicide rates on record. Oakland, California topped 100 homicides for the year Monday for the first time in nearly a decade, up from 66 murders at this point last year.
The fact that the trend appears to be decelerating overall indicates the nation is moving beyond some of the influences that drove the increase last year. However, experts say the numbers for 2021 so far are still troubling, and communities should look to implement new strategies to reduce violence.

https://nypost.com/2021/09/22/us-saw-record-increase-in-murders-in-2020/

https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/fbi-us-homicides-rose-by-nearly-30-in-2020-amid-pandemic

27 September 2021 :

September 22, 2021

In the Extreme: Women Serving Life Without Parole and Death Sentences in the United States
Today the Alice Project – a collaboration among The Sentencing Project, the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, and the Cornell University Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide – released a new report analyzing extreme sentences imposed on thousands of women in the U.S.
1 of every 15 women in prison – amounting to more than 6,600 women – is serving a life sentence. Of these, 2,000 women are serving life without parole (LWOP). Another 52 women in the U.S. are awaiting execution.
Since 2008, the number of women serving LWOP has grown an alarming 43 percent. Florida, Pennsylvania, California, Michigan, Louisiana, and Mississippi lead the nation in the use of this hopeless sentence. California outpaces all other states in the number of women on death row.
Racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal legal system are tightly linked to disparities in the racial composition of women serving extreme sentences. More than 4 in 10 women on death row are people of color. And, one of every 39 Black women in prison is serving LWOP.
Analysis of homicide arrest data finds that women who commit homicide do so somewhat later in life than men. Whereas 48% of men who reportedly commit homicide are under age 25 at the time of their offense, nearly two thirds of women are at least 25 years old when they commit homicide.
As for the crimes ascribed to women with LWOP, 76% were convicted of 1st degree murder, 17% of 2nd degree murder, 3% of murder (other, non-negligent), 2% of sexual assault, and 1% for aggravated assault. Some women were also sentenced for drug offenses, robbery, property crimes (theft), and kidnapping.
Many women facing extreme sentences experienced trauma and abuse prior to their imprisonment. A majority of the women have endured sexual and/or domestic violence, and the legal system has consistently failed to take their experiences into account. Imprisonment often exacerbates their trauma.
In the Extreme: Women Serving Life Without Parole and Death Sentences in the United States is authored by Ashley Nellis, Ph.D., Senior Research Analyst at The Sentencing Project. The report is a joint publication of The Sentencing Project, National Black Women’s Justice Institute and the Cornell University Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide who together in 2020 formed the Alice Project. The collaboration seeks to highlight the experiences of incarcerated women and girls, expose the influence of racial and gender bias on extreme sentencing, and reduce reliance on extreme punishments.

https://yubanet.com/life/in-the-extreme-women-serving-life-without-parole-and-death-sentences-in-the-united-states/  

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/in-the-extreme-women-serving-life-without-parole-and-death-sentences-in-the-united-states/

24 September 2021 :

Appeals Panel Overturns Army Judge’s Ruling on Torture. The decision on a case at the Guantánamo war court did not resolve the broader issue of whether prosecutors can use evidence obtained through torture.
A Pentagon appeals panel on Monday threw out a ruling by an Army judge who found that evidence obtained during the torture of a defendant could be considered in determining pretrial matters in a death-penalty case at Guantánamo Bay.
“The issue of admissibility of such evidence is not ripe or ready for judicial review,” the Court of Military Commission Review ruled in a six-page decision that essentially left to another day the overarching issue of whether prosecutors can in some instances use evidence obtained through the torture of a prisoner.
Lawyers brought the appeal on behalf of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi man accused of plotting Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole off Yemen in 2000, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded by psychologists working for the C.I.A., and his trial has been mired in pretrial proceedings for a decade as the court that was set up after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, tries to deal with the legacy of the torture.
The Pentagon appeals panel issued the decision on Monday, the eve of the 1st pretrial hearings in the case since January 2020 following a lengthy closure of the court caused by the coronavirus pandemic. A military commission at Guantánamo is essentially a commuter court, with nearly everybody who takes part in the proceedings, aside from the prisoner, arriving on a charter flight from the Washington, D.C., area.
At issue in the appeal had been a decision by prosecutors earlier this year to include in a classified filing something Mr. Nashiri told a C.I.A. interrogator during a particularly brutal interrogation in 2002. His lawyers were seeking information about a drone strike in Syria in 2015 that killed Mohsen al-Fadhli, another Qaeda figure, as they explored a theory that the United States had already killed plotters of the Cole attack who were more senior and more culpable. Prosecutors asked the judge to end that line of inquiry, pointing to a classified cable that said Mr. Nashiri had told C.I.A. agents as he was being interrogated at a secret prison in Afghanistan that Mr. Fadhli had not been involved.
Defense lawyers asked the trial judge to reject the filing, saying prosecutors in a military commission trial are forbidden to submit evidence derived from torture. Rather than reject the evidence, the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., ruled on May 18 that while juries could not see that type of evidence, prosecutors may invoke such information for very narrow use on matters that are a judge’s rather than a jury’s domain.
The ruling stirred controversy. David Luban, a professor of law at Georgetown University, said he found it troubling because “torture evidence sneaks in through the back door.” Mr. Nashiri’s lawyers accused the military judge of “moral blindness.”
The ruling also caught the attention of Biden administration lawyers, who were unhappy with the decision by the long-serving chief war crimes prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins of the Army, to cite a statement obtained through torture. A dispute over the tactic figured in the general’s unexpected decision to retire from the Army 15 months early. He leaves service on Sept. 30.
After he put in for retirement, General Martins asked Colonel Acosta to wipe from the record the information from the C.I.A. prison while retaining the overarching decision that judges have the authority to evaluate information gleaned from torture. Colonel Acosta did just that.
In Monday’s decision overturning Colonel Acosta’s ruling, the military commission review panel said the “withdrawal of the contested language renders the matter moot.”
Mr. Nashiri’s defense lawyers said they were disappointed that the panel had not gone further and forbidden the use of evidence derived through torture in pretrial litigation. They had sought a broader decision that found Colonel Acosta’s reasoning flawed, and an order to review filings made between the prosecution and the judge to determine if other such evidence had seeped into the case.
Mr. Nashiri’s military lawyer, Capt. Brian L. Mizer of the Navy, said Monday that his team was considering an appeal to a civilian court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/us/politics/torture-terror-guantanamo-bay.html

11 September 2021 :

U.S. Supreme Court Stays Texas Execution, Agrees to Review Contours of the Right to Religious Exercise in the Execution Chamber
In an after-hours order issued on September 8, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court halted Texas’s planned execution of John Henry Ramirez and agreed to review his claim that the state’s refusal to allow his pastor to “lay hands” on him or pray audibly during the execution violated federal law and his First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.
The order, released shortly after 9:45 p.m. Eastern time — nearly three hours after Ramirez’s execution was scheduled to begin — directed the Court’s clerk “to establish a briefing schedule that will allow the case to be argued in October or November 2021.” It was the fourth time since 2019 that the Court has stayed an execution based on a dispute over the exercise of religion in the death chamber, but the first time it has scheduled any of those cases for full briefing and argument. The court has not granted stays of execution for any other reasons during that time period.
Ramirez’s request to permit his pastor to lay hands on him during the execution was the most extensive religious demand made to date by any condemned prisoner. However, Ramirez also requested that his pastor be permit to pray out loud with him during the execution process. Ramirez’s counsel asked the Court to review whether “the State’s decision to allow Ramirez’s pastor to enter the execution chamber, but forbidding the pastor from laying his hands on his parishioner as he dies … and from singing prayers, saying prayers or scripture, or whispering prayers or scripture” violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (“RLUIPA”).

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/u-s-supreme-court-stays-texas-execution-agrees-to-review-contours-of-the-right-to-religious-exercise-in-the-execution-chamber 

03 September 2021 :

The number of people on death row or facing possible capital resentencing in the United States has fallen to its lowest level in nearly three decades, according to a DPIC analysis of the latest death-row data compiled by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF).
LDF’s Winter 2021 edition of its quarterly Death Row USA (DRUSA) census, released on August 31, 2021, reports that 2,528 people were imprisoned on state, federal, or military death rows in the United States as of January 1, 2021 or still faced jeopardy of death in pending capital retrial or resentencing proceedings.
DPIC’s review of historical data found that the last time death row in the United States was smaller was in August 1991, when LDF reported that 2,504 people were sentenced to death or facing reimposition of the death penalty in pending capital proceedings.
LDF listed 92 fewer people in its Winter 2021 DRUSA report than appeared in the organization’s January 1, 2020 death-row census, a one-year decline of 3.5%. The biggest declines were in California and Pennsylvania, whose death-row populations fell by 17 and 12 prisoners, respectively, without carrying out any executions. Nineteen California death-row prisoners died in 2020, 13 from COVID-19. In Pennsylvania, three death-row prisoners were exonerated and nine others were resentenced to life or less.
In the fourth quarter of 2020, the number of people on death row or facing potential capital resentencing declined by 25, from LDF’s October 1 total of 2,553. Pennsylvania led the decline with seven in the three-month period.
The U.S. death-row population has steadily fallen since its peak in July 2001, when a reported 3,717 people were on death row or facing possible capital resentencing. The January 2021 numbers are 32.0% below that peak.
The number of active death sentences — that is, individuals on death row whose death sentences have not been reversed — also continued to decline. The LDF report identified 227 people whose sentences have been reversed and are awaiting retrial or resentencing, or whose grants of relief are still subject to appeal. Removing those individuals leaves 2,301 people facing active death sentences, a 79-person reduction (3.3%) from the 2,380 active death sentences reported on January 1, 2020 and a 25-person reduction (1.1%) from October 1, 2020.
34.3% (867 people) of those on death row or facing capital resentencing as of January 1, 2021 were in states with moratoria on executions. Subtracting those on death row in the moratorium states and those whose death sentences have been reversed, LDF calculated that there were 1,478 currently enforceable sentences. 1,050 death sentences are currently unenforceable, either because the death sentence has been overturned or the prisoner is in a state with a moratorium on executions of an execution moratorium. The total represents 41.5% of all active cases in which a death sentence has been imposed.
California’s death row was once again the largest in the nation, with 708 prisoners, followed by Florida (345), Texas (207), and Alabama (170). North Carolina (141) and Ohio (138) moved into the fifth and sixth positions, surpassing Pennsylvania, whose death-row population fell to 135.
Nationwide, 42.3% of death-row prisoners were white, 41.5% were Black, 13.5% Latinx, 1.8% Asian, and 0.9% were Native American. Among states with at least 10 prisoners on death row, Nebraska (75%), Texas (72%), Louisiana (72%), California (67%) and Pennsylvania (63%) were the states with the highest percentage of individuals of color on death row. Two percent of all death-row prisoners are women.
LDF also released its Spring 2021 Death Row USA report on August 31. DPIC will have an analysis of that report next week.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/naacp-legal-defense-fund-u-s-death-row-falls-to-lowest-level-in-nearly-three-decades

https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/DRUSAWinter2021.pdf

04 September 2021 :

8th Graders Push to Exonerate Woman Sentenced to Death in 1683 in Salem Witchcraft Hysteria
A group of 8th graders from North Andover Middle School in North Andover, Massachusetts are championing efforts to posthumously pardon a young woman who was sentenced to death for witchcraft in 1693 during the height of the Salem witchcraft hysteria.
The students in Carrie LaPierre’s civics class spent a year researching the case of Elizabeth Johnson Jr., who they discovered was the only remaining person wrongfully convicted of witchcraft in the colony who had not been exonerated. They reviewed original historical sources, learning that Johnson was targeted because she belonged to a politically disfavored family, deviated from accepted gender norms, and may have been intellectually disabled.
After gathering their research, the students began a letter-writing campaign to clear Johnson’s name and persuaded their state senator, Diana DiZoglio to introduce legislation to exonerate Johnson. The students helped draft the bill, which DiZoglio introduced in March 2021 and which received a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 27.
Twenty-eight members of Johnson’s family were persecuted on superstition-backed claims of witchcraft. She was unmarried, and was described by contemporaries as “simplish at the best,” “senseless,” and “ignorant.” After confessing to being a witch, she was sentenced to be hanged, but received a reprieve and was never executed. Johnson was 22 years old at the time of her trial and lived into her 70s. “Because Elizabeth was not hanged for her alleged crime, she was overlooked.” DiZoglio said in written testimony submitted to the Senate committee. “Because she never had children, there is no group of descendants acting on her behalf.”
“It is important that we work to correct history,” she said. “We will never be able to change what happened to these victims, but at the very least, we can set the record straight.”
“Part of our introduction to the civics class overall is based on the idea of identity, values, stereotypes and civil discourse,” LaPierre told the international news service Agence France Press. “The kids’ efforts righted a long-standing wrong, and I want them to be proud of that.”
Exonerating Wrongfully Accused ‘Witches’
There have been multiple efforts to posthumously pardon those wrongfully convicted of witchcraft in the Salem hysteria. However, Johnson’s case was overlooked or remained undetected on each occasion.
In 1711, the colonial legislature reversed 22 of the convictions, acting on petitions from some of the accused and the children of those who were executed. After Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, drew attention to the witch trials as an allegory for the political witch hunts of the 1950s, Massachusetts enacted legislation in 1957 to exonerate more of the accused. The legislature passed another bill in 2001 to exonerate the falsely accused, but again failed to identify Johnson’s case.
DiZoglio said the students’ research had determined that Johnson is the only person condemned for witchcraft at the time who has yet to be formally pardoned.
The History of Witchcraft Executions in the U.S.
According to the “Espy file” of historic executions in the United States, 26 women and 9 men were executed for witchcraft in U.S. colonies or territories. The outcomes of the trials were largely preordained. Those who asserted their innocence were condemned; those who falsely confessed were spared execution.
Nearly all the witchcraft executions took place in Puritan New England. In the years 1647 through 1662, Connecticut hanged seven people falsely accused of witchcraft. Most of the witchcraft executions were in neighboring Massachusetts, where, beginning in 1648, 26 were executed. The witchcraft killings culminated in 1692, when false charges of witchcraft claimed 20 innocent victims. The Espy file reports one colonial-era witchcraft execution outside of New England: Rebecca Fowler was executed in Maryland in 1685. The last witchcraft execution occurred nearly a century later, when an enslaved Black man named Manuel was burned at the stake on witchcraft charges in Illinois in 1779.
The witchcraft executions are regarded as an illustration of how capital punishment has been applied to harshly punish women from disfavored groups or whose lifestyles or beliefs deviate from socially dominant norms. In capital cases, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions Agnes Callamard said in 2018, “courts judge women not just for their alleged offenses, but also for what are perceived to be their moral failings as women.”
Woman account for approximately 2% of all people sentenced to death in the United States since colonial times but comprised three-quarters of those executed for witchcraft. In discussing the effort to posthumously pardon Johnson, Jane Swift — who issued the pardons in 2001 and is the only woman to serve as Governor of Massachusetts — said, “What has always resonated with me is that these are some of the earliest historical examples in the U.S. of women being vilified for acting outside of their accepted role.”

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/massachusetts-8th-graders-push-to-exonerate-woman-sentenced-to-death-in-1683-in-salem-witchcraft-hysteria

31 August 2021 :

Sirhan Sirhan, man who assassinated Robert F Kennedy, granted parole after 53 years.
Decision subject to further review and governor’s final approval. Sirhan, 77, convicted of killing Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968, was granted parole on Friday after two of the former attorney general, senator and presidential hopeful’s sons spoke in favor of release and prosecutors declined to argue he should be kept behind bars.
The ruling by the two-person panel at Sirhan’s 16th parole hearing will be reviewed over 90 days by the California parole board. Then it will be sent to the governor, who will have 30 days to decide whether to grant it, reverse it or modify it.
Douglas Kennedy, a toddler when his father was killed in 1968, said he was moved to tears by Sirhan’s remorse and said he should be released if he’s not a threat to others.
“I’m overwhelmed just by being able to view Mr Sirhan face-to-face,” he said. “I think I’ve lived my life both in fear of him and his name in one way or another. And I am grateful today to see him as a human being worthy of compassion and love.”
Robert Kennedy, a New York senator and brother of President John F Kennedy, was a Democratic presidential candidate when he was killed on 6 June 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, moments after delivering a victory speech in the pivotal California primary.
Sirhan, convicted of first-degree murder, has said he doesn’t remember the killing. His lawyer, Angela Berry, argued that the board should base its decision on who Sirhan is today.
Prosecutors declined to participate or oppose his release, under a policy by Los Angeles county district attorney George Gascon, a former police officer who took office last year. Gascon, who said he idolized the Kennedys and mourned RFK’s assassination, believes the prosecutors’ role ends at sentencing and they should not influence decisions to release prisoners.
As Douglas Kennedy spoke, Sirhan, in a blue prison uniform with a paper towel folded like a handkerchief and tucked into his pocket, smiled. Sirhan said he had learned to control his anger and was committed to living peacefully.
“I would never put myself in jeopardy again,” he said. “You have my pledge. I will always look to safety and peace and non-violence.”
Some Kennedy family members, Los Angeles law enforcement officers and the public submitted letters opposing Sirhan’s release, parole board commissioner Robert Barton said at the start of the proceeding, which was held virtually. “We don’t have a DA here but I have to consider all sides,” Barton said.
Sirhan, a Christian Palestinian from Jordan, has served 53 years. He has acknowledged he was angry at Kennedy for his support of Israel. When asked how he feels about the Middle East conflict today, Sirhan broke down crying and temporarily couldn’t speak.
“Take a few deep breaths,” said Barton, who noted the conflict had not gone away and still touched a nerve.
Sirhan said he doesn’t follow what’s going on in the region but thinks about the suffering of refugees. “The misery that those people are experiencing. It’s painful,” Sirhan said.
If released, Sirhan could be deported to Jordan. Barton said he was concerned he might become a “symbol or lightning rod to foment more violence”. Sirhan said he was too old to be involved in the Middle East conflict and would detach himself from it.
“The same argument can be said or made that I can be a peacemaker, and a contributor to a friendly nonviolent way of resolving the issue,” Sirhan said.
Paul Schrade, who was wounded in the shooting, also spoke in favor of his release. Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has spoken in favor of Sirhan’s release in the past, wrote in favor of parole.
Sirhan was sentenced to death but that sentence was commuted to life when the California supreme court briefly outlawed capital punishment in 1972.
At his last parole hearing in 2016, commissioners concluded after more than three hours of intense testimony that Sirhan did not show adequate remorse or understand the enormity of his crime.
Six children of Robert F Kennedy have condemned the decision to grant parole to Sirhan Sirhan, the man who shot and killed the New York senator as he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.
“He took our father from our family and he took him from America,” the six said in a statement late on Friday. “We are in disbelief that this man would be recommended for release.”
The statement was signed by Joseph P Kennedy II, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Christopher G Kennedy, Maxwell T Kennedy and Rory Kennedy.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/27/sirhan-sirhan-bobby-kennedy-assassination-parole

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/28/sirhan-sirhan-parole-robert-f-kennedy-children-california

10 August 2021 :

Chief Guantánamo Prosecutor Retires
After clashing with Biden administration officials over the propriety of using statements obtained through torture from Guantánamo detainees, Army Brigadier General Mark S. Martins, the chief prosecutor in the Guantánamo Military Commission trials, will retire from the military on September 30, 2021. Martins, who had served as the commissions’ chief prosecutor throughout the Obama and Trump administrations, abruptly submitted papers on July 7 providing notice of his early retirement. Gen. Martins had recently sought and obtained an extension of his Guantánamo assignment until January 1, 2023. Citing “senior government officials with knowledge of the disputes,” the New York Times reported on July 9 that Martins had “repeatedly butted heads with Biden administration lawyers over positions his office had taken on the applicable international law and the Convention Against Torture at the Guantánamo court.” The Biden administration opposed the use of statements obtained by torture. During the Trump administration, Martins had taken the position that the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution did not apply to Guantánamo detainees, a position that raises significant constitutional and human rights issues. The Biden Justice Department has since backed off Martins’ view, though not overtly repudiating it. In briefs filed by civilian lawyers July 9 in the case of Abdulsalam al-Hela — a Yemeni detainee who has been incarcerated at Guantánamo since 2004 without being charged with any offense — the Justice Department said it took no position on the issue. Martins also filed pretrial pleadings using statements obtained by torture from detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is being capitally prosecuted as the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 U.S. sailors in 2000. Although a military judge ruled that such statements were admissible in pretrial proceedings, under pressure from administration officials, military prosecutors filed a motion on July 16 to remove those statements from the record. “Was he asked to resign or did he quit in protest?,” Nashiri’s lead counsel Navy Captain Brian L. Mizer said to The Times. “I don’t know.” But, Mizer added, “removing the sentences citing evidence obtained by torture, but not [withdrawing] their motion saying the judge is free to use torture pretrial, or the judge’s ruling saying that it is lawful to do so, accomplishes little.” Martins’ retirement adds a new layer of uncertainty to the already tumultuous Guantánamo proceedings. The general was lead prosecutor in the long-delayed death-penalty trial of alleged 9/11 planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other Guantánamo detainees alleged to have been his accomplices. Because of other retirements, no military judge has yet to be assigned to hear the case, but Guantánamo prosecutors intended to resume hearings against the backdrop of the 20th anniversary of the attack. No one has yet been named to succeed Martins as chief prosecutor. In April 2020, Air Force Colonel W. Shane Cohen, the prior military commission judge in the 9/11 case, retired from active service. He was the third judge since 2012 to preside over the case. In September 2018, Air Force Colonel Shelley Schools announced her retirement, just one month after being assigned as the third judge to preside over the USS Cole military tribunal. In April 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated more than two years of pretrial decisions, including more than 450 written orders, in the Cole prosecution because of an undisclosed conflict of interest by her predecessor as military commission judge, Air Force Colonel Vance Spath. Spath had retired after months of frustration over developments in Nashiri’s case following the resignation of Nashiri’s entire civilian defense team in October 2017 in protest of the government’s illegal eavesdropping on their legal meetings. “I was shocked that Gen. Martins is stepping down,” said Adele Welty, whose son was killed on 9/11. “I thought he was very committed to seeing it through. But who can blame him? The entire enterprise in Guantánamo is almost comical in its ridiculous turns of events — judge after judge quitting, and now General Martins.” Attorney General Merrick Garland has recused himself from involvement in prosecutorial decisions related to the Guantánamo cases because he previously participated in some of the cases as a District of Columbia federal appeals court judge.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/at-odds-with-biden-administration-over-use-of-statements-obtained-by-torture-chief-guant%C3%A1namo-prosecutor-retires

02 July 2021 :

Attorney General Merrick Garland suspends federal executions and orders review of Trump-era rules.

"Serious concerns have been raised about the continued use of the death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases. Those weighty concerns deserve careful study and evaluation by lawmakers," Garland said in a memo issued on Thursday.

"As the President has made clear, he has significant concerns about the death penalty and how it is implemented, and he believes the Department of Justice should return to its prior practice of not carrying out executions," White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.

There are 46 men currently on federal death row, and while there are more than 2,500 men and women on state death row, this directive from Garland does not halt those proceedings.

“The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely,” Mr. Garland said in a memo to Justice Department leaders. “That obligation has special force in capital cases.”

Mr. Garland said in his memo that the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, would supervise a review of Justice Department policies related to federal executions that were implemented by former Attorney General William P. Barr. He asked that several of the department’s divisions, including the Bureau of Prisons, the criminal division and the civil rights division, participate, along with other federal agencies and outside advocacy groups.

"The Department must take care to scrupulously maintain our commitment to fairness and humane treatment in the administration of existing federal laws governing capital sentences," Garland wrote in the memo, citing changes the Justice Department had made under former Attorney General William Barr to policies and procedures around the federal death penalty in 2019.

Barr revived the federal death penalty after a 17-year hiatus. Despite calls from civil rights leaders, celebrities, lawmakers and anti-death-penalty advocates to halt the executions, 12 men and one woman were executed during the last seven months of former President Donald Trump's term.

Garland's directive will include a review of changes to regulations made in 2020 under Barr that expanded the permissible methods of execution beyond lethal injection, to include the use of firing squads.

During Garland's confirmation hearing in February, he said the use of the death penalty gave him "pause" because of the number of wrongful conviction cases that have occurred across the country.

As a candidate, Mr. Biden said that he would work to abolish federal executions and incentivize states to follow suit.

The Supreme Court also said in March that it would review an appeals court’s decision to overturn the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.

Should the Biden administration withdraw its support for the death penalty against Mr. Tsarnaev, the Supreme Court case would become moot.

"Not enough"

Anti-death penalty advocates are criticizing the Biden administration’s moratorium on federal executions as inadequate

"If the DOJ review is as narrow as the memorandum suggests—i.e., it addresses only the things the Trump administration did to expedite executions and expand the methods available to kill federal prisoners—it barely even scratches the surface of death penalty reform. Simply put, if the administration doesn't repeal or commute, it isn't taking steps to end the federal death penalty. It may be making reforms, but it isn't fulfilling the Biden campaign pledge." — Robert Dunham, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center.

The Witness to Innocence organization echoed Mr. Dunham’s sentiments, tweeting that the Justice Department’s action is a “step in the right direction, but not enough. Biden can and should commute fed death row.”

"While a moratorium on federal executions has symbolic value, we’ve seen the danger of half-measures that do not fully address the fundamental brokenness of our death penalty system. More is required." — Sister Helen Prejean, anti-death penalty activist, spiritual adviser to men and women on death row. Author of Dead Man Walking, The Death of Innocents, and River of Fire.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/us/politics/executions-pause-merrick-garland.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/01/politics/federal-executions-halted-merrick-garland/index.html
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jul/2/advocates-say-doj-federal-execution-moratorium-not/

04 July 2021 :

DPIC 2021 MID-YEAR REVIEW: Virginia’s Historic Death Penalty Abolition Accompanies Continuing Record-Low Death Penalty Usage in First Half of Year
The first half of 2021 spotlighted two continuing death-penalty trends in the United States, according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s 2021 Mid-Year Review. On one hand, the continuing erosion of capital punishment in law and practice across the country; on the other hand, the extreme and often lawless conduct of the few jurisdictions that have attempted to carry out executions this year. The year began with three executions that concluded the Trump administration’s unparalleled spree of 13 federal civilian executions in six months and two days, and saw state attempts to revive gruesome, disused execution methods and to introduce never-before-tried ways of putting prisoners to death. At the same time, the first half of 2021 featured the historic abolition of capital punishment in the former home of the Confederacy and historically low numbers of both executions and new death sentences.
Virginia’s abolition of the death penalty was significant both historically and symbolically. When Gov. Ralph Northam signed the repeal bill, it was the first time a Deep South state whose death penalty was closely tied to a history of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation had abandoned the punishment. Virginia was the 23rd state to abolish the death penalty and, with formal moratoria on executions in place in three states, meant that a majority of states either did not authorize the death penalty or had a formal policy against carrying it out.
Five people were executed in the first half of the year — three by the federal government and two by the state of Texas. Only four new death sentences were imposed — one each in Alabama, California, Florida, and Nebraska — in a rate of sentencing unmatched since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. in the 1970s. The low numbers were once again unquestionably affected by the pandemic, but signaled that 2021 will be the seventh consecutive year of fewer that 30 executions and fewer than 50 new death sentences in the U.S.
The states of Arizona and South Carolina moved forward with plans to carry out executions using execution methods that have been abandoned in most of the country due to their brutality. Arizona announced that it had “refurbished” its gas chamber to execute prisoners with cyanide gas, the same substance used by the Nazis to murder more than a million people during the Holocaust. One day before the tenth anniversary of the state’s last execution, the South Carolina legislature passed a law allowing the state to perform executions using the electric chair or firing squad. Alabama announced that it was nearly ready to perform executions using nitrogen hypoxia, a new, untried method in which the prisoner dies of asphyxiation from breathing pure nitrogen.
The executing states also displayed remarkable incompetence, with South Carolina setting four execution dates it was incapable of lawfully carrying out; Arizona testing the air-tightness of its execution chamber by passing a candle flame across its seals; Nevada obtaining drugs online in probable violation of state and federal law and despite advance notice that the drugs could not be used for executions; and Texas forgetting to bring assembled reporters into the prison to witness an execution.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/dpic-2021-mid-year-review-virginias-historic-death-penalty-abolition-accompanies-continuing-record-low-death-penalty-usage-in-first-half-of-year

28 June 2021 :

'Capital Punishment 2019' Reports Number on Death Row Down, Average Time on Death Row Approaches 19 Years
The number of prisoners on death row across the United States continues to decline while the average amount of time they have been on death row approaches 19 years, according to a new report from the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).
BJS’s June 2021 annual death penalty review found that 2,570 prisoners were under sentence of death in the custody of 29 states and the U.S. federal government as of December 31, 2019, down 2.1% from the 2,626 prisoners on death row at the end of 2018. BJS reports that 2019 was the nineteenth consecutive year in which the number of prisoners on the nation’s death row declined, down by more than a thousand since reaching a peak of 3,601 in 2000.
The decrease in the number of death-sentenced prisoners comes even as the average duration of their stay on death row prior to exoneration, resentencing, death, or execution approaches two decades. BJS reports that the average amount of time a prisoner has been incarcerated pursuant to their latest death sentence is 18.7 years. That figure is calculated from the date of a prisoner’s latest death sentence and does not take into consideration the time nearly 10% of those on death row had previously been imprisoned because of unconstitutional capital trials or death sentences that had been judicially reversed. More than half of the prisoners currently on death row (1,317, or 51.7%) were sentenced to death in 2000 or earlier.
For the 22 prisoners put to death in 2019, the average time elapsed between the imposition of their death sentence and their execution was 264 months, or 22 years, by far the longest time between sentence and execution since capital punishment resumed in the U.S. in the 1970s. It represents a 21-month increase over the 243-month time span between sentence and execution in 2017 — the only other time the average surpassed 20 years. The increase in 2019 was 26 months longer than 2018’s 238-month average time lapse between sentence and execution.
The report provided further evidence of the aging of death row. Both the average and the median age of prisoners on death row at the end of 2019 was 51 years, and 22.4% of death row prisoners were age 60 or older. That compares to the year-end 2000 figures, when the average and median age of death-row prisoners was 38 and 2.7% of death-row prisoners had reached age 60.
The educational level of new admissions to death row suggested the greater vulnerability of defendants now being sentenced to death. More than half of the new death-row prisoners had less than a high school education and 31.3% had completed 8th grade or less. Among all death-row prisoners, 44.6% completed 11th grade or less and 11.8% had completed 8th grade or less.
Death row shrank by 56 prisoners in 2019, representing 87 prisoners who came off death row and 31 who were added. Death rows grew in only three states (North Carolina, South Carolina, and Ohio), which increased by a combined total of six prisoners. By comparison, 19 states saw their death rows shrink. California (11), Pennsylvania (8), Texas (7) and Tennessee (6) accounted for 57.1% of the reduction nationally, while no other state had as much as a five-prisoner shift in size.
Execution, once again, was not the main reason prisoners were removed from death row in 2019: three-quarters (74.7%) of those who came off death row were not executed. More than half the prisoners who came off death row in 2019 had their convictions or death sentences overturned by courts (43) or received sentence commutations (2). Twenty-two prisoners were executed and 20 more died on death row of other causes. The executions reflected the continuing geographic isolation of the death penalty, with 20 of the 22 executions carried out in the South.
The BJS report corroborates DPIC’s June 2020 analysis of the time death-row prisoners are spending on death row. At that time, DPIC reported that, as of January 1, 2020, at least 1,344 death-row prisoners — more than half of the nation’s total — had been on death row for 20 or more years, in violation of U.S. human rights obligations. DPIC reported that an additional 191 prisoners had been executed in the United States since the 1970s after spending 20 or more years on death row.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/bureau-of-justice-statistics-reports-number-on-death-row-down-average-time-on-death-row-approaches-19-years

04 July 2021 :

Pittsburgh synagogue requests no death penalty for Robert Bowers, killer of their members
The president of Congregation Dor Hadash, Bruce Herschlag, made the request of US Attorney General Merrick Garland in a letter sent last week, the WESA radio station reported Friday.
Don’t give the Pittsburgh synagogue gunman the death penalty.
That’s the request of one of the congregations based in the building targeted by the white supremacist who killed 11 worshippers in a 2018 attack.
Garland is Jewish.
Justice in the ongoing trial of Robert Bowers, 49, should be achieved “in a manner that is both consistent with our religious values and that spares us from the painful ordeal of prolonged legal maneuvering,” Herschlag wrote in the June 17 letter.
“The imposition of multiple life sentences would ensure that the perpetrator is never released. This is the outcome we desire.”
Bowers, now 49, white, is on trial for killing 11 people in the Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27, 2018, and injuring many more. It was the bloodiest anti-Semitic attack on American soil.
It is not the first time that Jewish congregations have publicly taken a stand against Bowers' death sentence. As HoC reported, on November 2, 2018, it was the rabbis of the three major Jewish associations who approached both the state and federal attorney general.
And on August 16, 2019, Rabbi Jonathan Perlman of the New Light Congregation and President Donna Coufal of the Dor Hadash Congregation made a similar intervention. Today, when Bruce Herschlag presides over the Dor Hadash Congregation, the intervention was repeated.

https://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/2021/06/usa-pittsburgh-synagogue-requests-no.html

20 June 2021 :

White House Reasserts Opposition to Death Penalty, Stresses Independence of Justice Department as DOJ Asks Supreme Court to Reinstate Death Sentence in Boston Marathon Bombing
As the Department of Justice filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court seeking reinstatement of the death sentence imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the Boston Marathon bombing, the White House press office issued a statement stressing the independence of the Department over the cases it is pursuing and asserting that President Joe Biden has not backed away from his campaign promise to work to end the federal death penalty.
On June 14, 2021, Department of Justice lawyers filed the government’s initial merits brief in the Supreme Court asking the court to reverse a 2020 federal appeals court decision that had overturned Tsarnaev’s death sentence. In a pleading that incorporated language nearly verbatim from briefs previously filed by the Trump Department of Justice, federal prosecutors wrote that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit had “improperly vacated the capital sentences recommended by the jury in one of the most important terrorism prosecutions in our Nation’s history” and that undoing the appeals court’s decision would “put this case back on track toward a just conclusion.”
One day later, a White House spokesman disassociated the President from the prosecutors’ actions, citing the Justice Department’s “independence regarding such decisions.” In a email to reporters on June 15, Deputy White House Press Secretary Andrew Bates wrote, “President Biden has made clear that he has deep concerns about whether capital punishment is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our sense of justice and fairness. … The President believes the Department should return to its prior practice, and not carry out executions.”
The DOJ brief provoked a range of disconsonant responses. A number of liberal publications interpreted the filing as representing the official policy of the Biden administration and a retreat from the President’s campaign promise. “Biden broke his promise and failed his first death penalty test in a very big way,” Professor Austin Sarat wrote in a Slate commentary. HuffPost reported: “The new DOJ filing to the Supreme Court undermines what Biden has publicly said about ending the death penalty.” Fox News on the other hand viewed the filing and White House response as suggesting internal discord, describing the press office’s statement as “the latest in a recent string of instances where the White House has pointed to the DOJ’s independence while openly criticizing them.”
Death Penalty Information Center director Robert Dunham described the incongruity between the DOJ action and the White House response as fulfilling one campaign promise — to restore the integrity and independence of the Justice Department — while failing to take action on another. “There’s less to this than meets the eye,” Dunham told The Intercept. During his confirmation hearings, Attorney General Merrick Garland indicated that if the White House set a policy on the death penalty, the Department of Justice would follow it. “What is the administration’s policy with respect to the federal death penalty?” Dunham asked. “The administration has not answered that yet.”
As a result, the DOJ continues to respond to death penalty prosecutions on a case-by-case basis. It has appeared in a federal appeals court to defend the death sentence imposed on Charlestown church shooter Dylann Roof and asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the appeals court decision in Tsarnaev’s case. But it also has asked a federal appeals court to return an important habeas corpus case to the DOJ so the Department can reconsider Trump administration rulemaking that would sharply curtail Arizona death-row prisoners’ access to federal review of their convictions and death sentences and has rescinded death-penalty authorization in a half-dozen cases in which the Trump administration was pursuing capital punishment.
Simply not carrying out executions does not fulfill the campaign promise to end the federal death penalty, Dunham said. “It sets the table for the next president to carry out more executions.” Part of ending the death penalty, veteran capital defense lawyer David Bruck told HuffPost in January, would be to direct the Justice Department to stop seeking and defending death sentences in federal cases. Another essential part, death penalty opponents say, is to commute the sentences of everyone of the federal death row.
“He can do that today, he can do that tomorrow,” Dunham said. “But the longer that he does nothing about it, … the more his campaign promises look like empty words.”

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/white-house-reasserts-opposition-to-death-penalty-stresses-independence-of-justice-department-as-doj-asks-supreme-court-to-reinstate-death-sentence-in-boston-marathon-bombing

17 June 2021 :

Unlike other U.S. religious groups, most atheists and agnostics oppose the death penalty
A majority of adults in the United States favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. However, views about the death penalty vary by religion – with atheists and agnostics opposing this form of punishment at about the same rate as Americans overall support it.
Atheists oppose the death penalty about as strongly as Protestants favor it
Roughly 2/3 of atheists (65%) and 6-in-10 agnostics (57%) either “strongly” or “somewhat” oppose the death penalty for people convicted of murder. Atheists and agnostics are small religious groups, representing less than 10% of the adult population, but their share has grown in recent years.
Meanwhile, 60% of U.S. adults overall favor the death penalty, including 75% of White evangelical Protestants and 73% of White non-evangelical Protestants, according to the survey, which was conducted in early April. White Protestants account for about 29% of the U.S. population, a share that has shrunk in recent years.
Pew Research Center conducted this analysis, using data from a survey of 5,109 U.S. adults fielded April 5 to 11, 2021, to better understand how Americans’ views about the death penalty vary by religion.
Atheists and agnostics are the only religious groups in this analysis that are more likely to oppose the death penalty than to support it. Groups with majorities in favor of executing convicted murderers include Hispanic Catholics (61%) and people who describe themselves, religiously, as “nothing in particular” (63%). Black Protestants are divided in their views on the death penalty, with 50% in favor and 47% opposed, mirroring a broader trend of lower support for the death penalty among Black Americans overall.
Due to sample size limitations, this analysis does not include some smaller religious groups, including Jewish and Muslim Americans.
Views of the death penalty also differ by political orientation, race and age – characteristics that tend to vary between religious groups. For example, atheists are younger and more politically liberal than White evangelicals on average. Still, while these differences account for some of the variation across religious groups, religious differences in support for the death penalty remain even after accounting for these other traits.
In addition to exploring levels of support for the death penalty, the survey asked respondents whether they feel this form of punishment is morally justified, whether it acts as a deterrent, whether there are adequate safeguards to ensure that no innocent person is put to death, and whether sentencing for the same crime varies by race.
Again, on several of these questions, atheists and agnostics fall on one end of the spectrum and White Protestants on the other. Roughly half of atheists (51%) and agnostics (47%) say the death penalty is morally wrong, even for people who commit crimes like murder. Fewer than 1/2 as many White Protestants (22%) – evangelical and not evangelical – feel the same way, with more than 3/4 in these groups saying the death penalty is morally justified when someone commits a crime like murder.
3/4 of White Protestants say the death penalty is morally justified
White evangelical Protestants are also the only religious group in which a plurality (51%) say the death penalty deters people from committing serious crimes. By comparison, about half as many Black Protestants (27%) believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent. Generally speaking, people with any religious affiliation are more likely than those without one to say that the threat of the death penalty deters serious crimes: 39% of affiliated adults say this, compared with 26% of the unaffiliated.
Large majorities in every religious group say there is some risk that an innocent person will be put to death. However, White evangelical Protestants are more likely than any other group analyzed to say there are adequate safeguards in place to ensure that no innocent person will be put to death, with three-in-ten taking this position. Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, only about 1-in-10 atheists and agnostics say adequate safeguards are in place to prevent innocent people from being executed. Unaffiliated people who say their religion is “nothing in particular” are twice as likely to say the same (20%).
There also are wide differences over whether the death penalty is applied equally by race. About 9-in-10 Black Protestants (88%) say Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to death for committing similar crimes, while nearly 7-in-10 White evangelicals (68%) say that White and Black people are equally likely to be sentenced to death. Roughly half of White non-evangelicals (53%) and Catholics (47%) believe the death penalty is applied equally between these 2 races.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/15/unlike-other-u-s-religious-groups-most-atheists-and-agnostics-oppose-the-death-penalty/

17 June 2021 :

Joe Biden’s Craven Death Penalty Reversal in the Boston Bomber Case.
When Joe Biden took the oath of office as the 46th president of the United States, opponents of America’s death penalty, including me, celebrated. We took heart from his stated opposition to capital punishment and his campaign promise to end the federal death penalty. It seemed as if the United States had its first abolitionist president.
During his campaign, Biden pledged that he would stop federal executions, propose legislation to abolish the death penalty at the federal level, and provide incentives for states to follow suit. He recognized that America’s death penalty system is rife with error and unfairness. “Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time,” candidate Biden tweeted, “we must eliminate the death penalty.”
Death penalty opponents, heartened by such promises, called on the new president to take bold, dramatic action on Day One of his administration. One month before Biden took office, 45 members of Congress, led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, wrote to the president-elect, asking him to act on Jan. 20 “to clearly demonstrate your commitment to eliminating the death penalty.”
But that day came and went without any action to turn Biden’s campaign promise into policy.
During his first 100 days, he signed scores of executive orders and acted to reverse many of the Trump administration’s policies. But, over the first five months of its term, the Biden administration remained silent about the death penalty.
As the months passed, Biden’s silence and inaction began to arouse concerns in the abolitionist community. Anti–death penalty activists and organizations worried that ending capital punishment was slipping as a Biden priority, getting buried as he turned his attention to other parts of his agenda.
But on Tuesday, the silence and inaction ended in a stunning reversal of position.
Instead of announcing the end to federal capital prosecutions, a moratorium on federal executions, steps to dismantle the federal execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, or support for congressional legislation to end the death penalty, Biden’s first decision about capital punishment was to endorse it.
He broke his promise and failed his first death penalty test in a very big way when his administration filed a brief with the United States Supreme Court asking it to reinstate the death sentence of Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The brief defended the death penalty as an appropriate response to what it called “one of the worst” acts of terrorism on U.S. soil since Sept. 11.
Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for the 2013 bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon that killed three and wounded more than 260 others, and he is by no means a sympathetic character. He is one of 46 people now on the federal death row. His death sentence was overturned on July 31 by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the trial judge had not protected the defendant from potential bias during the jury selection process and had erred by excluding mitigating evidence.
The Trump administration brought the case to the Supreme Court last fall, seeking reinstatement of the death sentence. And ironically the Biden Justice Department’s position in the Tsarnaev case, which it calls “one of the most important terrorism prosecutions in our Nation’s history,” turns out to be exactly the same as the position articulated by William Barr, Donald Trump’s attorney general.
The depths of the administration’s hypocrisy are revealed when we recall what the president’s press secretary said in March, when the Supreme Court announced that it would take up the Tsarnaev case.
“President Biden,” Jen Psaki said at the time, “made clear, as he did on the campaign trail, that he has grave concerns about whether capital punishment, as currently implemented, is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our sense of justice and fairness.”
Those concerns seem to have evaporated when they were put to a stern test.
The brief submitted to the Supreme Court on Tuesday does not read like it issues from an anti–death penalty administration. Instead, it deploys the classic images and arguments of death penalty supporters: a horrible crime, an unrepentant defendant, a trial court bending over backward to protect his rights.
The brief takes pains to rehearse in excruciating detail the genuine horrors of what Tsarnaev did. Sounding like a zealous prosecutor with an ardently pro–death penalty constituency, it says that, “The bombs caused devastating injuries that left the street with ‘a ravaged, combat-zone look.’ … ‘Blood and body parts were everywhere,’ littered among ‘BBs, nails, metal scraps, and glass fragments. The smell of smoke and burnt flesh filled the air, and screams of panic and pain echoed throughout the site.’”
Far from being unsettled by the devastation of the crime, Tsaranev, the brief points out, returned to the dorm at the college he was attending and later worked out at the gym with a friend. It notes that he tweeted, “I’m a stress free kind of guy.”
It argues that the trial was scrupulously fair. “The jury,” it contends, “carefully considered each of respondent’s crimes and determined that capital punishment was warranted for the horrors that he personally inflicted.”
The brief accuses the appellate court that overturned Tsarnaev’s sentence, in language that exactly parallels words used in the Trump administration’s original Supreme Court brief, of relying on what it labels a “novel, inflexible, and unsupported … rule to invalidate respondent’s capital sentences.”
And it calls Tsarnaev a “’radical jihadist […] bent on killing Americans.’” It concludes that the defendant “deserved the ultimate punishment for his horrific crimes.”
Opposing the execution of Tsarnaev, no doubt, would have imposed a political cost that the Biden administration was unwilling to pay. It might even have drawn the administration into the vortex of culture wars that it has seemed so intent on avoiding.
The brief filed on Tuesday also reprises the position that Attorney General Merrick Garland took in an earlier domestic terrorism case, the federal death penalty prosecution of Timothy McVeigh for the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Whatever its political motives and potential explanations, the Biden administration should have recognized that the state killing any citizen—even one who has committed a crime as horrific as Tsarnaev’s—always compromises the “values that are fundamental to our sense of justice and fairness,” as Biden put it.
As former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once noted, “A shocking crime puts law to its severest test.” In its first foray into the death penalty, the Biden administration failed that test.

For the Tsarnaev case see also HoC 01/05/2013, 16/09/2013, 29/01/2014, 05/01/2015, 04/03/2015, 23/03/2015, 08/04/2015, 13 / 04/2015, 21/04/2015, 15/05/2015, 28/05/2015, 24/06/2015 and 31/07/2020.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/biden-death-penalty-boston-bomber-fail.html

09 June 2021 :

A pen pal of Gerald Marshall's forwards a second message from him (For the first, see HoC 3/31/2021).

"Dear friend,
I have a friend in Texas on death row. He is innocent of killing any one and he does not have any support from his family. I and a few other people have been trying to support Gerald through letter writing and raising funds.
We have also tried to promote a short book that Gerald wrote in order to get his case out there to the public. We have not been able to garner the support that Gerald needs to get off death row. We are contacting you in hopes that you can be of some assistance to Gerald. Gerald is an avid writer and is working on several books that he hopes to publish in order to help his situation. Would you be off any assistance of helping us publish Geralds books. He also paints and draws. We could use help in promoting Geralds art and trying to raise funds with it.
Because Gerald does not have much support, we are trying to raise funds for him to have a comfortable living while he lives on Texas death row. If there is any way that you can help us by promoting Geralds cause, please do so. You can read more about gerald at justiceforgerald.org and by watching our video.”

Gerald can be reached at:
Gerald Marshall #999489 Polunsky unit
3872 FM 35
South livingston Tx 77351

To this message, his pen pal adds a solicitation that comes directly from Gerald:
“It would be great if you could promote my case in any way you can. Also, if you could find someone who can help promote / publish my books there in Italy. This would be a great help. I would like other pen pals, including Hands Off Cain. Can you tell me the address of Hands Off Cain? I can write to them. I really need to get my books back online. This was the easiest way for me to raise money. I have done a lot for my son with money from my books and my art. I hope I can find an easy way to get that stuff back up and running. It would really help."

06 June 2021 :

Pew Poll: Support for Death Penalty Declining, But Higher in Internet Polling than Phone Polling
A new poll by the Pew Research Center reports that support for the death penalty is down in the United States but may be higher than previous estimates because some poll respondents are unwilling to admit to a live pollster that they support capital punishment.
Results of Pew’s April 5–11, 2021 on-line survey of U.S. adults, released on June 2, indicated that:

• About 60% of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder (down from 65% in August 2020), including 27% who “strongly favor” it, while 39% oppose the death penalty, including 15% who are “strongly opposed.”
• About 78% of U.S. adults said there is some risk that an innocent person could be wrongly executed, and only 21% think there are proper procedures in place to prevent such mistakes
• About 85% of Black adults said Blacks are more likely than whites to be sentenced to death for serious crimes, while only 49% of whites hold this view.
• On the whole, 63% of American adults said the death penalty does not deter people from committing serious crimes, while about half, 48%, of death penalty supporters hold this view.
• Some 77% of Republicans favor the death penalty for murder (down from 84% in 2019) while only 46% of Democrats favor it (down from 49% in 2019).
• By race, Whites and Asians (each 63%) and Hispanic adults (56%) favor the death penalty for murder, while 49% of Black adults do.

Pew found that during the last three times in which it surveyed Americans about their views on the death penalty, on-line respondents were 9–12 percentage points more like to say they favored capital punishment than were respondents who provided responses to a live interviewer on the phone. Pew said that “survey questions that ask about sensitive or controversial topics — and views of the death penalty may be one such topic — may be more likely to elicit different responses across modes.” That difference, it posited, is “perhaps attributable to social desirability bias.”
Courtney Kennedy, Pew’s director of survey research, told the New York Times the researchers were “absolutely” convinced that social desirability bias was the most significant factor in the differences between the responses to the on-line and phone surveys. The death penalty, Kennesy said, is “a bit of a touchy subject, it’s kind of sensitive, and admitting that you hold an opinion that has such profound implications for somebody else — not everybody wants to engage with that with a stranger.”
Because of this, Pew has shifted its methodology in death-penalty polling from phone interviews to on-line surveying. However, it said, telephone surveys continue to “provide a basis for examining long-term changes in the public’s attitudes toward the death penalty.” Those surveys, Pew noted, “have shown a steady decline in support for the death penalty in the United States since the mid-1990s.”
The poll found significant differences in views of the death penalty based upon respondents’ race, age, education, and political affiliation. 64% of Whites and Asians said they supported the death penalty, compared to 56% of Hispanics and 49% of Blacks. Support for capital punishment was highest among adults aged 50-64 (69%), falling to 60% among those over 65, 58% among those aged 30–49, and 51% among those aged 18–29.
Whether respondents favored or opposed the death penalty was inversely related to their level of education. Those with a high school education or less were most likely to favor the death penalty (68%), dropping to 63% among those with some college education, 49% among college graduates, and 44% among those with postgraduate education.
77% of Republicans — and 82% of Republicans who identified themselves as conservative —said they favored the death penalty, with 23% and 17%, respectively, saying they opposed it. 53% of Democrats — and 64% of those identifying themselves as liberal — said they opposed the death penalty, versus 46% and 36%, respectively, who said they favor it. The survey was conducted between 5 and 11 April 2021 on a sample of 5109 people.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/pew-poll-support-for-death-penalty-declining-but-higher-in-internet-polling-than-phone-polling

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/us/politics/death-penalty-polls.html

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/06/PP_2021.06.02_death-penalty_REPORT.pdf

25 May 2021 :

Life Without Parole Is A Death Sentence With Fewer Legal Protections
There are 56,000 people in the United States serving life-without-parole sentences who don’t get the same legal defense or opportunities to appeal as those facing execution.
In Texas, a death sentence is the harshest punishment for someone convicted of a serious crime. But life without parole is a close second, and it comes with fewer legal protections than those facing execution are afforded. It has also become a much more common sentence with almost 56,000 people serving nationwide – a 66% increase since 2003.
Cary Aspinwall has been investigating that disparity for The Marshall Project and The Dallas Morning News. She says the legal system doesn’t provide as robust a defense for those facing a life-without-parole sentence.
“The idea … for so long was that death is different because we are taking your life away; we have to give you special protections and built in these special protections,” Aspinwall said. “But there’s sort of a little more laissez faire attitude when it comes to life without parole, even though you have fewer protections and fewer opportunities for appeal.”
Courts are supposed to operate as though the state may seek the death penalty in capital murder cases until a decision is submitted in writing. That makes things like two attorneys, a mental health specialist, an investigator and more available to a defendant even if the state ends up not seeking the death penalty. But Aspinwall says that hasn’t been happening.
“They’re supposed to operate as though it might be on the table and give that person those tools, that defense team, because it is it is a more significant level of defense,” she said.
In order for things to change, Aspinwall says there needs to be more training for defense lawyers to handle capital murder cases. That’s because those cases are more complicated to navigate and are very difficult to reverse if something goes wrong. Also, appeals are based heavily on a defense attorney’s actions during trial. If that attorney was poorly trained or incompetent, it could leave the accused with fewer options.
“If you get an attorney who doesn’t do anything, who doesn’t file motions, who doesn’t object during procedures, then you have nothing to appeal on,” she said. “You’ll file your appeal and the appellate court will say, ‘Well, you didn’t object at trial, you didn’t raise these issues at trial.'”
Getting it right matters, especially because of the racial disparity among those who are serving life-without-parole sentences. Aspinwall says a disproportionate number of them are people of color, and some of them are some are serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes.
“You see the same racial disparities in life without parole as you do with the death penalty especially because in a lot of states, you can get life without parole for nonviolent drug convictions through these repeat-offender laws,” she said.

https://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/2021/05/usa-why-life-without-parole-is-death.html

05 May 2021 :

New study explains why a few counties generate most of the death sentences in the United States.
“Learning to kill: Why a small handful of counties generates the bulk of US death sentences”, now published in PLOS One, sheds light on why the geographic distribution of death sentences in the United States is clustered in just a few jurisdictions. The findings indicate that a county’s legal and racial history plays a more important role than the homicide rate.
“I’m a quantitative social scientist and have been working in the area of the death penalty since publishing a book on how arguments about the death penalty are framed, and the impact of the ‘innocence frame’ on public opinion,” said study author Frank R. Baumgartner, the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC Chapel Hill.
His book, “The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence,” was published in 2008.
“Since then, I’ve been continuing with various studies of the death penalty, and I constructed a database of everyone executed in the United States, including the county from which the case derived,” Baumgartner explained. “A shocking pattern is an extreme concentration of cases in just a few counties. That was apparent in my data, but is also well known to those who study the matter, so it was not a new discovery.”
For their latest study, Baumgartner and his colleagues examined factors such as population size, number of homicides, violent and property crime rates, poverty rates, the relative share of nonwhite population, and history of lynchings.
But they found a surprisingly weak relationship between the number of homicides in a county and the number of death sentences.
Instead, the better predictor of death sentences was the number of death sentences that a county had previously imposed. In other words, each death sentence made another death sentence more likely.
“The data are consistent with a ‘learning’ hypothesis where each time an event occurs, the expected time delay before the next event is shortened,” Baumgartner told PsyPost. “The most common use of such models is in analyzing such things as heart attacks or brain seizures. Given an underlying set of risk factors, having one heart attack makes a second one more likely. We used those statistical techniques and showed that a similar process occurred for U.S. counties.”
The findings are in line with previous research conducted by Baumgartner, which analyzed executions rather than death sentences.
“There have been about 9,000 death sentences in the United States since 1972, and about 1,500 executions,” Baumgartner said. “The findings are very strong with regards to death sentences, even stronger than in the earlier paper. So our point was not to identify something new; the fact of high concentration of use of the death penalty in just a few jurisdictions was already known. Rather, we explored where it comes from: Learning. Some counties get very good at it. Some never do.”
The study provides evidence that the “death penalty is not applied in a consistent manner,” Baumgartner told PsyPost.
“Even within the same state, there are stark differences in the odds that a crime with certain characteristics will lead to a death sentence,” he said. “A key factor is randomness. Just by flukes of their own histories, some counties get good at death sentencing, and others do not. This is not consistent with the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees ‘equal protection of the law.'”
The researchers also found evidence that racial dynamics played a role.
“To the extent that we could discern a pattern to the data beyond the learning aspect, we found two main patterns, one of less interest but one very troubling. The first is population size; larger counties have more death sentences. That’s not that interesting but is an important thing to keep in mind and to have as a statistical control. Once you control for population, homicides have no effect; that’s pretty interesting,” Baumgartner explained.
“The troubling thing is that racial dynamics have an effect. We found that a county’s history with Jim Crow-era lynchings still has a discernable statistical impact on the odds of a crime leading to a death sentence. So: ugly racial history, population size, and a lot of randomness and learning from one’s own history rather than having the penalty applied proportionately across jurisdictions in accordance, for example, with homicides.”
But the study — like all research — includes some caveats.
“I think we did a good job of explaining the concentration of cases in a small number of jurisdictions,” Baumgartner said. “At the same time, there are complicated trends toward and away from use of the death penalty over time, and these affect the entire nation. Death sentences became more common in the period from 1976 through about 1996, and have declined since then.”
“Similarly, progressive District Attorneys have now taken office through election in some of the death penalty ‘hotspots’: Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and in those three counties they have completely suspended the use of the death penalty. So the trends we describe are not written in stone, and there are other factors that matter as well.”
“The legal profession is not typically very concerned with sophisticated statistical models,” Baumgartner added. “For those who are well versed in numbers, I think our repeated events model will be very convincing and show that the numbers cannot be squared with equal protection of the law. Whether the U.S. Supreme Court will understand that is another matter!”

The study, “Learning to kill: Why a small handful of counties generates the bulk of US death sentences”, was authored by Frank R. Baumgartner, Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Benjamin W. Campbell, Christian Caron, and Hailey Sherman.

Hands Off Cain has repeatedly reported on studies by Professor Baumgartner focusing on various aspects of the death penalty: April 18, 2011 "The Death Penalty in North Carolina: A Summary of the Data and Scientific Studies"; July 16, 2015 "The impact of race, gender and geography on Missouri executions"; September 20, 2015 "Race-Of-Victim Discrepancies in Homicides and Executions, Louisiana 1976-2015"; January 28, 2016 "The Impact of Race, Gender, and Geography on Ohio Executions"; April 28, 2016 "Louisiana Death Sentenced Cases and Their Reversals, 1976-2015", and April 3, 2017 "Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty".

https://www.psypost.org/2021/05/new-study-explains-why-a-few-counties-generate-most-of-the-death-sentences-in-the-united-states-60317
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0240401

24 April 2021 :

Sonia Sotomayor’s Lonely Battle to Give the Voiceless a Voice at the Supreme Court
In 2 new opinions, the justice continues to provide a small grace to victims of unconstitutional abuses ignored by her colleagues.
Every year, the Supreme Court receives about 10,000 petitions and hears only around 80 cases. 4 justices have to vote to hear an appeal, which ensures that thousands of petitions are swatted away without comment, leaving the lower court’s decision as the final word. Unfairness is baked into the cake: SCOTUS’s desire for tidy docket management means that egregious wrongs go unrighted simply because 4 justices lack the nerve, the bandwidth, or the desire to address them. A majority of the court seems content with this state of affairs. Not Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In recent years, Sotomayor has emerged not only as the conscience of the court but as the watchdog of its docket. She continually writes separate opinions to flag cases involving extreme cruelty, lawlessness, and other inequities. Her goal appears to be to urge the public to pay attention to the injustices that the Supreme Court lets stand.
On Monday, the Supreme Court turned away 2 cases, Brown v. Polk County and Whatley v. Warden, with appalling facts, prompting Sotomayor to write separately about each of them. Start with Brown. In 2017, Sharon Brown was arrested for suspected shoplifting in Polk County, Wisconsin. While in the county jail, 2 inmates accused her of hiding a packet of methamphetamines in a body cavity. Jail officials sent Brown to the hospital, where a doctor used a speculum to open and examine her vagina. When he found no drugs, he inserted the speculum into Brown’s anus and opened it. The doctor’s headlamp then went out, so Brown waited with the speculum in her anus while he searched for a flashlight. After several minutes, he found the flashlight and discovered no drugs.
Brown sued the jail officials for violating her Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches. She argued that the Constitution requires correctional officers to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before searching the body cavities of a pretrial detainee. (It should be noted that pretrial detainees like Brown have not been convicted of a crime and are legally innocent.) The lower courts ruled against her, finding that officers need only a reasonable suspicion for such a search, and had it in this case. Brown appealed, urging the Supreme Court to rule that a warrant, rather than mere reasonable suspicion, is necessary to conduct such an invasive search of pretrial detainees.
SCOTUS turned away the case without comment. Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself because, while serving on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, she participated in the decision not to take up the case as a full court after a 3-judge panel ruled against Brown. Sotomayor concurred with the court’s decision not to hear Brown’s appeal, writing that SCOTUS should wait to act until other courts consider the issue. (Under an informal rule, the Supreme Court lets legal questions “percolate” in the lower courts before rendering a verdict.)
Following this gesture of collegiality, however, Sotomayor recounted the revolting facts with an eye toward the systemic racism and sexism that lie just behind them. She quoted extensively from Brown’s testimony, noting that, when the doctor removed the speculum from her anus, she said: “I immediately started crying. I couldn’t stop. I cried myself to sleep. I cried all the way back to the jail. I cried the whole time I was getting dressed.”
“This trauma left Brown with anxiety and depression,” Sotomayor wrote. “She slept just 3 hours a night. She experienced flashbacks and feared leaving the house, terrified the police would pull her over and send her back to jail. Nearly 2 years later, Brown was still afraid of being alone in a room with a man. Even her own brother.”
Sotomayor pointed out that the Polk County jail has a policy of believing inmates who accuse a fellow detainee of concealing drugs and automatically perform cavity searches on these individuals. “An unverified charge from a stranger with unknown motives could send anyone to the hospital for a penetrative search, just like Brown,” she wrote. Meanwhile, “almost anyone can be arrested for something” thanks to the dramatic expansion of criminal laws. “An unbuckled seatbelt, a noisy muffler, an unleashed dog: Any one of countless petty misdemeanors might land you in jail.
“People of color disproportionately bear these burdens,” Sotomayor continued. “Brown is a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Native American people are vastly overrepresented in Wisconsin jails and prisons.” And, citing an amicus brief filed in the case, Sotomayor pointed out that Native American women “experience sexual violence at higher rates than any other population in the United States,” meaning “non-consensual body cavity searches are more likely to traumatize and retraumatize” these women “and their communities.” (The justice has long paid attention to the disparate impact of overpolicing and overcriminalization racial minorities.)
Will Sotomayor’s opinion have any effect? On the public, certainly: It has already drawn attention (and scorn) to an obscure county jail’s odious policies, as well as their “degrading” and “dehumanizing” effects on detainees. But she also issued a warning to lower courts: Jails must consider “less offensive” and “invasive” methods before resorting to a body cavity search. “The courts below considered no such alternatives before holding that reasonable suspicion alone justified this degrading search into Brown’s vagina and anus,” she cautioned. “Future courts presumably will not do the same.” Translation: Lower court judges, don’t do this again.
Sotomayor’s opinions give voice to those crushed by the wheels of the criminal justice system.
Sotomayor’s other opinion on Monday, Whatley v. Warden, was an outright dissent. The facts of the case are stunning. After a jury in Georgia found Frederick R. Whatley guilty of murder, his trial moved to the penalty phase—when the jury would decide whether to recommend the death sentence. The Supreme Court has ruled that due process forbids the needless, visible shackling of defendants during this phase of a trial because it prejudices the jury. Yet Whatley’s attorney allowed him to hobble up to the stand, his shackles clearly visible to the jury, to testify for several hours. The prosecutor then directed Whatley to reenact the alleged murder using a toy pistol while providing a running commentary. (“I want you to point the gun at me just like you did him that day.”) As Sotomayor described it, “Whatley’s chains clanked and rattled with every move, constantly reminding the jury that the court apparently believed he might do more than just pretend to kill someone in the courtroom if left unrestrained.” Yet his defense attorney allowed all this to take place without objection.
Unsurprisingly, the jury sentenced Whatley to death. He then claimed that he had ineffective assistance of counsel in violation of the Sixth Amendment because his lawyer failed to object to his visible shackling, even during the bizarre “reenactment.” Every lower court ruled against him, and the Supreme Court rejected his appeal without comment. Sotomayor dissented, writing that she would order a new sentencing hearing for Whatley. As she explained:
Chains paint a defendant as an immediate threat. Jurors faced with a defendant in shackles will find it more difficult to consider the defendant as a whole person and to weigh mitigating evidence impartially. If jurors think the court does not trust a capital defendant to avoid violence at his own sentencing proceeding, with his life on the line, they are unlikely to trust him to do so while serving a life sentence with no hope of parole. … Whatley’s chains, fresh in the jury’s mind from the previous afternoon’s spectacle, powerfully corroborated the prosecutor’s argument. It is hard to imagine a more prejudicial example of needless shackling.
Powerful words—yet Sotomayor could not even convince fellow liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan to join her dissent. Maybe that’s beside the point. Opinions like this one give voice to those crushed by the wheels of the criminal justice system. It echoes her opinions—mostly lone dissents—in cases that involve police brutality, the death penalty, prosecutorial misconduct, highly questionable or downright corrupt judicial practices, prison conditions during COVID, and the rights of clemency applicants. At the end of Donald Trump’s execution spree, Sotomayor published a dissent that named every individual put to death by the administration, as if bearing witness.
In January, Sotomayor even plucked out an obscure petition by a mentally ill immigrant facing deportation to Haiti, where he faced persecution, including torture. She scolded her colleagues for allowing the government to deport the immigrant while he appealed his removal order, denying him “the small grace” to which “he is legally entitled.”
Perhaps a “small grace” is what Sotomayor seeks to provide in these opinions, as well. She knows she has not persuaded three other justices, let alone a majority of the court, to come to her side. She knows prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and lower courts may simply ignore her stern warnings. But she writes them anyway, because she believes it is important to put on the record the unconstitutional abuses that voiceless people face in the United States every day. With this extremely conservative court, that may be the most that she, or any of us, can hope for.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/04/sonia-sotomayor-supreme-court-injustice-body-cavity-dissent.html

19 April 2021 :

Senators Urge Biden To Shut Down Guantánamo, Calling It A 'Symbol Of Lawlessness'
In a letter to the White House, 24 senators said the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba "has damaged America's reputation, fueled anti-Muslim bigotry, and weakened the United States' ability to counter terrorism and fight for human rights and the rule of law around the world." Calling the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a "symbol of lawlessness and human rights abuses," 2 dozen U.S. senators are urging President Biden to shut it down quickly and find new homes for the 40 men remaining there. Many of the detainees have been confined at Guantánamo for nearly two decades without being tried or charged, and some have been cleared for release but are still being held. In a letter sent to Biden on Friday and reviewed by NPR, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and 23 of his Democratic-voting colleagues outlined immediate steps they believe the administration should take to close the secretive, deteriorating island detention facility. Among them:
--Reestablish the State Department office, dismantled by the Trump administration, that negotiates with foreign governments to transfer Guantánamo prisoners to other countries.
--Begin negotiating overseas transfers for the 6 men already approved for release as well as for any detainees who will not be charged with crimes.
--Use the U.S. federal courts to pursue plea agreements with detainees who can be federally charged and let them serve any remaining prison time overseas.
--Have the Justice Department conduct plea agreements remotely via videoconference since current federal law prohibits Guantánamo prisoners from entering the U.S. for any reason.
The senators said in the letter that Guantánamo "has damaged America's reputation, fueled anti-Muslim bigotry, and weakened the United States' ability to counter terrorism and fight for human rights and the rule of law around the world." As a result, they wrote, "it is past time" to shutter the prison, which opened in 2002, and "end indefinite detention." Biden's likelihood of success at closing Guantánamo is unclear. His efforts are applauded by human rights groups but criticized by several Senate Republicans, who say releasing the prisoners would endanger the country. Former President Barack Obama never fulfilled his pledge to shut down Guantánamo due to vehement Republican opposition. In their letter, the senators described Guantánamo's military court, which has finalized only 1 conviction in almost 20 years, as "thoroughly failed and discredited." The court has been perpetually problem-plagued, and legal proceedings there have been at a virtual standstill since February 2020 when the pandemic drastically limited access to the island. Guantánamo's highest-profile legal matter — the Sept. 11 death penalty case involving five defendants — has not gone to trial even though the 20th anniversary of the attacks is fast approaching, and at this point few Guantánamo lawyers believe it ever will. The case has repeatedly been delayed by ongoing setbacks, including a sort of musical chairs of judges, one of whom quit last fall after 2 weeks on the job. To date, according to an NPR investigation, Guantánamo's military court and prison have cost the U.S. more than $6 billion, money the senators called "wasted taxpayer dollars." The 24 lawmakers — 23 Democrats and 1 independent — who signed the letter include Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla of California, and Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The letter was also sent to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Attorney General Merrick Garland. In February, the White House said it would review Guantánamo's prison with the goal of closing it permanently but provided few details. A National Security Council spokesperson said the review would involve the NSC, Congress and the departments of Defense, State and Justice. Meanwhile, many of the prisoners are aging, as well as weakened by their past CIA torture. And in a rare development in December, a "forever prisoner" who has been held at Guantánamo for more than 18 years despite never being criminally charged was cleared for release after a parole-like board concluded he is no longer a significant threat to the United States. However, it is unclear when he may leave Guantánamo and where he would go, because his home country of Yemen is in a state of collapse. And Guantánamo's facilities are rapidly decaying. Earlier this month, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other so-called high-value detainees were moved from a crumbling secret detention facility to a main prison area, a move the military said would cut expenses. In recent years, about 1,800 troops — mostly National Guard members — have overseen Guantánamo's 40 remaining detainees, costing an estimated $13 million per prisoner per year. That guard force now numbers about 1,500. Almost 800 detainees have passed through the prison since it opened in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/16/988078547/senators-urge-biden-to-shut-down-guantanamo-calling-it-a-symbol-of-lawlessness?t=1618826240875

18 April 2021 :

Republican-led states secretly spending huge sums on execution drugs----Documents obtained by the Guardian show three states paying astronomical amounts to skirt – almost certainly illegally – a ban on pharmaceuticals for lethal injections
Documents show that Republican leaders are not only willing to run roughshod over their own state and federal laws, but are also prepared to spend lavishly in the process.
The most jaw-dropping outlay has been made by Arizona, a state in which Republicans hold both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. A single-page heavily redacted document obtained by the Guardian records that last October the department of corrections ordered 1,000 vials of pentobarbital sodium salt, each containing 1g, to be shipped in “unmarked jars and boxes”.
At the bottom of the document, the record states: “Amount paid: $1,500,000.”
It is a felony under Arizona and federal law to dispense pentobarbital without a valid prescription. Medical practitioners are not allowed to issue prescriptions for the drug for use in executions as taking the life of a prisoner serves no therapeutic or medical purpose.
The Guardian asked Arizona’s department of corrections to explain its costly and apparently unlawful purchase of pentobarbital. The department said that it does not discuss how it obtains execution drugs.
It also stressed that the information the Guardian was requesting was “statutorily confidential” – meaning that it is secret under court order.
Other documents obtained by the Guardian relate to Tennessee and Missouri. In Tennessee, the department of corrections splashed out $190,000 from 2017 to 2020 to acquire midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride – the 3 drugs in its lethal injection protocol.
During that period, the state executed two prisoners – Billy Irick and Donnie Johnson – using those chemicals. That suggests a cost per execution of almost $100,000.
In Missouri, the prison service invested over $160,000 on lethal injection executions, the documents reveal. That expenditure was incurred between 2015 and 2020, when Missouri put to death 10 inmates, producing an average cost to taxpayers of $16,000 per execution.
These hefty sums are a far cry from how lethal injections were initially envisaged. The use of medical drugs to kill prisoners was pioneered in 1977 in Oklahoma where officials were convinced it would be both humane and cheap – they predicted it would cost only $10 per execution.
Neither aspiration has proven to be true. The supposed humanity of lethal injections has been belied by a series of botched procedures that have shocked the nation.
The last time that Arizona put to death an inmate was in 2014, when executioners took almost two hours to inject a gasping and groaning Joseph Wood 15 times while he was strapped to the gurney.
Behind the states’ extravagant spending is the blanket refusal of pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors to allow their products to be used in US executions. Medical drugs are made to save lives, they argue, not to end them.
As a result, death penalty states have been forced to enter into increasingly dubious – and often unlawful – deals with suppliers at home and abroad. In 2010, five American states illegally purchased execution drugs without federal Food and Drug Administration approval from Dream Pharma, a wholesaler operating out of a driving school in London.
Since then, states have been pushing at legal boundaries in their scramble to evade the boycott of pharmaceutical supplies. “States have switched from one drug to another, crossed state lines to get drugs, paid cash and failed to record the payments to keep the purchases secret,” said Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham law school.
Denno added: “All of those actions are violations of state or federal laws, and all of them have ended up jacking up the price of the drugs.”
In recent years, 19 states as well as the federal government have moved to shroud their execution practices in secrecy – working especially hard to obscure the source of their lethal injection drugs. That too allows unscrupulous producers and dealers to hike up their prices.
“Any time a government retreats into secrecy you know there’s a problem. If you don’t have accountability then it opens the door to favoritism, to graft and to dealing with a lot of shady characters who don’t have the public’s interest in mind,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
Prashant Yadav, a lecturer at Harvard medical school, said that prices were often marked up by 1,000% or more over the rate charged in regular pharmaceutical markets. “These drugs are being traded in a zone of unclear regulatory apparatus, and so they typically charge a higher price,” he said.
Another cause of inflated drug prices is the cost of legal disputes. Between 2018 and 2020, Nevada spent over $100,000 defending itself in a lawsuit brought by a pharmaceutical manufacturer who objected to its drugs being obtained fraudulently for use in executions.
One of the paradoxes of the current scramble to acquire lethal injection drugs illicitly and at such high prices is that the efforts are exclusively being made by Republicans who frequently claim to be the party of fiscal conservatism and small government. Hannah Cox, national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, said that the spending revealed by the Guardian was shocking.
“You can’t run around and say you are a fiscal conservative Republican, or that you are pro-limited government and for the free market, and then behave like this. It’s completely contradictory to every conservative value,” she said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/09/revealed-republican-led-states-secretly-spending-huge-sums-on-execution-drugs

09 April 2021 :

Military closes failing facility at Guantanamo Bay to consolidate prisoners
U.S. military guards have moved Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other former CIA prisoners to the main part of the prison compound at Guantanamo Bay from a failing secret facility, in a consolidation of detention operations that could cut costs and reduce the troop presence at the base in Cuba, the military said Sunday.
Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, and other so-called high-value detainees at Guantanamo were moved to Camp 5 as part of the consolidation. The 2-story building, a maximum-security facility that cost $17 million to build in 2004, is modeled after a state prison in Bunker Hill, Indiana. It has a modest detainee health clinic and a psychiatric ward with a padded cell, but none of the hospice or end-of-life care capacity once envisioned by Pentagon planners.
The maximum-security facility is designed to keep prisoners confined to their cells except when guards move an individual to showers, outdoor cages that serve as recreation yards or another cell where a single captive can sit in a recliner, one ankle shackled to a bolt on the floor, and watch television.
As of Sunday, the military said, all 40 so-called war on terror detainees — the 11 men who have been charged with war crimes, as well as others who are held as indefinite detainees — were housed in a compound containing 2 prison buildings, called Camps 5 and 6.
The plan to consolidate the prisoners was devised during the Trump administration, when their former compound, Camp 7, was failing. Raw sewage sloshed through the tiers, the power sometimes went out and some cell doors would not close at the site. The situation worsened over the summer amid the coronavirus pandemic because it was difficult to bring in contractors and spare parts.
“This sounds like a solution to the crumbling Camp 7,” said James G. Connell III, a capital defense lawyer who represents Ammar al-Baluchi, who along with his uncle, Mohammed, and three other men is accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks. “They are abandoning it rather than repairing it.”
Camp 7 also housed some of the best-known captives of the post-9/11 period, including a Palestinian man known as Abu Zubaydah, who is held without charges and was the first prisoner to be waterboarded by the CIA after the attacks; the Saudi man accused of orchestrating al-Qaida’s bombing of the Navy destroyer USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and who is charged in a death-penalty case that has no trial date; and a Baltimore-educated Pakistani man, Majid Khan, who pleaded guilty to serving as an al-Qaida courier and was moved from the other prisoners as a government cooperator.
Maj. Gregory J. McElwain, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, called the move a “fiscally responsible decision” whose planning “involved all relevant organizations to include the intelligence community.”
McElwain declined to say how much the consolidation cost. Over time, he said, the move would most likely mean a reduction in troops from the 1,500 mostly National Guard members who primarily serve nine-month tours of duty at the detention operation, which has been estimated to cost $13 million per prisoner per year.
Mohammed and the other high-value detainees were held at the classified Camp 7 site after their transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006. They had spent three to four years in the George W. Bush administration’s secret overseas prison network, known as black sites, where the CIA subjected its prisoners to sleep deprivation, forced nudity, waterboarding and other physical and psychological abuse.
By segregating the prisoners, under the watch of a special guard unit called Task Force Platinum, the intelligence agencies could strictly monitor and control their communications and prevent them from divulging what had happened to them. Defense lawyers who were eventually granted access to the men were bound by security clearances to keep their conversations classified, including in court filings that accused government agents of state-sponsored torture.
Camp 7 was long one of Guantánamo’s most clandestine sites. The Pentagon refused to disclose its cost, which contractor built it and when. Reporters were not permitted to see it, lawyers were required to obtain a court order to visit and its location was considered classified, although sources pointed to it on a satellite map of the base.
In the short term, McElwain said, Camp 7 “will be sanitized, shut down and locked.”
“A plan for its final disposition has yet to be determined,” he said.
The former CIA prisoners were kept mostly isolated in their early years at Camp 7. Each was allowed to speak with only one other prisoner through a tarp during recreation time, in conversations that were recorded for intelligence purposes.
Their lawyers described the conditions as mind-numbing until recent years, when the commanders permitted the prisoners to eat and pray together under strict surveillance. They also had a cell where they could prepare food to pass time.
It is unknown whether the military will emulate that communal lifestyle in the prisoners’ new surroundings.

The New York Times updates a site, The Guantanamo Docket, which keeps track of the 780 people who passed through the Guantanamo cells, and indicates the names and some data of the 40 people still detained.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/04/us/politics/guantanamo-bay-prisoners.html?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/guantanamo/detainees/current

31 March 2021 :

Announcing the launch of "The Death Penalty Photography Project", a new website featuring an in-depth look into executions in the United States through photographs.
In the light of the sentence of Albert Camus "It would become harder to execute men one after another, as is done in our country today, if those executions were translated into vivid images in the popular imagination", Scott Langley launches a new website.
“Executions in the United States are not public events. Photography has never been allowed in prison death chambers during executions in modern times. Coupled with the fact that many executions take place in the middle of the night and are sanitized by the government for the media, very few people see or experience the full extent of what transpires when the state carries out a death sentence.
Originally conceived as a college class assignment, more than two-decades later Scott is still capturing moments both inside and outside of prisons during executions – telling the story of what occurs when the government kills its prisoners and who the process impacts”.
The project consists of thousands of images, making it the largest photo documentary ever about the death penalty's modern era in the United States – bringing together the unique combination of photography, journalism and education into one powerful project.
The documentary includes execution vigils, inside an execution chamber, the hours leading up to an execution, portraits of exonerated death row prisoners, celebrities opposed to the death penalty, marches, demonstrations and candid emotional and prayerful moments in the context of the death penalty in the United States.
The project started in 1999 and continues today.
The project is Scott's effort as an independent photojournalist and as a social justice advocate to expose the reality of capital punishment through a sociological and human rights lens.
The photos are used regularly by organizations, schools, book publishers, filmmakers, and news outlets. With printed exhibits available on loan, the photos have been displayed in hundreds of schools, libraries and galleries throughout the United States and exhibited in over a dozen countries around the world.
Experience the photos and stories at http://deathpenaltyphoto.org
Exhibits of the photos are available on loan, and Scott Langley is available to give presentations in-person or virtually.
Email info@deathpenatyphoto.org for more information.

http://p2.smu.edu/rhalperi/updates.html

24 March 2021 :

Business Executives Launch Campaign Against the Death Penalty
A group of business leaders have launched a campaign calling for an end to capital punishment. Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson (pictured) announced the initiative at the virtual South By Southwest festival on March 18, 2021, saying, “The death penalty is broken beyond repair and plainly fails to deliver justice by every reasonable measure. It is marred by cruelty, waste, ineffectiveness, discrimination and an unacceptable risk of error. … By speaking out at this crucial moment, business leaders have an opportunity to help end this inhumane and flawed practice.”
Twenty-one business leaders from a variety of industries, including technology, telecommunications, fashion, and food, urged world leaders to end the death penalty. Among the signatories are Branson, The Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, and former Tiffany & Co. CEO Alessandro Bogliolo.
“We stand united in our belief in a fairer and more equitable world, the rule of law, and universal human rights,” the declaration begins. “As an irreversible and extreme form of punishment, the death penalty is inhumane, and it is irreconcilable with human dignity. Its worldwide abolition is a moral imperative that all of humanity should support.” The declaration sets forth four major reasons to abolish capital punishment: racial bias in its application, the absence of any deterrent effect, the risk of executing innocent people, and the high cost of the death penalty.
Celia Ouellette, the founder and CEO of the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, which organized the declaration and supports businesses in advocating for criminal justice reform, linked the effort to the global movement for racial justice sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. “This is a completely new moment in the movement,” she said. “You can create a lot of change quickly.”
The business leaders explicitly linked capital punishment to racial justice, writing, “The abolition of capital punishment is a critical step in the movement toward racial and social equality.” Ben & Jerry founders Cohen and Greenfield added in a separate statement, “Business leaders need to do more than just say Black Lives Matter. They need to walk the talk and be instrumental in tearing down all the symbols of structural racism in our society. The death penalty has a long history with oppression, and it needs to end. Now.”
Branson said he plans to work on expanding the number of signatories between the release and October 10, World Day Against the Death Penalty. “Part of our job is, is to find the time to educate them, give them the facts and win and win them over,” he said. “It needs patience. It needs education for some. But for, I say the vast majority, it’s a reasonably easy. The doors are open and I think we can get the vast majority of people on board.”

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/business-executives-launch-campaign-against-the-death-penalty

06 March 2021 :

Invited to a conference (Cascina, 2 March, “Greg's story”), Caino entrusted the university professor Porzia Addabbo, president of its Scientific Committee, with a comparative form between the USA and Italy. Based on data and statistics recently published in the US, Cain wanted to highlight that, beyond the "moral" assessments, the excess of harshness of the US judicial and penitentiary system not only does not work, in the sense that it does not make US society more safe, but it is probably also counterproductive, in the sense that it contributes to maintaining a level of widespread violence that is much higher (about 5 times) than the European average, and even 7 times higher than the Italian one.

The main "numerical" differences between the US and Italy

The United States has 330 million inhabitants, Italy 60 (they are 5 and a half times more populous than us).

The US has 2,100,000 people in prison, Italy 53,000 (if we were as many as the Americans, we would have 291,000 people in prison, instead we have 7.2 times less).

In the US there are an average of 16,500 homicides every year, in Italy 315 (it is as if Italy, in proportion, had 3,000 homicides, instead we have 9.5 times less).

In the United States over 203,000 people are serving life sentences, in Italy 1,784 (it is as if Italy, for the same population, had 36,900 life sentences, instead we have more than 20 times less).

In the United States, the police kill on average, every year, about 1,800 citizens, and on average another 400 murders, committed by citizens, are not prosecuted because they are considered "justified" under the laws on self-defense. In Italy, there is a complete lack of data on "victims of law enforcement", and cases of "legitimate defense" are difficult to extrapolate from "normal" murders. Although it is unfortunate that in Italy there is a lack of transparency on this category of killings, it is likely, however, that the Italian figures are low, they should not exceed, on average, 20 cases per year. Following the US ratio, the police are expected to kill 330 people a year on average, and 70 should be cases of "self-defense". If we take the overall figure of 20 as valid, in Italy the "justified killings" are 16.5 times less than in the United States. Following the US ratio, Italian police would be expected to kill 330 people a year on average, plus 70 cases of "self-defense". If we take the overall figure of 20 as valid, in Italy the "justified killings" are 16.5 times less than in the United States.

The United States kills on average 20 people a year through "legal" executions, ie after a series of trials (in 2020 for Covid all states have suspended executions since the beginning of the summer, but Trump has insisted that 10 were carried out by the Federal Government, reaching a total of 17, which in any case is the minimum figure since 1991) while in Italy the last execution dates back to the immediate postwar period, in 1947. Speaking of executions, one cannot fail to notice the US paradox of a judicial and political system (because every execution must also be countersigned by the political authority) that kills 20 people a year, while the police are granted the right to kill, in the absence of any trial, 90 times as many. It could be said that in the face of a definitively convicted criminal, the US kills 90 "suspects" even before they arrive at trial.

In the United States, an average of 40% of homicides remain unsolved. Some "iconic" counties have particular statistics. Miami-Dade County, where the TV series "CSI Miami" is set, with "Horace" and his elegant colleagues who brilliantly solve all the cases, had 64% of the murders and 78% of the unsolved rapes in 2017. In 2019 the way of compiling the statistics changed, and "police made arrests" in 51% of homicide cases, and in 21% of rape cases. The other city famous for the CSI series is New York. Here, too, in January 2021, the New York Times commented on the murder cases resolved only at 51%.

In Italy, in 2019, 24% of the murders remained unsolved.

So the US police, more numerous, more armed, better paid, and with almost unlimited power of life and death over the citizens is not at all more efficient than the European one, a continent in which, in some countries, the agents run unarmed, and for to be able to extract a weapon stored in an armored compartment in the trunk of the service car, they must first ask for permission via radio, and obtain a numeric unlock code from the control unit.

Likewise, the massive recourse to detention, even of very long duration, in regimes that often provide for "compulsory work with seized remuneration", that is, the recognition to the prisoner of a wage of 1 or 2 dollars for a full day of work, or, on the contrary , 23 hours of isolation a day for entire decades, all this does not seem to work, it does not seem to have any "deterrent" or "preventive" power. The European prison systems, extremely limited in the numbers and percentages of use of hard or very hard regimes, seem much more effective (together with social prevention policies, almost completely absent in the USA) in keeping the level of violent conflict inside the society relatively low.

Even the fact that the death penalty is in force in 28 of the 50 states does not seem to give the US any advantage over Europe, where the death penalty is in force only in Belarus. Belarus, a nation of the former Soviet bloc, belongs "geographically" to Europe, but "politically" it is neither part of the European Union (27 member states) nor of the Council of Europe (47 member states). Although internationally considered a "de facto" dictatorship, Belarus makes a "moderate" use of the death penalty, with an average of 2 executions per year in the last 10 years. It must be said that the violent crime rates in the US and Belarus are very similar, on average more than four times that of the "Old Europe".

Having said all this, that is, that Italy holds in prison, in proportion, 7 times fewer US citizens, that it sentences them to life imprisonment 20 times less, that our police forces kill "without trial" at least 20 times less than the US, that we have not executed anyone for 74 years, having said all this, we said, we have a murder rate that is 10 times lower than the US one. The other large European countries, which by population can be compared to Italy (Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain) have similar figures.

In light of these simple data, without venturing into too complex analyzes, it can be said that the European tradition of "guarantee" and an overall "moderate" use of repression and punishment seems to work in keeping a lower level of violence and/or crime, while the US “law and order” model does not seem to have any improving effect on the society it insists on.

(Source: HoC)

Sources of data US:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/195331/number-of-murders-in-the-us-by-state/
https://www.istat.it/it/ archive/253296
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191134/reported-murder-and-nonnegligent-manslaughter-cases-in-the-us-since-1990/
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/murder
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami-dade-county-is-worst-in-florida-at-solving-crime-10939171#:~:text=The%20clearance%20rate%20for%20murder, ( 17.7% 20and% 2019.4% 20respectively).
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami-dade-county-crime-clearance-rate-among-worst-in-florida-11350696
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-police-solve-fewer-crimes-in-pandemic-11606917600
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/nypd-crime-murder.html

Sources of data Italy:

https://www.istat.it/it/ archive/253296
https://www.istat.it/it/files//2021/02/Report-Vittime-omicidio_2019.pdf
https://www.giustizia.it/giustizia/it/mg_1_14_1.page?contentId=SST674047&previsiousPage=mg_14_7
https://www.truenumbers.it/casi-irrrisolti-omicidi/

for the conference:

“Storia di Greg” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aAB0pGSDyI&ab_channel=TeatroComunaleDeFilippo-Cecina

02 March 2021 :

Juvenile Life Without Parole: An Overview
The Sentencing Project has published a study on the subject of life imprisonment applied to minors. The study, signed by Josh Rovner, is titled "Juvenile Life Without Parole: An Overview", and begins with the observation that the United States is the only nation that sentences people to life without parole for crimes committed by minors.
Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have banned life sentences without the possibility of parole for minors. In the other states it is still in force, although in some no one is serving this sentence.
3 sentences, in 2010, 2012 and 2016, led to a limitation of life sentences without parole. In 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States, with the Graham v. Florida, declared unconstitutional to sentence a minor who had not committed a murder to life without parole. That sentence applied to 123 minors, 77 of them in Florida.
In 2012, with Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the life sentence without parole imposed on a minor when the law did not provide alternatives, that is, when, in several states, for certain crimes the judge was "obliged" to issue a JLWOP. An estimated 2,500 minors were serving a JLWOP after a murder sentence that year.
In 2016, with the Montgomery v. Louisiana, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Miller v. Alabama was to be applied retroactively.
At the end of 2016, in 29 states and the federal system, there were 2,310 people serving life sentences without parole for crimes committed before the age of 18.
Since then, all "forced" JLWOP convictions have undergone or are undergoing a review procedure. In a few cases, the former minors were also released from prison. For the rest there is no exact count of how many cases have been reviewed, and which sentences have been imposed in lieu.
Another study recently published by the Sentencing Project, "No End In Sight: America's Enduring Reliance on Life Imprisonment" publishes statistics on life sentences in the United States. This study, with data updated to 2020, indicates that 1.465 people would be serving JLWOP, while in about 700 cases the juvenile life without parole sentences would have been canceled, but the prisoners are still awaiting a redetermination of the sentence. In "No End In Sight" it is highlighted that in Georgia 840 people are serving a "normal" life sentence for juvenile offenses.
Among them, 45 were 13 or 14 years old at the time of the crime. In the case of "minors", the "normal" life sentence provides for the possibility of conditional release after minimum detentions ranging from 15 years (Nevada and West Virginia) to 40 years (Texas and Nebraska). Juvenile life sentences without parole, theoretically still in effect today in 26 states, are in practice concentrated in 4 states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Louisiana, and Florida. These 4 states alone account for 80% of cases.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/juvenile-life-without-parole/

02 March 2021 :

FEBRUARY 27, 2021

No End In Sight: America’s Enduring Reliance on Life Imprisonment.
In the United States, more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences.
According to the "NO END IN SIGHT" study by the Sentencing Project, published on February 17, 2021, as of December 30, 2020, there were 203,865 life prisoners in the US. The term "lifers" includes 3 categories: those who will never go out on parole (LWOP, Life With Out Parole), those who could take it (LWP, Life With Parole. asking for parole varies from 15 to 40 years, on average it is 25 years), and those "Virtual", people formally not sentenced to life imprisonment, but to such high sentences, and with the possibility of parole "not earlier than 50 years" to be equivalent to life imprisonment. The Sentencing Project report, signed by Ashley Nellis, counts 55,945 “LWOP” lifers, 105,567 “LWP” lifers, and 42,353 “Virtual” lifers.
The same Sentencing Project study 4 years ago (see NtC 06/05/2017 and 29/01/2018), with data updated to 31 December 2016, gave 3000 fewer LWOP sentences, but 2500 more LWP, and 2700 more "virtual" ones.
All on a prison population (2020) of 1,400,000 people between state and federal prisons. As is well known, in the United States there is also another level of detention, the "local" or "county" one, which on the whole hosts on average between 700,000 and 750,000 people, where, however, the accused are only awaiting trial, or serve minor sentences. Although data on jails are lacking in this study, lifers should not be found in this circuit.
Life in prison without parole exists in all states except Alaska. The main uses are California, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Half of the national population of people serving LWOP reside in these five states. The federal government holds another 3,536 people in LWOP. Compared to the first life sentence census carried out by the Sentencing Project in 2003, life sentences without parole have increased by 66%.
On the other hand, considering the 3 types of life imprisonment as a whole, the main uses are: California (40,000 cases), Texas (18,460), Florida (15,000), Georgia (10,000), New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania (over 8,000 cases), the Federal System (6,250) and Louisiana (6,000).
Of the "normal" life prisoners, 3,972 were convicted not of murder but of drug offenses. 38% of these are in the Federal System.
Life sentences are served disproportionately by African Americans, Hispanics, and other people of color. Nationally, two-thirds of people serving life sentences are black people: 46% black, and 16% Hispanic. Of the people serving the most extreme life sentence, LWOP, 55% are black. 3% of life prisoners are women.
At least 8,600 people are serving normal or "virtual" life sentences for crimes committed as minors.
The study also points to some proposals to overcome the excessive use of detention.
Some states are beginning to address overly long prison terms through second-look legislation. In 2018, California passed a law to allow prosecutors to seek sentence modifications from judges if sentences are believed to be excessive. In 2020, the Council of the District of Columbia passed legislation that provides people who were under 25 at the time of their offense and sentenced to a long term, the chance to petition the court for resentencing and early release after 15 years. At the federal level, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced the Second Look Act in 2019 which would allow a federally incarcerated person to petition the court for a sentence modification after 10 years.
These are important first steps. More must be done.
Recommendations
Abolish Life Without Parole
Sentences of life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) are virtually unheard of in the rest of the world. They are considered antithetical to personal transformation, the primary goal of many other corrections systems. Even more, they violate fundamental principles of human dignity. Instead of serving the interests of justice, LWOP unnecessarily burdens systems with the heavy cost of housing, feeding, and providing medical care for the more than 55,000 people. This disproportionately elderly population must live in institutions not well designed to care for them.
The elimination of LWOP will recalibrate all sentences underneath it. Public perceptions of incarceration minimize the negative impact of a 5- or 10-year sentence on an individual when compared to the extremes of a life sentence. Creation of a more fair and just system depends on ending all extreme penalties.
Limit All Life Sentences to 20 Years Except in Rare Circumstances
Accelerate and Expand Release Opportunities
America suffers from a broken parole system, or in some jurisdictions, no parole system at all. In jurisdictions with parole, the review process is mired in political jockeying and often manipulates victim experiences to secure a parole denial. A just parole system would operate independently from the politics of the executive branch both in the ultimate decision to release an individual, as well as the composition of the parole board. The board should be composed of professionals with expertise in social work, psychology, the law, and corrections. Crime of conviction should not be the determining factor in the decision of the parole board. The focus of the parole board hearing should be on the person’s development while incarcerated, current public safety considerations, and identifying what supports are needed to ensure success after release.
States should also adopt “second look” policies that reconsider the appropriateness of continued incarceration given the passage of time and changed circumstances within the individual. Beginning this review at 10 or 15 years aligns the U.S. with the international community and the American Law Institute, a national nonpartisan body of legal experts. It should not take the corrections system more than 20 years to empower an individual with the skills necessary to live crime-free after release.
Reorient Victim and Community Involvement Toward True Healing
A reorientation of the role of victims requires investing in restorative justice models that heal the harm caused by violence at their root, creating a system that is “survivor-centered, accountability-based, safety driven, and racially equitable.” Expert work is underway by groups including Common Justice as well as the National Black Women’s Justice Institute. Both esteemed organizations anchor their work in the belief that we are all safer when we uplift victims, hold everyone accountable for their actions, and do so with empathy and compassion.
The involvement of crime survivors in the process of justice through healing will help to undermine the misguided assumption that victims have been well served by mass incarceration.
Similarly, rather than commit scarce public resources toward perpetual incarceration, funds could be invested in positive community development approaches that improve access to housing, jobs, education and health care.
Since we already know where most violence and other crimes take place, we can mitigate crime-risk by immersing highly disadvantaged communities with early intervention and prevention resources. Considerably larger investments in community strengthening, such as universal preschool education, effective parenting initiatives, victim restitution, and treatment for substance use and mental health disorders will no doubt provide more justice in the end than pointlessly long prison terms. These resources make communities more secure by building systems that prevent the economic and social dislocation that greatly contributes to violence and other crime. By de-emphasizing incarceration and scaling back punishment we can use scarce public resources to support victims and communities to heal and thrive.
This is the path to crime prevention and true public safety.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/no-end-in-sight-americas-enduring-reliance-on-life-imprisonment/  

28 February 2021 :

Federal Bureau of Prisons Sanitized Execution Reports, Omitting Disturbing Details Observed by Media Witnesses
Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials repeatedly misrepresented accounts of the executions they carried out in 2020 and 2021, providing sanitized descriptions of the executions that omitted all references to dramatic body movements and signs of distress observed by media witnesses, according to an Associated Press report. The sworn accounts by executioners, which federal prosecutors provided to an expert witness and to a federal district court judge to defeat the prisoners’ court claims that the execution process was excruciatingly painful and unconstitutionally cruel, deviated significantly from the observations of multiple journalists who witnessed the same events.
The government’s questionable depiction of what prisoners experienced while being put to death “directly implicates concerns about the constitutionality of the federal government’s execution procedures,” said Megan McCracken, a lawyer with the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. McCracken told Newsweek that neutral eyewitness accounts of the executions had “described prisoners gasping for breath and their abdomens convulsing. These movements,” she said, “are consistent with the prisoners consciously experiencing flash pulmonary edema,” a medical condition in which fluid fills the lungs and airways, causing a sensation similar to drowning.
Federal executioners uniformly described the executions as tranquil and problem-free, using the same metaphor of the prisoner peacefully going to sleep, AP reported. “During the entirety of the execution, William LeCroy did not appear to be in any sort of distress, discomfort, or pain,” wrote executioner Eric Williams in legal documents filed as part of federal prisoners’ challenge to the execution protocol. “A short time after he took a deep breath and snored, it appeared to me that LeCroy was in a deep, comfortable sleep.” By contrast, journalists for AP who witnessed LeCroy’s September 22, 2020 execution said his chest heaved violently, suggesting he experienced flash pulmonary edema.
Experts who testified at a hearing before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia provided conflicting opinions, based on which account of the execution they accepted. Kendall Von Crowns, an expert who testified on behalf of the federal government, said the executioner’s account “does not state that there was any irregular or uncontrolled heaving,” and suggested that others had merely observed “hyperventilation due to the anxiety associated with LeCroy’s impending death.” Von Crowns claimed that the heaving “has no relevance to pulmonary edema whatsoever.”
Federal prosecutors objected when lawyers for the prisoners attempted to question Von Crowns about media descriptions of the apparent distress experienced by the prisoners. AP reporter Michael Tarm, who personally witnessed ten of the 13 executions, said AP and other media outlets described LeCroy’s “stomach area as having heaved uncontrollably immediately after the pentobarbital injection [for] about a minute.” This “distinctive jerking and jolting was visible in at least half the executions,” Tarm reported. Tarm also contradicted Von Crowns’ assertion of pre-death anxiety, writing that “all the journalist reports said the movements happened within minutes of injections, never in the minutes before an inmate was pronounced dead.”
Gail Van Norman, an expert for the prisoners’ legal team, said the journalists’ descriptions were consistent with a person experiencing flash pulmonary edema. As fluid blocks the airway, it alters the rhythm of the chest, diaphragm, and abdomen, she testified, “giving the appearance of the chest and abdomen rocking opposite of one another, or a heaving abdomen.” Van Normal said a prisoner suffering from flash pulmonary edema would experience a sensation “identical to that reported by victims of near drowning or suffocation” like that produced during “enhanced interrogations” such as waterboarding. “She said, “these are among the most excruciating feelings known to man.”
Autopsy results from the executions show that flash pulmonary edema can also occur even when witnesses do not observe outward signs of distress. In August 2020, Tarm described Wesley Purkey as “blinking repeatedly as the pentobarbital was injected” but showing no “obvious outward signs he was in pain.” However, an autopsy examination of his lungs found that Purkey had suffered “severe bilateral acute pulmonary edema.”
In their accounts of the executions, prison officials described the execution gurney as a “bed” and prisoners’ dying breaths as “snores.” None of the executioners mentioned that any of the prisoners’ bodies jerked or jolted, as reporters repeatedly observed. Prison officials turned off audio from the execution chamber prior to the injections, so the journalists in attendance could not hear what transpired in the execution chamber or evaluate the executioners’ assessment of “snores.” William Breeden, a spiritual advisor who attended to Corey Johnson during his execution on January 14, 2021, reported that “Corey said his hands and mouth were burning.” However, execution personnel who were in the chamber claimed not to have heard Johnson’s statement.
AP said “the sworn accounts by executioners, which government filings cited as evidence the lethal injections were going smoothly, raise questions about whether officials misled courts to ensure the executions scheduled from July to mid-January were done before death penalty opponent Joe Biden became president.” Evidence suggests that the government’s sanitized execution accounts likely contributed to court decisions that permitted those executions to proceed.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who heard challenges to the federal execution protocol, ultimately decided that the evidence was not adequate to halt the executions. “While the court continues to be concerned at the possibility that inmates will suffer excruciating pain during their executions,” she wrote, attorneys for the federal prisoners “have not established that flash pulmonary edema is ‘certain’ or even ‘likely’ to occur before an inmate is rendered insensate.”
“Secrecy surrounded all aspects of the executions,” AP wrote. “Courts relied on those carrying them out to volunteer information about glitches. None of the executioners mentioned any.”

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/federal-bureau-of-prisons-sanitized-execution-reports-omitting-disturbing-details-observed-by-media-witnesses

23 February 2021 :

DPIC Adds Eleven Cases to Innocence List, Bringing National Death-Row Exoneration Total to 185.

New research by the Death Penalty Information Center has found 11 previously unrecorded death-row exonerations, bringing the total number of people exonerated after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death to 185. The data now show that for every 8.3 people who have been put to death in the U.S. since executions resumed in the 1970s, one person who had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death has been exonerated. Wrongful capital convictions occurred in virtually every part of the country, with exonerations documented in 29 states and 118 different counties.

“Everybody’s worst fear about capital punishment is that innocent people will be wrongfully convicted and executed,” said Robert Dunham, DPIC’s Executive Director. “But the more we learn about what actually happens in these cases, the worse the problem gets. As long as the legal system involves humans, it is guaranteed to make mistakes. But most innocent people who are wrongfully convicted and sent to death row don’t get there by mistake. The data from these 185 exonerations shows that far more frequently, and particularly with people of color, innocent death row prisoners were convicted because of a combination of police or prosecutorial misconduct and perjury or other false testimony.”

Analysis of the 185 innocence cases reveals disturbing patterns of official misconduct and racial bias. Nearly 70% of the exonerations involved misconduct by police, prosecutors, or other government officials. 80% of wrongful capital convictions involved some combination of misconduct or perjury/false accusation and more than half involved both. Cases that involved misconduct took longer, on average, to reach exoneration. Misconduct was implicated in all 8 of the exonerations that took more than 30 years and 88% of exonerations that took 21-30 years. Misconduct occurred more often in cases involving Black exonerees (78.8%) than white exonerees (58.2%). Black exonerees spent an average of 4.3 more years waiting for exoneration than white exonerees.

Jurisdictions with heavy use of the death penalty and histories of police and prosecutorial misconduct had the largest numbers of death-row exonerations. While 91 counties with wrongful capital convictions have produced one exoneration each, the 27 counties with multiple exonerations collectively account for a majority (50.2%) of the country’s death-row exonerations. Cook County (Chicago), Illinois wrongfully convicted and condemned 15 death-row exonerees since 1973, more than double the number of any other county in the United States. It is followed by Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio; and Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, with six exonerations each. Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona; and Oklahoma County (Oklahoma City), Oklahoma had five each. By themselves, these five counties account for 37 death-row exonerations, one fifth of the nation’s total. And more than 95 percent of the wrongful capital convictions and death sentences in these counties involved some combination of police or prosecutorial misconduct and/or witness perjury or false accusation.

A new examination of exonerations involving DNA evidence suggests that many more innocence cases remain undetected because DNA evidence was unavailable or courts refused to permit testing. Because the presence or absence of DNA evidence in a case should have no effect on what factors cause a wrongful capital conviction, large differences between the causes of wrongful convictions in the DNA cases and in the cases with no DNA are red flags of where courts may have unjustly denied or erroneously credited false evidence that could have been disproven by DNA. In particular, misconduct, false or fabricated confessions, and questionable forensic or witness testimony were proven to be present much more frequently in the cases involving DNA evidence. Official misconduct was a contributing factor in 85.7% of exonerations involving DNA evidence, but only 66.2% of those without DNA. False or fabricated confessions were present 4.3 times more frequently in the DNA exonerations (46.4%) than in cases without DNA (10.8%), and false or misleading forensic evidence was exposed 2.9 times more frequently (71.4%) in the DNA cases than in the non-DNA exonerations (24.8%). Mistaken witness identifications were found more than twice as frequently in the DNA exonerations (35.7%) than in the exonerations without DNA (17.2%)

The DPIC analysis shows that DNA may be a critical element in uncovering innocence in wrongful conviction cases that might otherwise proceed to execution. Kirk Bloodsworth, Executive Director of Witness to Innocence and the first death-row survivor to be exonerated by DNA, said of the new report, “with such a large number of mistakes uncovered, there’s no need to wonder anymore, we can also be sure that innocent people have been executed.”

The eleven new cases are listed below:

175. Anthony Carey (North Carolina), Black, convicted in 1973 and exonerated in 1974;
176. Howard Jackson Stack (Georgia), White, convicted in 1973 and exonerated in 1975;
177. John Thomas Alford (North Carolina), Black, convicted in 1975 and exonerated in 1976;
178. Gary Radi (Montana), White, convicted in 1975 and exonerated in 1978;
179. Thomas Pearson (Ohio), Nero, convicted in 1976 and exonerated in 1980;
180. Charles Lee Bufford (Alabama), Black, convicted in 1978 and exonerated in 1981;
181. Justin Cruz (Texas), Hispanic, convicted in 1984 and exonerated in 1985;
182. Claude Wilkerson (Texas), White, convicted in 1979 and exonerated in 1987;
183. Charles Tolliver (Ohio), Nero, convicted in 1986 and exonerated in 1988;
184. Bonnie Erwin (Texas), Nero, convicted in 1985 and exonerated in 1989;
185. Andre Minnitt (Arizona), Nero, convicted in 1993 and exonerated in 2002.

On the occasion of this article, the DPIC updates the various statistics of the Innocence List, such as the prevalence of Black prisoners (99) over Whites (67), the division by states and counties (Florida 30 exonerations, Illinois 21, Texas 16, 12 in North Carolina, 11 in Louisiana and Ohio, 10 in Arizona, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, and below, grounds for convictions later overturned, and a brief account of each individual case.

DPIC also summarizes in a table the "errors" found in the cases:

Official Misconduct in 128 cases (69.2%)
False Confession in 30 cases (16.2%)
False or Misleading Forensic Evidence in 59 cases (31.9%)
Inadequate Legal Defense in 47 cases (25.4%)
Insufficient Evidence in 17 cases (9.2%)
Mistaken Witness Identification in 37 cases (20%)
Perjury or False Accusation in 125 cases (67.6%)
Exonerations Involving DNA in 28 cases (15.1%)

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/dpic-adds-eleven-cases-to-innocence-list-bringing-national-d eath-row-exoneration-total-to-185

08 March 2021 :

Christopher Williams Released From Prison After Being Cleared of Another Murder. In 1989 he was charged with 6 murders, none of which he committed.
Pennsylvania death-row exoneree Christopher Williams was released from prison on February 9, 2021, after being exonerated in a second murder case. The second wrongful murder conviction had kept Williams incarcerated after he was cleared of the murder for which he was wrongfully condemned to die.
Williams was exonerated with the assistance of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit. Unit chief Patricia Cummings admitted that “there was some cynicism in me as a human being that one individual could be wrongfully convicted more than once.” But, she ultimately acknowledged, in Williams’ case, “lightning did strike twice.”
Williams was exonerated on December 23, 2019 of a 1989 triple murder in North Philadelphia. He and his co-defendant, Theophalis Wilson, were wrongfully convicted on the basis of false testimony from James White and David Lee. White was facing possible death sentences for six murders, but he struck a deal with prosecutors to name his accomplices in exchange for help applying for a reduced sentence after 15 years. He falsely identified Williams and Wilson. Lee was granted leniency for his testimony in two unrelated cases, and prosecutors deliberately withheld information about his history as an informant and cooperating prosecution witness.
Philadelphia prosecutors charged Williams with six killings. Juries acquitted him of two of the murders and he has now been exonerated of the other four. “Williams’ conviction was built on a house of cards that began to collapse in 2019 when the Commonwealth opened up its files to the defense,” the District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit wrote in its filings. “Once the light was allowed to shine, the Commonwealth was forced to see that the basic structure underpinning the conviction was built on the unscrupulous behavior of several bad actors.”
Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Tracy Brandeis-Roman called Williams’ experience “mind-boggling.” She offered an apology to the family of Michael Haynesworth, the 19-year-old murder victim in the case. Victor Abreu of the Philadelphia Federal Community Defender Office, which has represented Williams since 1998, also offered his apologies to Haynesworth’s family “that 31 years later, we still don’t have the answer to who killed their loved one.”
Upon his exoneration, Williams noted the unique nature of his case. “Never in the history of the Pennsylvania judicial system has someone been charged with six murders, acquitted of two and now exonerated of four,” he said. He went on to offer a warning about wrongful convictions. “If this was done to me,” he said, “the question remains: Who else was it done to?”
In the three years since Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner established the Conviction Integrity Unit, it has been instrumental in 18 exonerations, including Williams and former death-row prisoner William Ogrod. Philadelphia’s six death-row exonerations since Pennsylvania reenacted the death penalty in the 1970s is tied for the second most of any county in the U.S. All six cases involved police or prosecutorial misconduct. A seventh likely death-row exoneree, Fred Thomas, died before he could be released, while the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, knowing Thomas had terminal cancer, fought defense efforts to expedite the prosecutors’ appeal of the court order that had granted Thomas a new trial.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/former-pennsylvania-death-row-prisoner-christopher-williams-released-from-prison-after-being-cleared-of-another-murder

03 March 2021 :

Records Disclose: Taxpayers Picked Up a Nearly Million Dollar Price Tag for Each Federal Execution.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons spent nearly $4.7 million dollars on the first five executions carried out by the Trump administration in July and August 2020, according to redacted government financial records recently obtained by the ACLU.
The government’s January 2021 disclosures in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, detailed the extraordinarily high price tag absorbed by taxpayers as a result of the administration’s choice to conduct executions during the worst global pandemic in more than a century. With an average annual federal incarceration cost of $37,449.00, the burden to U.S. taxpayers for each execution exceeded the price tag of incarcerating a federal prisoner for 25 years.
The bulk of the expenditures were spent on payments relating to assembling, transporting, and housing multiple execution teams. The BOP paid round-trip travel and related expenses to bring dozens of staff to Terre Haute from more than 20 out-of-state prisons for training, to perform daily functions normally undertaken by Terre Haute staff, and to participate in the executions. The documents identified $3.1 million in unidentified costs related to the new execution staff. BOP spent $107,000 on hotels for the witnesses and out-of-state staff.
Cassandra Stubbs, the director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said the expenditures reflected “a gross misplacement of resources.” Pointing to heavy redactions in the disclosed record, she said that the nearly million dollar per execution price tag likely significantly understates the actual costs. “The government is doing so much of this in the dark, so we don’t always get to see the full weight of what it’s up to,” Stubbs said. “They’re willing to go to extraordinary lengths in terms of spending our money and then hiding the footprints of it.”
BOP officials declined to answer media questions on the payment records.
In a court filing in November, BOP’s regional counsel Rick Winter indicated that teams involving more than 40 employees from around the country would be assembled for the executions, removing them from their day-today functions, “which include a wide range of correctional and administrative positions within the BOP.” He indicated that the Bureau brings another 50 members of BOP Special Operations Response Teams and Disturbance Control Teams from across the country to Terre Haute for enhanced security during the executions. BOP also paid private contractors to provide unspecified services in connection with the executions.
The execution costs included the increased expenses for security and running the rest of the prison while the executions were taking place. A lack of prison staff at Terre Haute, which Stubbs attributed to the pandemic, meant that guards had to be pulled away from their usual duties during the executions, sending the prison into semi-lockdown. During these lockdowns, alternative brown-bag meals were provided to the around 2,600 prisoners at an increased cost.
While BOP paid for staffing costs and travel and housing expenses for the families of the victims, it did not make similar expenditures for the families of the indigent prisoners who were being executed. Lisa Brown, whose son Christopher Vialva was executed in September, told The Marshall Project, “What they pay for on our side is the shipping of the body of our loved ones, the embalming, a suit for them to wear and the casket.” Brown was forced to take out a loan to be able to be present to support her son at his execution, she said. Her congregation and her son’s friends pooled together donations to pay for her gas and hotel room. After her son’s death, she said that “We feel that they go out of their way to not accommodate us.”
The federal government has been the only U.S. jurisdiction to carry out executions since early July 2020, and it, like the two states that carried out executions early in the pandemic, experienced a COVID-19 outbreak following the executions. “There was no need to restart executions and certainly no need to carry out so many executions during a pandemic when each execution brings together and poses an enormous risk to so many circles of people,” Stubbs said.
If the cost of carrying out the eight other federal executions in November and December 2020 and in January 2021 are comparable to the first five executions, the federal executions will have cost taxpayers at least $12.2 million dollars. That figure does not include the cost of the extensive litigation over the legality and constitutionality of the executions in each of the cases.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/records-disclose-taxpayers-picked-up-a-nearly-million-dollar-price-tag-for-each-federal-execution

27 January 2021 :

After Trump’s Execution Spree, Criminal Justice Leaders Urge Biden To End Death Penalty----Prosecutors want President Joe Biden to commute the sentences of those on federal death row and end capital punishment once and for all.
During Donald Trump’s final week in office, the federal government executed 3 prisoners on death row. By the time President Joe Biden was inaugurated, the Trump administration had overseen a record 13 executions in 7 months, a killing spree unparalleled in modern U.S. history.
Now, a coalition of prosecutors and attorneys general is calling on Biden to immediately end the federal death penalty, calling it “an assault on human dignity and an affront to American values.”
In a letter sent on Monday, nearly 100 criminal justice leaders implored Biden to commute the sentences of everyone on federal death row and to instruct federal prosecutors not to seek the death penalty in future cases.
“The death penalty is an archaic and failed institution that is rooted in racism and too often punishes the innocent,” said Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution and a former federal prosecutor who organized the letter. “The previous administration’s cruel and ruthless killing spree undermined the already-fragile trust in the justice system and revealed that a simple pause on executions is not nearly enough.”
The Trump administration restarted federal executions last summer — in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic — after a 17-year hiatus in the practice.
Among those executed by the federal government was Lisa Montgomery, a mentally ill woman who was sexually tortured as a child; Dustin Higgs, who maintained his innocence up until his death; and Corey Johnson, who had an intellectual disability. Both Higgs and Johnson were recovering from COVID-19 at the time of their deaths.
The letter, which was signed by a number of U.S. attorneys and former Department of Justice officials, warns that the death penalty is tainted by racial bias and exists in tension with the constitutional ban against cruel and unusual punishment and the guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law.
“We also now know that we have not executed the worst of the worst, but often instead put to death the unluckiest of the unlucky — the impoverished, the poorly represented, and the most broken,” the letter reads.
“Time and again, we have executed individuals with long histories of debilitating mental illness, childhoods marred by unspeakable physical and mental abuse, and intellectual disabilities that have prevented them from leading independent adult lives. We have executed individuals with trial lawyers so derelict in their duties and obligations that they never bothered to uncover long histories of illness and trauma. We have also likely executed the innocent.”
There are 49 people left on federal death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
During his presidential campaign, Biden pledged to eliminate the federal death penalty, noting that “we cannot ensure we get death penalty cases right every time.” But he has not elaborated on his plans for the people on death row.
Federal executions take place at a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, which houses the only federal death chamber in the U.S. The letter also asks Biden to order that the death chamber be taken apart so it is never used again.
“We ask you to not only support federal legislative efforts to end capital punishment, but to take all steps in your power to disassemble the machinery of death and ensure future presidents cannot execute the dozens of people on federal death row at will,” the letter says. “Keeping intact the death chamber at Terre Haute leaves the stage still set for unspeakable cruelty that says more about us as a society than it does about those we execute.”
40 members of Congress have also signed a letter asking Biden to commute the sentences of the remaining people on death row.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-biden-end-death-penalty_n_600f4511c5b6997d555b729c

26 January 2021 :

Death sentence tossed for Kenneth Eugene Barrett.
Barrett, now 59, White, was convicted in 2005 in the shooting death of Trooper David “Rocky” Eales during a Sept. 24, 1999 drug raid at Barrett’s home in Sequoyah County. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday reversed a lower court ruling that found that while Barrett had deficient legal representation during his trial, he suffered no prejudice as a result. Rather, the appellate court determined that had particular mitigating evidence been presented at the trial, Barrett might not have received the death sentence for the fatal shooting Eales. “In reversing, we conclude that, viewing the totality of the evidence at trial, sentencing, and the post-conviction hearing, there is a reasonable probability at least one juror would have recommended a life sentence,” the 3-member court panel wrote in a 65-page ruling. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2015 had ordered that an evidentiary hearing be held in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma regarding whether Barrett’s federal trial attorneys were deficient in not investigating his background and mental health during the penalty phase of the 2005 trial. A magistrate who conducted the evidentiary hearing found that Barrett’s counsel performed deficiently and that such performance prejudiced Barrett at sentencing. In 2019, a Muskogee federal judge agreed with the magistrate’s finding that Barrett’s legal defense was inadequate, but he overruled the prejudice finding, determining that “the jury would not have been impressed by (Mr. Barrett’s) experts’ opinions.”

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/capital-case-roundup-death-penalty-court-decisions-the-week-of-january-18-2021

18 January 2021 :

Death row inmate's 'excruciatingly painful death' felt like drowning for 20 minutes----Corey Johnson, 52, died an "excruciatingly painful death".
A death row serial killer who was intellectually disabled died an "excruciatingly painful" death as he was executed at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. Corey Johnson, 52, died on Thursday, January 14, despite his lawyers warning his Covid diagnosis would make death by lethal injection "excruciatingly painful." Multiple sources claimed Johnson was pumped with pentobarbital solution into his arms before his eyelids suddenly closed. The man then struggled to speak unsuccessfully for several minutes and his mouth fell agape until he died 20 minutes later. Pentobarbital solution can paralyse people, masking the pain they’re enduring during their final moments. Johnson’s lawyers say he would have suffered an unconstitutionally painful death likened to drowning. It had also been argued Johnson was mentally-disabled during several unsuccessful attempts to get his sentence commuted. He was pronounced dead at 11:34am, 20 minutes after he had received the injection in his arms. According to a crime website dedicated to abolishing the death penalty, when asked if he had any last words Johnson replied “no, I’m OK," before turning his head to a room reserved for family members to say: "Love you." Corey Johnson received the death penalty for the 1992 murders of seven people in Richmond, Virginia. He killed Peyton Johnson, Louis Johnson, Bobby Long, Dorothy Armstrong, Anthony Carter, Linwood Chiles, and Curtis Thorne. In a statement released by his lawyers, Johnson said he was “sorry” for his crimes and wanted the victims to be remembered.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/death-row-inmates-excruciatingly-painful-23329422

12 January 2021 :

A federal judge granted Lisa Montgomery a stay of execution pending a competency hearing -- just hours before she was scheduled to die.
Judge James Hanlon of the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana wrote in the order granting the stay, "Ms. Montgomery's motion to stay execution is GRANTED to allow the Court to conduct a hearing to determine Ms. Montgomery's competence to be executed." A date has not yet been set for the competency hearing.
Montgomery, 52, was scheduled to die by lethal injection on Tuesday, January 12 at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. Prosecutors have filed a notice to appeal the judge's ruling.
Montgomery also has a petition before the US Supreme Court.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/12/us/lisa-montgomery-execution-stayed/index.html

12 January 2021 :

A few minutes after the news of the Indiana federal judge who has suspended the execution of Lisa Montgomery, the site "themarshallproject.org/next-to-die" publishes a very brief news that also the federal appeals court of Washington DC would have ordered a second suspension of the execution. At the moment it has not been possible to find further information on this news, which the important US site places at 2.11 pm, 6 minutes after the news from Indiana.
“The DC Court of Appeals granted Lisa Montgomery a stay of execution in an appeal about the government's method of setting execution dates. The order sets a schedule of filings that stretches to the end of the month and into the Biden administration”.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/next-to-die

11 January 2021 :

Lawyers: Woman On US Death Row Not Competent For Execution
Lawyers for the only woman on federal death row are asking a judge to halt her execution and arguing she isn’t competent and can’t be put to death. Lisa Montgomery’s lawyers filed a petition Friday in federal court in Indiana seeking to halt the execution, which is scheduled for Tuesday at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. They argue putting Montgomery to death would violate her constitutional rights because she “has brain damage, severe mental illness, and suffered a lifetime of sexual torture.”

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-indiana-terre-haute-courts-executions-a9f32d7c94fef7bde219a478a477da19

11 January 2021 :

Judge puts restrictions on federal executions----Bureau can proceed only if it shows it is taking certain COVID precautions
Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson, chief of the federal system's Southern District of Indiana, is ordering the federal government to show it is enforcing certain precautions against COVID-19 before it can execute more inmates at the the U.S. prison complex in Terre Haute. Judge Magnus-Stinson issued a preliminary injunction on Thursday. In that filing, she said the Bureau of Prisons has an obligation to attempt to protect the Federal Correctional Complex's population from COVID-19, including when it conducts an execution and brings off-site personnel onto the grounds of the complex.
Each execution brings approximately 50 to 125 individuals to FCC Terre Haute, the judge noted.
To that end, Magnus-Stinson said the BoP must:

• Enforce mask requirements for all staff participants in the executions.
• Maintain contact logs for all FCC Terre Haute staff members involved in any execution who have close contact — within 6 feet for a total of 15 minutes over the course of a 24-hour period — with any other person during execution preparation, during an execution or during the post-execution process.
• For 14 days following any such close contact, require all impacted FCC Terre Haute staff members to produce a negative COVID-19 result using one of the complex's 21 rapid testing machines each day before beginning ordinary duties that involve interaction with FCC inmates.
• Conduct thorough contract tracing for any such FCC staff member who tests positive for COVID-19 during this 14-day period.

The judge wrote that she would not allow the bureau to carry out executions unless or until it can show these precautionary measures have been followed. 3 executions are scheduled for next week: Lisa Montgomery on Tuesday, Cory Johnson on Thursday and Dustin Higgs on Friday. The timing of the remaining executions scheduled by President Donald Trump's administration's Justice Department is relevant, as Trump leaves office at noon on Jan. 20, and President-elect Joe Biden is opposed to the death penalty and could halt federal executions. Magnus-Stinson's preliminary injunction came in the case Smith v. Barr, No. 2:20-cv-00630-JMS-DLP. The federal government could choose to meet Magnus-Stinson's requirements, or it could appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which is based in Chicago.

https://www.tribstar.com/news/judge-puts-restrictions-on-federal-executions/article_1d8ef2dc-51e1-11eb-a1eb-1b359b26633c.html#:~:text=The%20judge%20wrote%20that%20she,precautionary%20measures%20have%20been%20followed.&text=The%20Trump%20administration%20will%20have,years%2C%20the%20Associated%20Press%20reported.

12 January 2021 :

Dustin Higgs Execution Roadblock Gov't Appeal To Be Heard 12 Days After Scheduled Execution Date
Maryland, where a federal jury returned a death sentence against Dustin Higgs in 2000, abolished capital punishment in 2013. That led the government to ask the court to amend its prior judgment and direct that Higgs be executed in Indiana, under Indiana law. His execution is set for January 15, 2021.
On December 29, 2020, the Maryland federal district court stated it lacks authority to revise a final judgment and order against the backdrop of a federal law which requires federal executions to be carried out under the law of the state in which the defendant was sentenced. The government appealed the district court's decision.
On Thursday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ordered the case scheduled for remote oral argument on January 27, 2021, at 11:00 a.m.

https://www.fd.org/news/dustin-higgs-execution-roadblock-govt-appeal-be-heard-twelve-days-after-scheduled-execution#:~:text=Search-,Dustin%20Higgs%20Execution%20Roadblock%20Gov't%20Appeal%20To%20Be%20Heard,Days%20After%20Scheduled%20Execution%20Date&text=That%20led%20the%20government%20to,set%20for%20January%2015%2C%202021