20 December 2024 :

December 19, 2024 - USA. “The Death Penalty in 2024: Year End Report”
Death Sentences and Executions Remain Near Historic Lows Amid Growing Concerns about Fairness and Innocence ----President Biden and North Carolina Governor Consider Commutations of Death Rows. 4 States Responsible for 76% of Executions.
This year marked the 10th consecutive year where fewer than 30 people were executed (25) and fewer than 50 people were sentenced to death (26), while high profile cases of death-sentenced people attracted significant attention and new, unexpected supporters. At this writing, widespread coalitions of people with diverse perspectives are publicly urging President Biden and North Carolina Governor Cooper to consider commuting the death sentences of prisoners to remedy longstanding concerns about systemic problems with the application of the death penalty.
“In 2024, we saw people with credible evidence of innocence set for execution, followed by extraordinary levels of public frustration and outrage. Several high-profile cases fueled new concerns about whether the death penalty can be used fairly and accurately. A new poll also predicts a steady decline of support in the future, showing for the first time that a majority of adults aged 18 to 43 now oppose the death penalty,” said Robin M. Maher, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI).
Ten states -- Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas -- sentenced people to death in 2024. Just 4 states -- Alabama, California, Florida, and Texas -- account for the majority (20) of new death sentences this year. Florida imposed the highest number of new death sentences, with seven. Texas imposed six new death sentences, while Alabama imposed four, California imposed three, while Arizona, Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, and Tennessee each had one new death sentence.
About 1/3 of the 26 new death sentences were imposed by non-unanimous juries: 6 in Florida and three in Alabama. In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation reducing the number of votes needed to recommend a death sentence from unanimous to just 8 out of 12 jurors. Observers accurately predicted that this change would result in an increase in Florida death sentences. At least 10 votes are required for Alabama juries to recommend a death sentence, while every other state requires unanimity. Non-unanimous juries have been criticized for silencing minority voices on a jury, increasing the chances that an innocent person will be convicted, and undermining public confidence in the death penalty system.
9 states -- Alabama (6), Florida (1), Georgia (1), Indiana (1), Missouri (4), Oklahoma (4), South Carolina (2), Texas (5), and Utah (1) -- carried out executions in 2024. Four states – Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas – were responsible for 76 % of executions.
Executions resumed for the 1st time in decades in Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah after elected officials announced they had secured execution drugs or approved new methods. Idaho attempted to resume executions this year after a 12-year hiatus but called off the botched execution of Thomas Creech when the execution team was unable to establish an IV line after an hour of attempts.
Public support for the death penalty in 2024 remains at a 5-decade low (53%), and polling reveals significant and growing generational differences, as well as rising disapproval among people ages 43 and younger. Also, a growing number of conservative lawmakers and elected prosecutors publicly supported prisoners with compelling evidence of innocence, including Richard Glossip in Oklahoma, Marcellus Williams in Missouri, and Robert Roberson in Texas.
3 death row prisoners were exonerated in 2024. DPI’s ongoing research uncovered two additional exonerations from prior years, bringing the number of U.S. death row exonerations since 1972 to 200. In Texas, Melissa Lucio, who came within 2 days of execution in 2022, was declared “actually innocent” by a trial court in October.
The U.S. Supreme Court turned away almost all petitions (145 of 148, 98%) from death-sentenced prisoners in 2024, even those with strong evidence of innocence. This approach reflects the Court’s retreat from the critical role it has historically played in regulating and limiting use of the death penalty. The Court’s December 6 certiorari grant in Rivers v. Lumpkin, a non-capital case, threatens to further restrict pathways to relief on appeal for death-sentenced prisoners.
The number of new death sentences (26) and executions (25) in 2024 represented an increase from 2023 when there were 21 new death sentences and 24 executions but represented a dramatic drop from 20 years ago when there were 130 new death sentences and 59 executions. This change can be attributed to an increase in non-unanimous death sentences in Florida, where the law was changed in April of 2023, and Alabama, the only 2 states that permit non-unanimous death sentencing. In 2023, non-unanimous sentences accounted for 3 new death sentences (1 in Florida, 2 in Alabama) but this year accounted for nine (6 in Florida, 3 in Alabama).
Executions reflect the views of jurors at the time of sentencing—increasingly, views that are 20 or 30 years out of date. The majority of individuals executed in 2024 would likely not receive death sentences if their cases were tried today. Legislative and legal changes, increased scrutiny of prosecutorial practices, and shifts in societal attitudes over recent decades have significantly affected whether defendants receive death sentences.
Today’s jurors, with their better understanding of how severe mental illness, developmental disabilities, youth, and profound trauma affect behavior, are increasingly choosing life sentences over death sentences. All but 1 individual executed in 2024 had at least 1 of the above-listed vulnerabilities. 6 of the 25 people executed were 21 or younger at the time of the crime for which they were executed.
As has been historically true, prisoners of color and prisoners convicted of killing white victims were overrepresented among those executed. 12 of the 25 prisoners executed this year were people of color.
Nine were Black, two were Latino, and one was Native American. The vast majority of defendants (80%) were executed for killing at least one white victim.
While six people of color were executed for murders of white victims, no white defendant was executed for the murder of a person of color.
Throughout U.S. history, the death penalty has been more likely to be imposed in cases involving white victims, especially if the defendant is a person of color. Since 1976, more than ten times as many Black defendants have been executed for murders of white victims than white defendants executed for the murders of Black victims. 14 of the defendants sentenced to death this year (54%) were people of color.
Both the average age at execution (52 years) and the average time from sentencing to execution (22.2 years) remained close to last year’s record highs of 54 years old and 23 years spent on death row.
Death penalty-related legislation was enacted in at least 6 states (California, Delaware, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah) to limit use of the death penalty, alter execution methods or protocols, modify procedures, and increase secrecy. Death penalty abolition efforts continue in more than a dozen states, and efforts to reintroduce the death penalty in eight states failed. Only one effort to expand the death penalty to non-homicide crimes was successful, in Tennessee.,

https://dpic-cdn.org/production/documents/The-Death-Penalty-in-2024-Press-Release.pdf?dm=1734627216

13 December 2024 :

December 13, 2024 - USA. Biden commutes roughly 1,500 sentences and pardons 39 people
For non-violent crimes
President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic and is pardoning 39 Americans convicted of nonviolent crimes. It’s the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.
The commutations announced Thursday are for people who have served out home confinement sentences for at least one year after they were released. Prisons were uniquely bad for spreading the virus and some inmates were released in part to stop the spread. At one point, 1 in 5 prisoners had COVID-19, according to a tally kept by The Associated Press.
Biden said he would be taking more steps in the weeks ahead and would continue to review clemency petitions. The second largest single-day act of clemency was by Barack Obama, with 330, shortly before leaving office in 2017.
“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a statement. “As president, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”
The clemency follows a broad pardon for his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes. Biden is under pressure from advocacy groups to pardon broad swaths of people, including those on federal death row, before the Trump administration takes over in January. He’s also weighing whether to issue preemptive pardons to those who investigated Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and are facing possible retribution when he takes office.
Clemency is the term for the power the president has to pardon, in which a person is relieved of guilt and punishment, or to commute a sentence, which reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing. It’s customary for a president to grant mercy at the end of his term, using the power of the office to wipe away records or end prison terms.
Those pardoned Thursday range in age from 36 to 75. About half are men and half are women, and they had been convicted of nonviolent crimes such as drug offenses, fraud or theft and turned their lives around, White House lawyers said.
The president had previously issued 122 commutations and 21 other pardons. He’s also broadly pardoned those convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia, and pardoned former U.S. service members convicted of violating a now-repealed military ban on consensual gay sex.
Others are advocating for Biden to commute the sentences of federal death row prisoners. His attorney general, Merrick Garland, paused federal executions. Biden had said on the campaign trail in 2020 that he wanted to end the death penalty but he never did, and now, with Trump coming back into office, it’s likely executions will resume. During his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented number of federal executions, carried out during the height of the pandemic.
More clemency grants are coming before Biden leaves office on Jan. 20, but it’s not clear whether he’ll take action to guard against possible prosecution by Trump, an untested use of the power. The president has been taking the idea seriously and has been thinking about it for as much as six months — before the presidential election — but has been concerned about the precedent it would set, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions.
Before pardoning his son, Biden had repeatedly pledged not to do so. He said in a statement explaining his reversal that the prosecution had been poisoned by politics. The decision prompted criminal justice advocates and lawmakers to put additional public pressure on the administration to use that same power for everyday Americans. It wasn’t a very popular move; only about 2 in 10 Americans approved of his decision, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

https://apnews.com/article/biden-pardons-clemency-4432002d67334e6716c2776fd73f3cc8

10 December 2024 :

December 09, 2024 - USA. Pope Francis and many others urge Biden, a Catholic, to commute all federal death sentences
In letters released on December 9, 2024, hundreds of stakeholders urged President Joe Biden to commute all federal death sentences.
This collective request reflects broad, bipartisan acknowledgement of the flaws in the capital punishment system and aligns with the national downward trend of support for the death penalty, now at historic lows. 40 men remain on federal death row. Any grant of clemency would result in new sentences of life in prison without parole for these individuals.
More than 200 Black and indigenous faith leaders in the Faith Leaders of Color Coalition (FLOCC) told President Biden that federal commutation “would acknowledge and help redress the racial bias built into the federal death penalty system, allow vast government resources to be redirected to policies that actually improve public safety, and allow the families of victims and incarcerated persons to focus on healing instead of living in legal limbo.” Catholic Mobilizing Network (CMN), a national organization engaged with more than 30,000 Catholics across the US to end the death penalty, asked President Biden to bring  “an end to every form of death penalty…in the spirit of reconciliation.” Echoing these sentiments, on sunday December 8, Pope Francis, during the Angelus address, prayed that these death sentences be commuted, asking the faithful to “pray for the inmates on death row in the United States…that their sentences may be commuted or changed.”
A group of 29 retired correctional professionals also joined in the effort to urge President Biden to commute the federal row, citing the harm executions pose to corrections staff. Applauding President Biden’s opposition to capital punishment, the group said they ​“know first-hand the devastating toll executions take, not only on correctional professionals directly involved in the process but on their families and on the larger correctional community.” Clearing federal death row would allow the Bureau of Prisons to move towards “important policy goals” and “would free millions of federal dollars for other priorities, including improving safety for correctional staff through training and infrastructure improvements.”
Pro-life advocates, stressing their commitment to this value from conception to natural death, told President Biden that “human life, no matter the circumstances, is worthy of protection. There is no amount of judicial process that can overcome the truth that the death penalty is the purposeful taking of a human being’s life.”
During his 2020 presidential campaign, President Biden said he would work to eliminate the federal death penalty. During President Biden’s tenure, the Department of Justice paused executions, but continued to defend existing death sentences and authorized one new capital prosecution. The letters urge President Biden to go beyond the moratorium on executions and fulfill his campaign promise to end the federal death penalty. Biden made this promise in the wake of the executions carried out during the last seven months of President Trump’s first term, when the federal government executed 12 men and one woman in the midst of a global pandemic and despite serious concerns surrounding intellectual disability, mental incompetency, racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, and more.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/religious-groups-former-corrections-officials-pro-life-voices-and-many-others-urge-president-biden-to-commute-federal-death-sentences
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2024-12/pope-appeal-prayers-federal-death-row-grace-inmates.html

02 December 2024 :

November 27, 2024 - USA. Biden Contemplates Federal Commutation Requests
On November 25, 2024, President Joe Biden pardoned 2 Thanksgiving turkeys, an annual, symbolic tradition that highlights the president’s constitutional authority to issue pardons and commutations. Now, as President Biden sets to leave office in January 2025, 60 members of Congress and many others are urging him to grant clemency to the 40 men currently on federal death row. During his 2020 presidential campaign, President Biden said he would work to abolish the federal death penalty but there has been little evidence of anything done in furtherance of this promise. President Trump, on the other hand, has vowed to use and expand the federal death penalty when he resumes office.
A grant of clemency to some or all the federally death-sentenced men would not be unprecedented. President Biden would join a number of elected officials who have made similar mass grants of clemency for a variety of reasons. Since 1976, governors in 8 states have commuted all death sentences under their authority, often citing systemic concerns. In 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan cleared the state’s death row, commuting 167 death sentences to life in prison due to many wrongful convictions and systemic concerns about the fairness of the state’s death penalty system. Upon announcing his decision, Gov. Ryan said, “I started with this issue because I was and still am concerned about innocence, but once I studied, I pondered what had become of our justice system, I came to care above all about fairness. Fairness is fundamental to the American system of justice and to our way of life.” In 2011, the state of Illinois abolished the death penalty, and then-Governor Pat Quinn commuted the sentences of the 15 individuals remaining on death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Gov. Quinn said that when he signed the abolition bill, he meant to “abolish the death penalty for everyone,” including those already sentenced to death.
Most recently, Oregon Governor Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of 17 prisoners on the state’s death row before leaving office in 2022, calling the death penalty “both dysfunctional and immoral.” Gov. Brown’s commutations completed what she characterized as “the near abolition of the death penalty” by the state legislature in 2019. At that time, the legislature amended its death penalty statute to significantly limit the crimes for which capital punishment can be imposed. In her statement announcing the commutations, Gov. Brown called the death penalty “an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably.” Gov. Brown said the commutations were “consistent” with the legislature’s effort to functionally end the death penalty.
In 1986, New Mexico Governor Toney Anaya commuted the death sentences of 5 prisoners on the state’s death row. Gov. Anaya said that he did this because he “consistently opposed capital punishment as being inhumane, immoral, anti-God, and incompatible with an enlightened society.” In 1991, before leaving office, Ohio Governor Richard Celeste commuted the death sentences of 8 death row prisoners. Ahead of New Jersey’s abolition of the death penalty in 2007, Governor Jon Corzine commuted the death sentences of the 8 individuals remaining on the state’s death row. Governor Martin O’Malley commuted the death sentences of 4 prisoners still on Maryland’s death row in 2015, after the legislature’s prospective abolition of capital punishment in 2013. In 2020, Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted the death sentences of the 3 prisoners still on the state’s death row after the legislature’s prospective abolition of capital punishment.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/biden-contemplates-federal-commutation-requests

02 December 2024 :

November 26, 2024 - USA. 9/11 Victim’s Daughter Writes Why She Supports Plea Deals for Perpetrators
In a November 18 Washington Post op-ed, Chanel Shum, a member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, explains her support of plea agreements that would end decades of legal uncertainty and sentence three of the accused 9/11 defendants to life without parole. Ms. Shum was starting preschool when her father, See Wong Shum, was killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Describing her first time attending hearings at Guantánamo Bay, she writes, “Like many, I assumed that justice had been served long ago. Instead, I confronted a reality tangled in legal red tape, endless delays and violations of the rule of law.” Sitting behind bulletproof glass to witness legal proceedings against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, she says, “I thought about how my family’s life had been changed forever. And yet, I felt uncomfortable with a justice system that allowed years of indefinite detention without trial, which I saw as antithetical to both the rule of law and my core values.” 
“Although 9/11 family members are a large group with divergent views, we can all agree that the case has taken far too long,” Ms. Shum writes. “Plea agreements will guarantee irreversible sentences for each of the detainees before 2026, as opposed to a trial, which could add years of appeals and still ultimately be overturned in federal court.” She says that the plea deals, which are currently in legal limbo, would bring finality to families like hers. 

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/article-of-interest-9-11-victims-daughter-writes-why-she-supports-plea-deals-for-perpetrators
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/18/9-11-family-support-plea-deals/

20 November 2024 :

November 18, 2024 - USA. Gallup poll: 53% of Americans in favor of the death penalty
42% amongst younger Americans
Support for the Death Penalty Remains at Five-Decade Low
According to October 2024 polling produced by Gallup, support for capital punishment remains at a five-decade low in the United States. Overall, Gallup found 53% of Americans in favor of the death penalty, but that number masks considerable differences between older and younger Americans. More than half of young adults aged 18 to 43 now oppose the death penalty. Among those expressing a political affiliation, support for the death penalty fell markedly in all groups and in all generations, with the exception of Republicans sixty and older, where support for the death penalty rose by 2%. Public support of the death penalty peaked in 1994, with 80% of Americans in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder, which roughly correlates with the peak in the number of executions in the United States.1
A generational divide in Gallup’s polling also shows that more than half of young U.S. adults—millennials and Generation Z, ages 18 through 43— oppose the death penalty, while approximately six in ten adults in the older generations—Silent Generation, Generation X, and baby boomers—favor the death penalty. This generational gap has been widening every year for the past 20 years, according to Gallup. Since 2000, support for the death penalty among millennials (ages 28 to 43) has fallen 25%. Gallup only began collecting data on Gen Z over the past four years, but the spread between Gen Z and all other age groups is marked—58% of Gen Z oppose the death penalty, compared to only 38% of baby boomers and the so-called “silent generation” (which comprise all those 60 years and older). Support for the death penalty also fell among this older cohort, but only by about 6% since 2000.
The political divide between supporters of the two major parties shows an erosion of support for the death penalty among Democrats, Independents, and younger Republicans. Support for the death penalty has remained stable among Republicans over the past 25 years but has shifted among Democrats and Independents. Support for the death penalty among Democrats 60 years old and older has fallen 11% since 2016. Support for the death penalty among younger Democrats dropped even further—18% since 2016. Among Republicans, support for the death penalty increased by 2% (the only group in the Gallup poll to show an increase in support) while support among younger Republicans fell slightly, by 4%.  The trend among Independents followed that of Democrats generally, but not as marked, with support for the death penalty among older Independents falling by 6% and among younger Independents by 10%.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/new-poll-overall-support-for-the-death-penalty-remains-at-five-decade-low-as-opposition-to-the-death-penalty-grows-among-younger-generations

15 November 2024 :

November 11, 2024 - USA. Trump wants to expand death penalty
President-elect Donald Trump said during his campaign he would like to expand the death penalty to include child rapists, immigrants who kill U.S. citizens and police officers, human traffickers and drug dealers.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 2008 that it is unconstitutional to impose the death penalty for the rape of a child that does not result in the child’s death.
Since then, Florida and Tennessee have passed laws authorizing the death penalty for child rapists. Supporters of the laws hope that they will lead the Supreme Court to overturn the 2008 decision, Kennedy v. Louisiana, according to prior coverage.
In the 6 months before Trump left office, the federal government executed 13 inmates, including the only woman on federal death row, according to NBC News and the Catholic News Agency. They are among 16 federal inmates executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1988.
After President Joe Biden took office, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium on executions to review changes in the Trump administration. Those changes allowed some executions to be carried out by electrocution, nitrogen gas, firing squad or the single drug pentobarbital.
40 federal inmates are currently on death row, according to statistics from the Death Penalty Information Center.
The anti-death penalty Catholic Mobilizing Network plans to petition Biden to commute the sentences of all federal death row inmates.

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/trump-wants-to-expand-the-death-penalty-to-include-these-crimes

11 November 2024 :

November 9, 2024 - USA. US will appeal ruling that 9/11 defendants can plead guilty, avoid death penalty
The U.S. Defense Department will appeal a military judge's ruling that plea agreements struck by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks, and 2 of his co-defendants are valid, a defense official said Saturday.
The ruling this past week voided Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's order to throw out the deals and concluded that the plea agreements were valid. The judge granted the three motions to enter guilty pleas and said he would schedule them for a future date to be determined by the military commission.
The department will also seek a postponement of any hearing on the pleas, according to the official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss legal matters and spoke on condition of anonymity. Rear Admiral Aaron Rugh, the chief prosecutor, sent a letter Friday to the families of 9/11 victims informing them of the decision.
The ruling by the judge, Air Force Colonel Matthew McCall, allowed the three 9/11 defendants to enter guilty pleas in the U.S. military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and would spare them the risk of the death penalty. The pleas by Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi would be a key step toward closing out the long-running and legally troubled government prosecution in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Government prosecutors had negotiated the deals with defense lawyers under government auspices, and the top official for the military commission at Guantanamo had approved the agreements. But the deals were immediately slammed by Republican lawmakers and others when they were made public this summer.
Within days, Austin issued an order saying he was nullifying them. He said plea bargains in possible death penalty cases tied to one of the gravest crimes ever carried out on U.S. soil were a momentous step that should only be decided by the defense secretary.
The judge had ruled that Austin lacked the legal authority to toss out the plea deals.
The agreements, and Austin’s attempt to reverse them, have made for one of the most fraught episodes in a U.S. prosecution marked by delays and legal difficulties. That includes years of ongoing pretrial hearings to determine the admissibility of statements by the defendants, given their torture in CIA custody.
While families of some of the victims and others are adamant that the 9/11 prosecutions continue until trial and possible death sentences, legal experts say it is not clear that could ever happen. If the 9/11 cases ever clear the hurdles of trial, verdicts and sentencings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would likely hear many of the issues in the course of any death penalty appeals.
The issues include the CIA destruction of videos of interrogations, whether Austin’s plea deal reversal constituted unlawful interference and whether the torture of the men tainted subsequent interrogations by “clean teams” of FBI agents that did not involve violence.

https://apnews.com/article/guantanamo-911-pentagon-pleas-khalid-sheikh-mohammed-5eaec86cfb1f855951e4581b4512a323

16 November 2024 :

November 10, 2024 - US MILITARY. Military Judge Postpones Guilty Plea Proceedings in Sept. 11 Case----The judge asked defense and prosecution lawyers to settle on a date for the accused mastermind of the terrorist attacks to plead guilty.
A military judge on Sunday postponed a hearing to receive the guilty plea of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, so that prosecutors can seek again to nullify the plea deal.
Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge, did not freeze preparations for the hearing, as prosecutors had requested. Instead, he told defense and prosecution lawyers to agree on a week or more next month or in early January to hold plea hearings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.
The judge said it was “not reasonable to indefinitely delay” the entry of pleas in the case. He also told the sides to continue to collaborate on providing answers to questions related to clauses in the plea agreements. All three plea deals were reached July 31 and ostensibly withdrawn by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III two days later. On Wednesday, however, the judge ruled that Mr. Austin had acted too late and that the pleas were still valid, lawful contracts.
Colonel McCall made no mention of the fact that his next scheduled hearing, from Jan. 20 to Jan. 31, straddled the inauguration of President-elect Donald J. Trump — and most likely Mr. Austin’s departure from the Pentagon.
But a defense lawyer noted that the official who had approved the deal — an Austin appointee — was likely to leave the Pentagon at the end of the Biden administration and could potentially become unavailable for questions related to aspects of the plea deals.
The crime. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and four other defendants are facing charges in a U.S. military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay of aiding the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people. The charges carry the death penalty.
The trial. The defendants were arraigned in 2012, but the case has been mired in pretrial proceedings, much of them focused on the C.I.A.’s torture of the defendants. Learn more about why the trial hasn’t started.
The role of torture. In 2021, a military judge in Guantánamo's other capital case threw out key evidence because that prisoner was tortured. Defense lawyers in the Sept. 11 case are challenging the same type of evidence, and seeking to have either the case or possibility of a death penalty dismissed because of torture.
The plea deal. Susan Escallier, a retired general and former Army lawyer, authorized a plea agreement meant to resolve the case with lifetime sentences for Mohammed and two other defendants. But Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin abruptly canceled the deal, reviving the possibility that they could someday face a death penalty trial. After defense lawyers challenged Austin’s cancelation, a different judge, Col. Matthew McCall, ruled that the original deal can go forward.
The defendants in the plea deal. Along with Mohammed, Walid bin Attash is accused of training 2 of the hijackers, researching flights and timetables and testing the ability of a passenger to hide a razor knife on flights. Mustafa al-Hawsawi is accused of helping some of the hijackers with finances and travel arrangements.
The other defendants. Ammar al-Baluchi is accused of transferring money from the United Arab Emirates to some of the hijackers in the United States. He chose not to join the plea agreement and could face trial alone. Ramzi bin al-Shibh was accused of helping to organize a cell of hijackers in Germany. In 2023, he was found medically incompetent to stand trial and removed from the case. He could someday face trial if his mental health is restored.
In a rare Sunday hearing, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., the lead prosecutor, told the judge that the chief prosecutor for military commissions, Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, had instructed his staff on Friday night to prepare an appeal of the judge’s decision reinstating the guilty pleas. Mr. Trivett asked the judge to halt all plea-related proceedings.
Defense lawyers opposed the request. Gary D. Sowards, Mr. Mohammed’s lawyer, said the impact of the decision to appeal was that “the promise of finality and justice in the case has been snatched away” again.
Mr. Sowards mentioned people at the rear of the court who were watching the proceedings, representing victims of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. Some of them had traveled to Guantánamo Bay to see Mr. Mohammed plead guilty.
Relatives of the victims have described the experience of the plea deals being reached and then undone as an emotional roller coaster.
There has never been a unified view among the thousands of family members on how the case should be resolved. Some want what prosecutors have called judicial finality, or a guilty plea in exchange for life sentences without the possibility of appeal or release. Others insist on an eventual capital trial, although a clause in Mr. Mohammed’s plea agreement may require that if there is a trial, it should go forward with the death penalty off the table.
Under the statute that created the war court, the prosecutors were not automatically entitled to appeal the judge’s ruling last week that the plea deals were valid. Instead, prosecutors said they would ask the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review to take the extraordinary step of issuing a writ of mandamus on the question.
To get the higher court panel to look at Judge McCall’s decision, the prosecutors must persuade the panel that they have a likelihood of successfully arguing that Judge McCall was wrong in reinstating the plea agreements — and that Mr. Austin had the authority to retroactively cancel them.
But the special court, which is made up of military and civilian judges, does not convene regularly and has at times taken months or years to decide cases.
Mr. Trivett and other prosecutors on the Sept. 11 case negotiated all three of the plea deals over two years. Susan K. Escallier, a retired general and former career Army lawyer, approved the deals. Mr. Austin put her in charge of military commissions last year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/us/politics/sept-11-plea-deal-guantanamo.html

08 November 2024 :

November 7, 2024 - USA. Joe Biden Urged To Prevent Death Row Execution Spree Under Trump
President Joe Biden has been urged to take action to prevent a spree of federal executions after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.
13 inmates were put to death in an unprecedented run of federal executions in the final 6 months of Trump's 1st term.
Those executions went ahead even though experts said that mental health and other issues should have stopped many of them from taking place. The Trump administration spent millions to ensure they were carried out during the coronavirus pandemic.
After Trump won a 2nd term on Wednesday, the Rev. Sharon Risher sent Biden a letter urging him to take action, including by commuting the sentences of all inmates on federal death row, to prevent Trump from embarking on a second execution spree.
"We write to you today with renewed concern and urgency," Risher wrote in the letter, which Newsweek reviewed. "President-Elect Donald Trump's stated plan is to execute all remaining prisoners on the federal death row. It is vital that you deny him that opportunity by commuting every death sentence remaining on federal and military death rows."
The letter was signed by a coalition of about 350 organizations, including Amnesty International USA, Death Penalty Action, Equal Justice USA, Faithful America, Human Rights Watch and The Innocence Project.
Biden hasn't kept his promise to abolish the federal death penalty, but his Justice Department announced a moratorium on federal executions in 2021.
That moratorium could be swiftly lifted when Trump returns to the White House in January, but Risher's letter noted that it "is not too late to act decisively."
"We are grateful that under your administration there have been no additional executions of federal prisoners," she wrote. "As you are aware, this abhorrent and outdated punishment raises profound concerns, including the arbitrariness of its application, its inherent racial bias, and the alarming rate of innocence among those sentenced to death."
The letter urged Biden to make federal executions "impossible" during Trump's second term by immediately commuting the sentences of those on federal and military death rows; deauthorizing pending federal capital trial cases; rescinding the lethal injection protocol; and ordering the Federal Bureau of Prisons to demolish the federal execution chamber inside the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The White House has been contacted for comment via email. A Trump spokesperson has also been contacted for comment via email.
Risher, the chair of Death Penalty Action, said she wants Biden to know that commuting the sentences of those on federal death row will help the families of murder victims.
Her mother, cousins and a friend were among those shot dead by white supremacist Dylann Roof in the 2015 shooting at a church in South Carolina.
"It is almost a decade later, and I'm very clear about why I oppose executions," Risher told Newsweek.
"Killing Dylann Roof would do nothing to help me heal, and in fact, just the experience of seeing his name in the news brings back all of the horror of his violence, returning us to the pain of that terrible day. Because he's on death row he gets to continue the terror he intended to create, because the focus is on him. If they execute him, he gets the limelight and another chance to spew his hate, and I say no."
Her message to Biden, she said, is "commute all of those sentences to death by incarceration rather than by an execution, and you will make those killers fade into obscurity. That's what will truly help us heal."
She added: "I want Joe Biden to know that I will stand by him when he signs those commutations, and I will explain to the world that what he is doing helps victim families far more than it helps those murderers."
Abraham Bonowitz, the executive director of Death Penalty Action, told Newsweek that although many death penalty opponents have been critical of Biden on the issue, "the truth is that he did the most pragmatic thing immediately upon taking office."
He said: "The President appointed an Attorney General who understood the Administration's position and knew not to set any death warrants. Anything more would have hurt his relationships with Congress, but that's all over now."
Biden now has the chance "to take away one of the things Donald Trump loves, which is the power to execute people," he added.
"If Biden commutes all of those death sentences, Donald Trump will never get to oversee another judicial execution. It would be a great legacy for Biden to live up to his own morals and save dozens of lives while leaving a stinging parting gift for Trump."

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-urged-prevent-trump-death-row-execution-spree-1981920

08 November 2024 :

November 7, 2024 - USA. Plea deals revived for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 2 co-defendants
A military judge has ruled that plea agreements struck by alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 2 co-defendants are valid, voiding an order by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to throw out the deals, a government official said Wednesday.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the order by the judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, has not yet been posted publicly or officially announced.
The plea agreements would spare Mohammed and the others the risk of the death penalty in exchange for guilty pleas in the long-running 9/11 case. Government prosecutors had negotiated the deals with defense attorneys under government auspices, and the top official for the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had approved them.
The plea deals in the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people spurred immediate political blowback by Republican lawmakers and others when announced in late July.
The agreements, and Austin's attempt to reverse them, have been one of the most fraught episodes in a U.S. prosecution marked by delays and legal difficulties, including years of ongoing pretrial hearings to determine the admissibility of statements by the defendants given their years of torture in CIA custody.
Within days of the deals becoming public this summer, Austin issued a brief order saying he was nullifying them. Plea bargains in possible death penalty cases tied to one of the gravest crimes ever carried out on U.S. soil were a momentous step that should only be decided by the defense secretary, Austin said at the time.
The Pentagon is reviewing the judge's decision and had no immediate further comment, said Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary. The New York Times first reported the ruling.
Military officials have yet to post the judge's decision on the Guantanamo military commission's online site.
However, a legal blog that long has covered the prosecutions from the Guantanamo courtroom said McCall's 29-page ruling concludes that Austin lacked the authority to toss out the plea deals.
The ruling also calls the timing of Austin's move "fatal," coming after Guantanamo's top official already had approved the deals, according to the blog, called Lawdragon.

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/september-11th-mastermind-plea-deal-revived/

18 October 2024 :

October 11, 2024 - USA. Trump insists on the death penalty for drug dealers. As suggested to him by Chinese leader Xi Jinping
Trump was asked about raising his kids. He went on an 8-minute rant calling for the death penalty
Donald Trump was asked about his family and parenting style at an event in Detroit, Michigan on Thursday.
At first, his response was on-topic. But his answer quickly devolved into an 8-minute rant about drugs that ended in him explaining why some people convicted of fentanyl-related crimes should face the death penalty.
Trump was speaking at the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday afternoon when his outburst began. Businessman John Rakolta Jr., who interviewed the former president in front of club members, complimented his parenting style before asking how he made his children “so responsible.”
“You did a great job raising them...What did you do with your children to make them so responsible and so involved in everything that you do?” Rakolta asked Trump.
“Well, I’m fortunate in that, you know, they’re smart children,” Trump responded.
“I have smart children...I would always tell them, no drugs, no alcohol,” he added.
Before Rakolta could say anything else, Trump then began to discuss fentanyl, claiming he “had that problem almost solved with President Xi [Jinping]” while serving as president.
“Almost all of it comes through Mexico, and the maximum penalty is the death penalty, and he was going to impose that,” Trump said.
This isn’t the first time Trump has praised the idea of the death penalty for fentanyl-related offenses in China. He made a similar comment in 2018 while serving as president, according to CNN.
“One of the very exciting things to come out of my meeting with President Xi of China is his promise to me to criminalize the sale of deadly Fentanyl coming into the United States,” Trump tweeted at the time. “It will now be considered a ‘controlled substance.’ This could be a game changer on what is...considered to be the worst and most dangerous, addictive and deadly substance of them all.”
“Last year over 77,000 people died from Fentanyl. If China cracks down on this ‘horror drug,’ using the Death Penalty for distributors and pushers, the results will be incredible!” he continued.
The next year, 9 people were imprisoned in China on charges related to smuggling fentanyl into the US. One of those arrested received a suspended death sentence. This marked one of the first cases of its kind between the US and China, Reuters reports.
In practice, that suspended death sentence will likely be commuted to a life sentence, a Chinese official said at the time, according to Reuters.
Trump went on to blame Biden for his plans going ‘down the tubes’ and explained why the death penalty could help solve “a lot of the problem.”
“And then we had the transfer power, and this guy came in, and he didn’t know what to do with everything, so that went down the tubes,” Trump said. “But one of the first things I’m going to do is talk to him about that, because they were going to give the death penalty to anybody sending fentanyl into this country, and that would have really solved a lot of the problem.”
“First time I met [President Xi], I said, ‘Do you have a drug problem?’ ‘No, no, no,’ 1.4 billion people. ‘And why don’t you have a drug problem?’ He says, ‘Death penalty. Quick trial...The dealer is immediately put on trial,’” Trump continued.
He ended his rant by, again, calling for the death penalty for fentanyl-related offenses.
“Everybody in this room knows a lot of people that...lost a child to fentanyl, and that wouldn’t have happened if we had the death penalty,” the former president said. “But the country’s going to have to tell us that they’re ready for it because you know, it’s a pretty big step.”
The death sentence can only be handed down if someone has been convicted of a capital offense. These offenses include murder, treason, genocide, as well as the killing or kidnapping of a Congressperson, the President or a Supreme Court Justice.
Notably, drug trafficking is not a capital offense.
Since 1971, more than 1,600 people have been executed by the US government. At least 200 people executed in the last 50 years were wrongfully convicted, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which is an average of 4 people per year.

https://consent.yahoo.com/v2/collectConsent?sessionId=3_cc-session_d931d187-badd-42b0-8473-1c47dfe80ddf

17 October 2024 :

October 10, 2024 - Louisiana. At 85, Sister Helen Prejean vows to keep fighting the death penalty. 'I believe it's unjust'
There are 21 states in the U.S. that employ the death penalty. In the view of New Orleanian Sister Helen Prejean, that’s 21 states too many.
A new documentary, “Rebel Nun,” coming to the New Orleans Film Festival, looks at her 40 years of activism as a renowned proponent of abolishing the death penalty.
Prejean originally explored her qualms about state-sponsored executions in her 1993 book, “Dead Man Walking,” which went on to become an award-winning film. Susan Sarandon took home the Oscar for best actress for her portrayal of Prejean.
Those themes of revenge and redemption, along with crime and punishment, struck a chord with many on both sides of the capital punishment debate.
Because he is British, "Rebel Nun" director Dominic Sivyer thought he could look at the issue with a couple of degrees of distance.
“I was determined to make a film that looks at both sides of this issue,” Sivyer said, speaking on Zoom from Marseilles, France, where he’s filming another documentary.
“For instance, I was determined to have Faith Hathaway’s sister in this film and show the effect that the violent rape and murder of her sister had on her. Sister Helen’s support of Faith’s murderer, Robert Lee Willie, who was executed at Angola in 1984, was painful to her, and I understand her anger.”
Sister Helen has been grappling with these issues since 1984, when she was asked as a volunteer at Hope House in New Orleans to become a pen pal to death row inmate Pat Sonnier.
Sonnier and his younger brother Eddie had been convicted of abducting a couple from a lover's lane, then raping the woman and murdering both.
Later, Eddie said that he, not Pat, fired the lethal shots. The state of Louisiana, however, sentenced Eddie to life in prison, and Pat, as the older “influencer,” to death.
Although Prejean fought to have Pat Sonnier's execution commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole, her efforts failed. On April 5, 1984, Prejean was a witness to his execution.
“When I walked out of the execution chamber of Pat Sonnier, where the electrocution happened, it was seared in my brain,” Prejean remembered, sitting in her Bayou St. John residence surrounded by photos of death row inmates whom she's served as spiritual adviser.
“I immediately threw up. I thought to myself that I had a choice. I could walk away from this, or I could stand up as a witness to the brutality of these legally authorized killings.”
As the documentary unfolds, it examines questionable evidence leading to many death penalties.
A case in point is the lethal injection of Dobie Williams, a Black man who was convicted by an all-White Louisiana jury in 1984 of killing a White woman.
Police maintained Williams had confessed, but there was no recording. Williams had an IQ of 65 and was considered intellectually disabled. Prejean, who was his spiritual adviser for more than 10 years, says he was resigned to his fate, but it’s been a controversial case for decades. This, she says, was her 1st personal experience with judicial racism.
The documentary leaves us with the case of Richard Glossip, convicted in Oklahoma in 1998 of murdering the owner of a hotel where he was the manager.
The maintenance man, Justin Sneed, confessed to the murder, saying he had bludgeoned the owner to death with a baseball bat during a robbery.
“However, when police questioned Sneed, they told him they didn’t think he was smart enough to have done this by himself, but if he could come up with the name of someone else involved, they’d ask for life imprisonment for him, rather than the death penalty,” Prejean said.
“That’s when Sneed accused Richard Glossip of being the mastermind behind the crime. Glossip’s lawyers never showed that police video to the jurors.”
'Using every skill I have to end this'
The original conviction was set aside by an Oklahoma court which said his defense was inadequate.
Another jury found him guilty in 2004, but the attorney general of the state of Oklahoma came forward, concluding that Sneed was a liar with psychiatric conditions, and that prosecutors also hid evidence that may have led to an acquittal.
On Oct. 9, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an extraordinary turn of events, heard the case, after delaying Glossip’s ninth execution date in 2023, while the case was on appeal. The new ruling is expected in June 2025.
“What is so shocking about Glossip’s case is that you’ve got important Republicans and Democrats who both feel that he never got a fair trial and have repeatedly questioned his guilt,” director Sivyer said.
Prejean, now 85, vows to fight until she dies.
“I’ll be using every skill I have to end this, because I believe it’s unjust,” Prejean said. “Does the state have the authority to strap people down and kill them? That is the last divine right of kings. Nowhere in America’s Constitution can you own slaves or have the right to kill people.”
“Rebel Nun” is showing at the New Orleans Film Festival at 3:30 p.m. Oct. 20 at the Contemporary Arts Center, 900 Camp St. For information about the film festival, visit neworleansfilmsociety.org.

https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/movies_tv/sister-helen-prejean-vows-to-keep-fighting-death-penalty/article_7cac739a-8679-11ef-b7e5-af744245324b.html

03 October 2024 :

October 1, 2024 - USA. Last Week America Carried Out Its 1,600th Execution Since 1976. When Will the Madness Stop?
On Thursday night, Alan Miller became the 2nd person put to death in Alabama using nitrogen hypoxia. Miller was convicted in the 1999 killing of three men, and this was his second trip to Alabama’s death chamber. The state had previously attempted to execute him by lethal injection in 2022.
With Miller’s death, this country has now executed 1,600 people since the United States Supreme Court revived capital punishment in its 1976 Gregg v. Georgia decision. The Washington Post rightly labeled the 1,600 mark “a grim milestone.”
1,600 executions in 48 years means that we have executed an average of just under 3 people a month. Of course, the pace of executions waxes and wanes. That fact was illustrated just last week when Miller became the fifth person executed in a 7-day period starting on September 20.
Even as we mark Miller’s death, we need to recognize that we have come a long way on the road to abolition in the last several decades. Signs of progress are all around us.
Death sentences and executions have fallen dramatically from their 1990s peak. More states have abolished the death penalty since 2007 than in other comparable period in the nation’s history.
While support for capital punishment grew steadily after Gregg and peaked in 1994, with 80% of Americans saying it was the right punishment for a person convicted of murder, today that number is 53%. Moreover, as Gallup reports, “for the first time since it started asking about the fairness of the death penalty’s application in the U.S., … more Americans say it is applied unfairly (50%) than fairly (47%).”
Still, as Alabama’s determined effort to kill Miller shows, we have a long way to go if we are to see this country rid itself of the curse of state killing. Indeed, as most of the country puts the death penalty in the rearview mirror, the remaining minority of states cling to it ever more tenaciously and seem to be prepared to go to great lengths to keep the machinery of death running.
That was illustrated last week when Missouri executed Marcellus Williams even though the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Office that originally prosecuted him confessed error. That office joined Williams in seeking to stop the state from killing him.
After the execution, Wesley Bell, the current St. Louis DA, said “Marcellus Williams should be alive today. There were multiple points in the timeline that decisions could have been made that would have spared him the death penalty. If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence the death penalty should never be an option. This outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”
The NAACP put it more bluntly. “Tonight,” the group claimed, “Missouri lynched another innocent Black man…. When DNA evidence proves innocence, capital punishment is not justice — it is murder.”
Or to take another example, Richard Glossip sits on Oklahoma’s death row even though Gentner Drummond, the state’s pro-death penalty attorney general, and many other state officials think that he is innocent.
States like Missouri and Oklahoma cling to it as if letting go of the death penalty would mean letting go of their way of life. They would rather push ahead with executions even when there is real doubt about whether those they want to kill deserve to die.
And they are not alone.
Alabama, Texas, and other death belt states seem similarly inclined. Moreover, if Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office, he is sure to launch another execution spree like he did in the last several months of his 1st term.
The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) gets it right when it says that Trump, as well as officials throughout the death belt, “are largely out of step with increasing public concern about the fairness and accuracy of capital punishment—and that zealous approaches to using the death penalty that were once popular are no longer winning the same levels of voter support.”
Indeed, every time they ignore claims of innocence and go ahead with executions, they bring this country closer to the day when Americans, including citizens of their own states, will no longer stand for state killing. And cases like those of Williams and Glossip are hardly unique.
Samuel Gross and his colleagues estimate that more than 4% of death row inmates are actually innocent. We also know that at the same time as this country piled up enough executions to reach the 1,600 mark, over 200 people have been exonerated from death row.
1,600 people executed, 200 exonerated is a national disgrace. Not surprisingly, states that use the death penalty a lot, like Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma lead the way in the number of people proven to have been falsely convicted.
Looking back almost 50 years shows that the problem of false convictions was barely in the field of view. Between 1973 and 1976, only 13 people had been exonerated from death row.
The issue of actual innocence and the risk of executing an innocent person was not a central concern when the Supreme Court temporarily put a halt to executions in Furman v. Georgia or when it gave the green light to resume executions four years later. Indeed, it was barely mentioned in either case.
But it isn’t only that we have learned more about breakdowns in the guilt phase of capital trials since those decisions. We have come to understand much more about the role race plays in the death penalty system.
While the Court recognized that the death penalty seemed to be rife with racial bias, they were stymied in grasping the full dimensions of the problem by the nature of the available evidence. As Justice William Douglas acknowledged in a footnote to his Furman opinion, even the best research could not rule out the effect of “a host of factors other than race” in explaining apparent racial discrimination in death cases.
“It is not possible,” Douglas explained, “to indict the judicial and other public processes prior to the death row as responsible for the association between Negroes and higher frequency of executions…. Too many unknown or presently immeasurable factors prevent our making definitive statements about the relationship.”
And then along came David Baldus to provide exactly what Douglas was calling for in Furman. Baldus examined over 2,000 post-Gregg death cases in Georgia using sophisticated statistical techniques. He showed powerful race-of-the-victim effects that explained disparate sentencing in death cases controlling for 230 variables.
So good was his research that even the Supreme Court did not dispute its validity.
Since Baldus did his work, we have learned that the effect of race doesn’t end when the sentence is handed down. Other studies have shown that Blacks are more likely to be executed and to have their executions botched.
Indeed since 1976, this country has witnessed a cascade of botched executions of defendants of every race. The problem became so bad that the DPIC called 2022 “the year of the botched execution” because things went wrong in 7 of that year’s 20 executions (35%).
False convictions, racial biases, and botched executions are inescapable. They are as much features as bugs in America’s death penalty system.
That is why even the most ardently pro-death penalty jurisdictions will one day have to grapple with those facts. Their effort to shunt them aside and push the number of executions ever higher is, to paraphrase former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, “plainly doomed to failure.”
While we cannot say exactly when, someday states like Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas will reach the same conclusion that Blackmun foresaw, namely that “the death penalty … must be abandoned altogether.”

https://verdict.justia.com/2024/10/01/last-week-america-carried-out-its-1600th-execution-since-1976-when-will-the-madness-stop

04 October 2024 :

September 30, 2024 - USA. Rulings for 2 Death-Sentenced Prisoners Recognize Devastating Harm Caused by Solitary Confinement
Scientists and other experts are unanimous in their conclusion that indefinite or prolonged solitary confinement causes serious harm, and the United Nations says it amounts to torture—yet most death-sentenced people in America are confined to these extreme conditions of isolation and deprivation for years. As of 2020, a dozen states routinely kept death-sentenced prisoners in single cells for at least 22 hours a day with little-to-no human contact. 2 recent developments in capital cases recognized the severe harm of these conditions.
In Tennessee, Christa Pike, who had been held in functional solitary confinement for 28 years as the only woman on the state’s death row, reached a settlement with the state that would allow her to work and socialize with other women in the general prison population. And in Pennsylvania, a federal appeals court ruled that Roy Williams, who has a lifelong history of serious mental illness, could proceed with his lawsuit alleging that the state unconstitutionally subjected him to 26 years of solitary confinement in violation of the Eighth Amendment and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

In Tennessee, Ms. Pike (pictured) sued the Department of Corrections in 2022, alleging that the state had kept her in de facto solitary confinement for over a quarter century. While the men on death row are allowed to socialize and work together, and another death-sentenced woman was permitted to live among the general prison population before her sentence was commuted in 2010, Ms. Pike had “no social engagement with other incarcerated individuals or prison staff, no educational or religious programming, and nearly no physical contact with another human being.” On Monday, September 16, Ms. Pike reached an agreement with the state that will give her equivalent opportunities to the men on death row, including a job, shared meals with other incarcerated women, and more time out of her cell. “For the last nearly 30 years, Ms. Pike has been subjected to solitary confinement in a cell the size of a parking space, where she has had nearly no meaningful human contact,” said Ms. Pike’s attorney Angela Bergman. “These conditions have had a devastating impact on her mental and physical health.” Ms. Bergman said that the settlement would be “life-changing” for Ms. Pike and signify “a reprieve from decades of harmful and unconstitutional conditions, [and] an opportunity to have a meaningful, positive impact on those around her.”
In Pennsylvania, Mr. Williams sued the Department of Corrections (DOC) for holding him in near-constant solitary confinement from 1993 to 2019 despite his history of serious mental illness. (Pennsylvania only ended its mandatory solitary confinement policy in 2019 in response to a successful class action lawsuit; at least 4 other states have ended their equivalent policies in response to lawsuits.) Mr. Williams argued that the state violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment and the ADA’s protections against discrimination for individuals with disabilities. A federal district court dismissed Mr. Williams’ claims, holding that the DOC held qualified immunity and Mr. Williams could not show that the state exhibited “deliberate indifference” to his disability.
However, on Friday, September 20, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the district court and held that Mr. Williams’ claims could proceed. “[I]ndividuals with a known history of serious mental illness have a clearly established right not to be subjected to prolonged, indefinite solitary confinement—without penological justification—by an official who was aware of that history and the risks that solitary confinement pose to someone with those health conditions,” the court wrote. The court cited Mr. Williams’ records of suicidal ideation, depression, and mental health hospitalizations going back to 1979, when he was 14 years old. He was diagnosed with a psychiatric disability in 1994 and placed on the DOC’s Mental Health Roster, and experts later concluded that he was “severely psychologically, cognitively, and emotionally impaired.”
The court strongly rebuked the state’s arguments in the case, as well as its solitary confinement policies, which were extensively documented in a scathing 2014 investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ found that Pennsylvania held death-sentenced prisoners in 7- by 12-foot cells around the clock and barred them from basic education courses, vocational opportunities, and group religious services. There was no natural light in the cells, but the artificial lights were kept on all night, and the lack of ventilation meant the unit often smelled of human feces. Officials punished prisoners who exhibited symptoms of mental illness by denying them running water and bedding, taking away their clothes, and placing them in full-body restraints for more than seven hours at a time. The DOJ concluded that the Pennsylvania DOC’s use of solitary confinement for people with serious mental illness violated both the Eighth Amendment and the ADA. Citing these findings, the Third Circuit wrote that Pennsylvania’s “blanket policy of keeping people with known preexisting serious mental illness in solitary confinement solely because they were sentenced to death, even in the absence of an active death warrant, amounted to ‘foul’ and ‘inhuman’ conditions of confinement…without penological justification, a classic Eighth Amendment violation.”
The court also emphasized that “solitary confinement can ‘cause cognitive disturbances’ after ‘even a few days’ in a person without a preexisting mental illness; obviously, such prolonged confinement is particularly cruel for a person with ‘severely compromised mental health.’” Both Mr. Williams and Ms. Pike suffer from organic brain damage and psychiatric disorders that experts say make them particularly vulnerable to the conditions of solitary confinement. Ms. Pike was exposed to alcohol in utero, which can have disastrous effects on the developing brain, then faced “abuse, neglect, multiple violent rapes, and…severe mental illness” in childhood. Mr. Williams had already experienced serious mental illness symptoms for half his life before entering Pennsylvania custody, and attempted suicide on death row. The Third Circuit’s ruling tracks the UN’s recommendation that any use of solitary confinement “should be prohibited in the case of prisoners with mental or physical disabilities when their conditions would be exacerbated by such measures.”

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/rulings-for-two-death-sentenced-prisoners-recognize-devastating-harm-caused-by-solitary-confinement

05 October 2024 :

September 17, 2024 - USA. Richard Branson, business leaders renew call to end 'inhumane' death penalty ahead of scheduled executions----'The death penalty is the ultimate injustice: It's inhumane, it's irreversible and it's riddled with errors,' Virgin Galactic founder says
Ahead of executions scheduled in the U.S. in the coming weeks, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and more than 350 fellow business leaders renewed their call Tuesday for a global end to the death penalty.
In a new video campaign, Branson called on business leaders to "be a voice for change" and sign the Business Leaders' Declaration Against the Death Penalty.
"All of us in business must speak up against broken systems and practices that don't make communities safer," the Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. (SPCE) founder said in the video. "The death penalty is the ultimate injustice: It's inhumane, it's irreversible and it's riddled with errors."
The declaration, launched in 2021 by Branson and the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, has received backing from business leaders including former Meta Platforms Inc. (META) Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, former Unilever PLC (UL) Chief Executive Paul Polman, Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington and Ben & Jerry's co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield.
"Business leaders care about justice," Maha Jweied, CEO of the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, said in a statement. "They care about the impact our flawed systems of justice have on their employees, their customers, and the communities they serve. They care about it when it impacts their operations, and they also care when it is simply unfair and cruel."
Branson, a vocal advocate on a range of social issues, recently told MarketWatch why he became a campaigner against the death penalty and believes other corporate leaders should join him in opposing it.
"Businesses generate jobs, wealth and a significant amount of government revenues. And we would like to see these revenues spent in a way that benefits everyone - on infrastructure, on education, on quality public services," he said in a Q&A via email. "Instead, states are wasting these precious public resources on a costly machinery of death that doesn't deliver justice, doesn't serve as a deterrent and doesn't make communities safer."

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/richard-branson-business-leaders-renew-call-to-end-inhumane-death-penalty-ahead-of-scheduled-executions-b4baa267

05 October 2024 :

September 13, 2024 - USA. 3 Americans and 34 Others Sentenced to Death in Congo on Coup Charges
A Congo military court sentenced three Americans and 34 others to death on Friday after being convicted of taking part in an attempted coup.
The foiled coup attempt led by a little-known opposition figure Christian Malanga in May killed 6 people, including Malanga who died during a shootout with presidential guards. The presidential palace was attacked in the attempted coup, as was the home of a close ally to President Felix Tshisekedi.
Malanga's son, Marcel Malanga, a 21-year-old U.S. citizen born in Utah, was one of the three Americans convicted in the attempted coup. His mother, Brittney Sawyer, previously told The Associated Press (AP) that her son "is innocent." Sawyer also said of Marcel Malanga on social media in May, "This was an innocent boy following his father."
The other 2 convicted Americans are Tyler Thompson Jr., who came to Congo from Utah with Marcel Malanga for what his family thought was an African vacation, and Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, 36, who reportedly knew Christian Malanga from the gold mining business.
"We are stunned and heartbroken by the videos we have seen from the coup attempt," Thompson's stepmother, Miranda Thompson, previously told the AP. "We have no idea how he got wrapped up in this situation, which is completely out of character for him. We are certain he did not go to Africa with plans for political activism."
Christian Malanga, who dabbled in gold mining and used cars, considered himself president of a shadow government in exile. He had described himself on his website as a refugee who settled in the U.S. with his family in the 1990s. According to court records and interviews, Malanga was convicted in Utah in 2001 in incidents including assault with a firearm. He was also faced with domestic violence charges in the early 2000s but pleaded not guilty and the charges were dismissed.
Some of the other defendants in the coup were from Congo and there was also a Briton, Belgian and Canadian convicted. All 37 defendants can appeal the verdict on charges that included terrorism, murder and criminal association. There were also 14 people acquitted in the trial that started in June.
In March, the Congolese reinstated the death penalty after crime ran rampant in eastern Congo for decades as over 120 armed groups fought for the region's gold and other resources.
When the 2003 death penalty ban was lifted, the Congo's justice ministry said the ban allowed offenders accused of treason and espionage to get away without proper punishment.
Lieutenant Colonel Innocent Radjabu, the military prosecutor in the case, requested last month that the judges sentence all the defendants to death, except for one who suffers from "psychological problems."

https://www.newsweek.com/congo-coup-americans-sentenced-death-1953657

20 September 2024 :

September 11, 2024 - USA. The Central Park 5 are exonerated. Trump doesn't seem to think so
Former President Donald Trump again defended his actions in New York in the late '80s surrounding the case of the Central Park Five (also called the Exonerated Five) during Tuesday night's presidential debate.
Following the 1989 brutal assault of a New York jogger in Central Park, Trump famously took out full-page ads in the city's major newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty for those responsible — further inciting racial tensions in the city.
5 Black and Hispanic teen boys were falsely accused and served years in prison before being exonerated by DNA and the confession of a convicted rapist and murderer.
But Tuesday night, Trump said that at the time the 5 Black and Latino teenagers who were falsely accused of the crime must have “badly hurt a person, killed a person, ultimately.” The victim in the case is still alive but deals with the lingering health effects of her attack.
It wasn't the first time in recent years Trump has falsely claimed that the men were responsible for the attack.
What happened in April 1989?
In 1989, Trisha Meili was a 28-year-old investment banker out for a jog in Central Park when she was brutally beaten and raped. Following the violent attack, Meili fell into a coma for almost 2 weeks and retained no memory of the attack.
New York City at the time was dealing with high violent crime rates and the media covered the case extensively. On the same night Meili was attacked, witnesses told media and police that groups of teenage boys attacked passersby and other joggers, robbing and beating them.
Police brought in a group of Black and Hispanic teen boys — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam — and subjected them to intense questioning.
"The boys were christened the 'Wolf Pack,' and quickly became symbols of the criminal menace that white New Yorkers felt had captured their city," Poynter said of the media at the time.
Trump jumped on the media circus of the day and purchased his full-page ad in the New York Times and other major city newspapers.
What happened after their arrest?
McCray, Richardson, Santana, Wise and Salaam broke down after hours of questioning, confessing on videotape — statements the boys ultimately recanted, saying they were coerced.
“When we were arrested, the police deprived us of food, drink or sleep for more than 24 hours,” Salaam wrote in the Washington Post in 2016. “Under duress, we falsely confessed."
The 5 pleaded not guilty but were imprisoned and served several years in prison.
Salaam wrote in that 2016 article, "Though we were innocent, we spent our formative years in prison, branded as rapists.”
This case is often used by juvenile justice experts as an example of the vulnerability of children and teens who come into contact with the criminal justice system. Their brains are not fully developed and research shows that juveniles are more likely than adults to confess to a crime they did not commit.
The case has also repeatedly been used as evidence of a criminal justice system prejudiced against individuals of color.
It wasn't until 2002 that the 5 men were exonerated after convicted rapist and murderer Matias Reyes confessed to the crime. Reye's DNA matched the sample found on Meili.
After their convictions were vacated, the 5 men received a multi-million dollar settlement from New York City.
Again and again, Trump has stood by the false belief that the men are guilty
Trump has never apologized for taking out the full-page ad (which didn't name the 5 men explicitly) and decades later continues to repeat claims that they were responsible for the attack.
Salaam wrote in his article that when Trump was asked about the case during the 2016 presidential race, he said, “They admitted they were guilty." And in a statement to CNN at the time Trump also said, “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous."
Salaam said Trump's claims do damage, and cause fear and stress.
"In some ways, I feel like I’m on trial all over again. I know what it is to be a young black man without a voice — like Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, who were killed and then crucified in the press. Even though the Central Park Five were found innocent by a court of law, we are still guilty in the eyes of many," Salaam wrote. "That brings a certain kind of stress."
3 years later, in 2019, Trump again said, “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt,” the New York Times reported. “If you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case — so we’ll leave it at that.”
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a presidential debate with Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Trump falsely said, when asked during the debate, that the Central Park Five must have “badly hurt a person, killed a person, ultimately.”
Salaam, who along with 3 other members of the Exonerated Five spoke at the Democratic National Convention and is now a New York City council member, was in the post-debate spin room, where he came face-to-face with Trump. The former president didn't appear to know who Salaam was when asked by reporters whether he would apologize.
The Independent reported on the incident, saying Trump, "grinned and pointed at [Salaam], quipping: 'That’s good, you’re on my side!'"
According to the outlet, Salaam seemed taken aback — he was in the room supporting Vice President Kamala Harris — saying, "'No, no, I’m not on your side!'" before Trump walked away.

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/11/nx-s1-5108632/central-park-five-trump-debate

19 September 2024 :

September 11, 2024 - US MILITARY. The Defense Secretary Revoked a Plea Deal in the 9/11 Case. Or Did He?
How the latest controversy in the long-running death-penalty case at Guantánamo Bay could play out.
In rapid succession, 2 dramatic decisions jolted the Sept. 11 case this summer: a plea agreement that exchanged life sentences for guilty pleas, and its reversal.
What happens next in the case is up to the judge, who has to decide if Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had the authority to revoke the agreement days after the retired general he put in charge of the process signed it.
Mr. Austin declared that his only motivation was to make sure there would eventually be a trial for the man accused of masterminding of the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and his co-defendants.
But his decision left the military judge in the case with a series of questions to resolve. Do the rules allow Mr. Austin to revoke an agreement after it was signed, sealed and delivered to the court? Or did he act too late? Did the manner in which he did it create the appearance of unlawful influence?
The case has been in pretrial hearings since 2012. 4 successive military judges have wrestled with the rules and evidence in the trial at Guantánamo Bay’s special tribunals, which the Bush administration created in response to the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001.
5 weeks of pretrial hearings are scheduled to begin on Monday, just after the 23rd anniversary of the attacks. But the question of the plea might not come up until October. Prosecutors have lined up 2 weeks of witnesses to testify on a challenge to the case by the lawyers for the one defendant who did not sign the agreement.
7 news organizations, including The New York Times, this week petitioned the judge to unseal the documents associated with the plea agreements. The judge set an Oct. 1 deadline for prosecution and defense lawyers to respond to the filing.
Here is how it could all play out:
The judge could consider the timing of Mr. Austin’s decision.
Defense lawyers for the 3 men who signed the agreement argue that Mr. Austin acted too late, and that the plea agreements are essentially still valid contracts.
They want the judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, to rule that Mr. Austin was wrong and to take the first steps toward a sentencing hearing that could happen next year.
To assist in deciding that question, the judge has asked the lawyers a series of technical questions about which rules, if any, allow a defense secretary to “withhold and reverse, or otherwise alter,” a lawful action by the overseer of the military commissions.
In this instance, the overseer is Susan Escallier, a retired brigadier general whom Mr. Austin put in charge of the war court last summer.
The judge could hear arguments on the question in the next hearings, rule on the spot or take his time before acting. Whatever he decides, his ruling could kick off appeals in higher courts.
Some defense lawyers are preparing a separate argument to dismiss the case, or the possibility of the death penalty. They say that Mr. Austin’s withdrawal of the deal after politicians protested it created the impression that he was subject to political influence.
The court could move forward on other issues.
The judge has made clear he wants to continue hearing evidence and arguments to resolve issues that have delayed the start of the death-penalty case for a dozen years. One topic is whether national security restrictions on the defense lawyers’ ability to investigate and acquire evidence prevent the defendants from having a fair trial.
In 2018, the 1st judge threw out the prisoners’ confessions for that reason. The next 3 judges have revisited the question.
Colonel McCall could suspend the case until the government decides that sharing the classified information at issue no longer presents a national security risk.
He could dismiss the case, which could still result in it being brought again later.
Or he could take death off the table, making life in prison the ultimate possible sentence.
The impact of torture on the confessions could be addressed.
Confessions by the defendants were obtained during interrogations at Guantánamo Bay in 2007, after the men had been tortured while they were in C.I.A. custody.
The judge has spent years hearing evidence about what happened before those confessions to decide whether they were tainted by torture.
The judge in Guantánamo’s other death-penalty case threw out that defendant’s confession for that reason, declaring that it was derived from torture.
In the Sept. 11 case, one team has argued that the case should be dismissed entirely using a rarely successful legal doctrine involving “outrageous government conduct.”
Under the plea deal, the government could use at least portions of the confessions in the sentencing phase.
The court may look at whether outside factors influenced Mr. Austin.
The court could examine whether Mr. Austin was unlawfully influenced by outside factors when he revoked the plea agreement two days after Ms. Escallier signed it.
But that question is unlikely to be ready for the judge to consider until later this year as defense lawyers seek information about the timing and circumstances of Mr. Austin’s decision.
Mr. Austin said he was acting out of a personal belief that there should be a trial. In the intervening days, however, 2 congressional committees opened an investigation into the plea deal and political leaders denounced it, as did some families of those killed on Sept. 11.
In this case and in military justice in general, a judge can dismiss a case or the death penalty as a possible punishment for even an appearance of “unlawful influence” to restore faith in the process and the independence of the judiciary. In this instance, the judge could also essentially reinstate the plea agreement through a finding that Mr. Austin did not have the authority to rescind it.
Last month, the judge urged the government to comply with requests by the defense teams for information surrounding Mr. Austin’s decision.
But obtaining emails or call logs or testimony of conversations could take time, and possibly subpoenas.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/us/politics/sept-11-defense-secretary-austin.html#:~:text=A%20Pentagon%20official%20authorized%20a,face%20a%20death%20penalty%20trial.

19 September 2024 :

August 22, 2024 - USA. Exonerated members of Central Park 5 warn about Trump at Democratic convention—-The former president has never apologized to the group for taking out newspaper ads calling for the death penalty or for his public antagonism toward the teens in 1989.
4 of the exonerated members of the so-called Central Park 5 — a group of 5 teenagers wrongfully imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a jogger — appeared Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention, warning of what a second Donald Trump presidency could bring.
“35 years ago, my friends and I were in prison for a crime we did not commit,” one of them, Korey Wise, said Thursday. “Our youth was stolen from us. Every day, as we walked into a courtroom, people screamed at us, threatening us because of Donald Trump.”
Their concerns about the former president stemmed from personal experience and go back more than three decades: In 1989, 5 teenagers, all Black or Latino, were arrested after a jogger was found brutally sexually assaulted and tied up in Central Park.
One of them, then-15-year-old Yusef Salaam, would later recount how police used questionable methods, including depriving the teens of food and sleep, to get them to falsely confess to the crime “under duress.” Though all would later recant their confessions and there was no evidence linking them to the rape, the teens became publicly branded as the Central Park 5, were wrongfully convicted and spent years in prison.
During their trial, Trump, already a prominent figure in New York City for his real estate dealings, took out full-page ads in 4 newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated.
“I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” Trump stated in the ads. “They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”
It wasn’t until 2002, when DNA evidence confirmed a different man’s confession that he had raped the Central Park jogger, that authorities dropped charges against the Central Park 5. The group became referred to as “the Exonerated 5” and in 2014 reached a $41 million wrongful-conviction settlement with New York City. Salaam, a Democrat, won election in November to the New York City Council.
But Trump would never apologize to the group for taking out the newspaper ads or for his public antagonism toward the teens in 1989. During his 2020 presidential campaign, 3 decades later, Trump continued to call into question the group’s innocence.
“You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt … some of the prosecutors think the city should never have settled that case, and we’ll leave it at that,” Trump said in 2019.
On Thursday, the 4th and final night of the Democratic convention, Salaam and Wise stood on stage with 2 others of the Central Park 5 who had been exonerated: Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson.
“He wanted us dead,” Salaam said, referring to Trump but avoiding using his name. “Today we are exonerated because the actual perpetrator confessed and DNA proved it. That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict. He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed and he never will.”
It was not the 1st time Salaam has warned what a Trump presidency could mean. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Salaam publicly spoke out about his concerns that Trump had only doubled down on his actions toward the Central Park 5, even after the group was exonerated.
“For 27 years, I’ve been in Donald Trump’s crosshairs,” Salaam wrote in an October 2016 op-ed for The Washington Post, recounting the fear and confusion he felt in 1989 when he and his friends were wrongfully arrested in the case. Those terrified feelings were only magnified when they learned that Trump had called for them to face the death penalty in full-page newspaper ads.
“He called for blood in the most public way possible,” Salaam wrote then. “… I don’t know why the future Republican nominee bought those ads, but it seems part and parcel with his racist attitudes.”
Trump, he added, never apologized for calling for their deaths.
“In fact, he’s somehow still convinced that we belong in prison. When the Republican nominee was recently asked about the Central Park Five, he said, ‘They admitted they were guilty.’ … It’s further proof of Trump’s bias, racism and inability to admit that he’s wrong,” Salaam wrote.
On Thursday, Salaam urged the crowd to throw their support behind Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in November.
Trump “thinks that hate is the animating force in America. It is not,” Salaam said. “We have the constitutional right to vote. In fact, it is a human right. So let us use it … and together, on November 5, we will usher in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz into the White House.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/22/central-park-five-dnc/

19 August 2024 :

August 16, 2024 - USA. Both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have extensive records when it comes to criminal justice policy – records that are sometimes completely opposed to one another, and at other times are aligned.
As Trump – who has a criminal record of his own, having been convicted on 34 felony counts – prepares to face off in the general election against Harris, who is a former prosecutor, district attorney and attorney general, their past actions on criminal justice have come into the spotlight.
Here’s a look at some of the candidates’ policy records on crime, the death penalty, policing, and prison reform:
Recidivism - In 2005, as the district attorney for San Francisco, Harris launched “Back on Track,” a reentry initiative aimed at reducing recidivism among young, low-level, first-time felony drug-trafficking defendants.
Candidates between the ages of 18 and 30 who first complete 6 weeks of community service and then plead guilty to their charges are eligible to participate in the program, during which their sentencing is deferred until they complete a 12 to 18-month supervised “individualized personal responsibility plan” that includes “concrete achievements in employment, education, parenting, and child support,” among other mandates. The program reported that fewer than 10% of the program graduates reoffended after being released, compared to a 53% recidivism rate for California drug offenders within two years of release from incarceration.
The Biden-Harris administration also implemented a new Small Business Administration rule that removed loan eligibility restrictions based on a person’s criminal record.
“Making this available, reducing and eliminating that restriction is going to mean a lot in terms of 2nd chances and the opportunity for people to excel,” Harris said of the program earlier this year.
In 2018, Trump signed a bipartisan bill into law similarly aimed at supporting recidivism reduction programs – a bill Harris voted for as a senator.
The First Step Act (FSA) called for the development of risk and needs assessment programs to reduce recidivism, and required the Bureau of Prisons to help incarcerated people access federal and state benefits, obtain identification, and more. Under the act, incarcerated people could earn time credit for participating in recidivism reduction programming and other activities, which could be applied toward early release.
According to the Council on Criminal Justice, recidivism is estimated to be 37% lower among FSA releases when compared to “similarly situated pre-FSA releases.”
Death penalty - Trump has consistently been pro-death penalty. Federal executions began under the Trump administration in 2020 for the 1st time in roughly 17 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
In 2020, the federal government completed 13 federal executions in the final months of the Trump presidency, according to the DPIC.
In 1989, prior to his time in office, Trump called for the return of the death penalty in a series of ads amid the case of 5 Black and brown boys then known as the “Central Park 5” who were convicted of assaulting and raping a woman in New York City.
Trump took out full-page ads in local newspapers within 2 weeks after the April 19, 1989 attack, calling to “Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police!” However, the ads never explicitly mentioned the 5 boys, who were incarcerated for years before they were exonerated after another man confessed to the crime.
Harris has been consistent in her stance against the death penalty: “My entire career I have been opposed – personally opposed – to the death penalty,” Harris said in an August 2019 debate. “And that has never changed.”
However, some have criticized Harris for decisions regarding several death penalty-related cases.
For example, Harris declined to take up the case of convicted murderer Kevin Cooper, who was sentenced to death for a quadruple homicide in California in 1983 and is currently awaiting execution. His team had asked the state for additional DNA testing that they maintained could have exonerated him.
Harris has since changed her views on Cooper’s request, later telling The New York Times “I feel awful about this.”
Additionally, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney overturned the death sentence of Ernest Dewayne Jones in 2014, ruling that the nearly 20 years he spent waiting for execution on death row was a form of cruel and unusual punishment, and so the death penalty was unconstitutional.
As the state’s attorney general, Harris appealed the ruling, arguing that the court’s decision “is not supported by the law, and it undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants.” Carney’s ruling was overturned on appeal the following year.
Prison policy - Under the Trump administration, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2017 rescinded an Obama-era initiative to phase out private prisons. Sessions then began distributing contracts for new privately-run detention centers.
In January 2021, the Biden-Harris administration ordered the Department of Justice not to renew contracts for privately-operated criminal detention centers. In December 2022, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) ended all contracts with privately owned prisons and transferred federal inmates who had been incarcerated in them to BOP-operated prisons.
Pardons and commutations - The Trump administration commuted the sentences of more than 90 individuals and granted pardons to more than 140 people, according to the DOJ. The Biden-Harris administration has so far commuted the sentences of more than 120 individuals and granted pardons to 25 people, according to the DOJ.
The plan ahead - Though the Harris campaign hasn’t yet released the vice president’s official 2024 platform, she previously has supported legalizing marijuana at the federal level, ending solitary confinement, embracing cash bail reform, ending federal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, and furthering rehabilitative services for the incarcerated. She has also supported the Justice in Policing Act, which would limit “unnecessary” use of force and no-knock warrants, limit qualified immunity for police officers, and increase accountability for law enforcement misconduct.
The Trump administration’s plan, according to his official campaign website, states that he plans to increase funding to hire and retrain police officers, strengthen qualified immunity and other “protections” for police officers, increase penalties for assaults on law enforcement, and “surge federal prosecutors and the National Guard into high-crime communities.”

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harris-trumps-records-criminal-justice-compare/story?id=112840980

05 August 2024 :

August 2, 2024 - US MILITARY
U.S. defense secretary rejects plea deal for 9/11 mastermind, puts death penalty back on table
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III on Friday put the death penalty back on the table for the mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks and 2 accomplices, rejecting a plea deal offered by military prosecutors earlier this week.
“Effective immediately, I hereby withdraw your authority in the above-referenced case to enter into a pre-trial agreement and reserve such authority to myself,” Austin wrote in a memo Friday to retired Brigadier General Susan K. Escallier.
The announcement comes after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 2 of his top lieutenants agreed to plead guilty "in exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment,” according to a Department of Defense letter sent to victims’ families Wednesday.
The Department of Defense first disclosed its Office of Military Commissions was working on a plea deal that would spare Mohammed and his accomplices their lives last August.
The sudden turnabout late Friday was met with mixed response by those who lost loved ones in the attacks.
Elizabeth Miller, whose father Douglas Miller, a New York City firefighter, died, is among the people related to victims of 9/11 who have been pushing for a plea agreement for years.
“I feel Ike this back and forth is completely disrespectful to 9/11 families,” Miller said. “This has already gone on for 13 years. When will it end?”
Others applauded Austin’s intervention in the mass murder case.
“This is a great turn of events,” said Terry Strada, whose husband Tom died on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower on 9/11. “I am very happy to see their plea deal revoked and the death penalty back on the table and hope justice will be served swiftly.”
Strada, the National Chair of 9/11 Families United, had called the U.S. plea deal a “victory” for the 9/11 plotters.
Muhammed has been jailed at Guantanamo prison for nearly two decades and is considered to be the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. The now-scuttled plea deal would have given Mohammed and 2 of his al Qaeda lieutenants life sentences and would have removed the possibility of a death penalty trial.
The 3 accused men had agreed to plead guilty to all offenses, including the murder of 2,976 people, according to the Department of Defense's Office of the Chief Prosecutor for Military Commissions.
2 of Mohammed's accomplices in the planning for the 9/11 attack, Walid Bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawasawi, had also entered into plea agreements Wednesday, the DOD said. All 3 men had been detained at Guantanamo prison for nearly two decades with no formal prison sentences imposed. Under the now-void plea deal, they were scheduled to be sentenced by a panel of military officers in the summer of 2025.
Mohammed is described in court papers as an al-Qaeda militant and the principal architect of the 9/11 assault on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside Washington. In CIA custody, interrogators subjected Mohammed to “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding him 183 times, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2014 report on the agency’s detention and interrogation programs.
The plea deal rejected by Austin would have required Mohammed and the other two combatants be sentenced by a panel of military officers at a sentencing hearing expected to happen in the summer of 2025. Family members of victims would have been able to testify at the hearing and provide a statement for the jury to use in determining a sentence.
The families would also have been able to ask the al-Qaeda operatives questions about their role in the attacks and motives. Mohammed and the others would have been required to answer as part of the plea agreement, according to the original letter explaining the terms of the plea deal. The letter was sent to family members of 9/11 victims.
Some family members interviewed by USA TODAY earlier this week said that they supported the plea, largely because of their right to ask questions to the attackers at the sentencing hearing. Some, such as Miller, anticipated asking Mohammed about his connections to Osama Bin Laden, for instance.
The families were told in the letter they received on Wednesday that the government had carefully considered all options and decided that a plea arrangement was best.
“The decision to enter into a pre-trial agreement after 12 years of pre-trial litigation was not reached lightly; however, it is our collective, reasoned, and good-faith judgment that this resolution is the best path to finality and justice," military prosecutors wrote in the letter.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/08/02/plea-deal-for-911-mastermind-rejected-death-penalty-back-on-table/74655022007/

05 August 2024 :

July 31, 2024 - USA. Accused Sept. 11 Plotters Agree to Plead Guilty at Guantánamo Bay
Word of the deal emerged in a letter from prosecutors to family members of victims of the attacks.
The man accused of plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and 2 of his accomplices have agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges in exchange for a life sentence rather than a death-penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Prosecutors said the deal was meant to bring some “finality and justice” to the case, particularly for the families of nearly 3,000 people who were killed in the attacks in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field.
The defendants Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi reached the deal in talks with prosecutors across 27 months at Guantánamo and approved on Wednesday by a senior Pentagon official overseeing the war court.
The men have been in U.S. custody since 2003. But the case had become mired in more than a decade of pretrial proceedings that focused on the question of whether their torture in secret C.I.A. prisons had contaminated the evidence against them.
Word of the deal emerged in a letter from war court prosecutors to Sept. 11 family members.
“In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet,” said the letter, which was signed by Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, the chief prosecutor for military commissions, and 3 lawyers on his team.
The letter said the men could submit their pleas in open court as early as next week.
The plea averted what was envisioned as an eventual 12- to 18-month trial, or, alternatively, the possibility of the military judge throwing out confessions that were key to the government’s case. Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge, had been hearing testimony this week and had more hearings scheduled for later this year to decide that and other key pretrial issues.
Mr. Mohammed, 59, a U.S.-educated engineer and avowed jihadist, was accused of coming up with the idea of hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings. Prosecutors said he presented Osama bin Laden with the plan in 1996, and then helped train and direct some of the hijackers.
He and Mr. Hawsawi, 55, were captured together in Pakistan in March 2003, and held in secret C.I.A. prisons until their transfer to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo in September 2006 for an eventual trial. By then, interrogators had held them for years incommunicado and tortured them, including subjecting Mr. Mohammed to 183 rounds of waterboarding, a decision that would stymie years of efforts to put the men on trial.
Mr. bin Attash, who is in his mid-40s, had been described as another deputy in the plot who had helped train some of the hijackers and had carried out missions tasked to him by both Mr. Mohammed and bin Laden.
The 3 men will still face a mini trial of sorts, but probably not before next year. At the military commissions, where they were charged, a judge accepts the plea, but a military jury must be empaneled to hear evidence, including testimony from victims of the attacks, and deliver a sentence. By that point, the judge has typically resolved litigation over what evidence can be used at the sentencing proceeding.
The deal stirred both anger and relief among the thousands of relatives of those killed on Sept. 11.
Some family members had been fearful that the case would never reach a resolution, and that the defendants would die in U.S. custody without a conviction. Others, wanting a death penalty, had pushed the government to get the case to trial, even at the risk of the sentence being later overturned.
Kathleen Vigiano, whose New York Police detective husband, Joseph Vigiano, and firefighter brother-in-law, John, were both killed at the World Trade Center, said she was “mostly angry” at the results.
“I really did want the death penalty,” she said. “They did kill 3,000 Americans and people are still dying from post-9/11 cancer.”
She added that she was concerned that the prisoners might someday be released; on the other hand, she said, if they remained in prison, the government would have to support them for life.
Glenn Morgan, whose father, Richard Morgan, was killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center, said he respected the prosecutors, who “put aside a desired capital sentence and made the best of the worst possible situation.”
“In doing so, they beat time,” he said. “In doing so, they applied the rule of law and found the wretched murderers of my father and his colleagues guilty.”
Admiral Rugh said in his letter that, as part of the deal, Mr. Mohammed and the others had agreed to answer questions from victims’ family members “regarding their roles and reasons for conducting the Sept. 11 attacks.”
Under the process, sometimes known as restorative justice, the family members would submit questions by Sept. 14, and should receive answers by the end of 2024. Mr. Mohammed’s lawyer, Gary D. Sowards, noted that having Mr. Mohammed answer “all questions of how and why 9/11 occurred” was an important portion of the agreement.
“The many people whose lives were tragically touched by these events will have the finality that so many have sought for so long,” Mr. Sowards said. “Equally important, the government has agreed to our commitment to allow victims and survivors to tell the stories of how 9/11 so greatly affected their lives.”
2 of the original 5 defendants were not a party to the deal. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was accused of helping to organize a cell of the hijackers in Hamburg, Germany, was found incompetent to stand trial because of mental illness, and his case was severed.
The 5th defendant, known as Ammar al-Baluchi, 46, also was not included in the plea agreement and could face trial alone. He is the nephew of Mr. Mohammed and is charged, like Mr. Hawsawi, with helping the hijackers with finances and travel arrangements while working in the Persian Gulf.
Plea deals had been under discussion since March 2022 but hit a significant snag in September when the White House declined to sign off on conditions sought by the defendants.
The men wanted assurances that they would not serve their sentences in solitary confinement, would have improved contact with their families and continued contact with their lawyers. Mr. Baluchi in particular also wanted the United States to pledge to set up a special, civilian-run torture treatment program for them at the prison.
The Biden administration considered the request for more than a year and then declined to sign off. It was not known if any of those conditions were contained in the agreement approved by Susan Escallier, the senior Pentagon official responsible for overseeing the war court.
The development came in the midst of the 51st round of pretrial hearings in the case since arraignment in 2012. Mr. Mohammed and the others were last seen in court almost 2 weeks ago, for testimony from a psychologist who had interrogated him and other C.I.A. prisoners.
Admiral Rugh and his colleagues wrote in their letter to the families that their decision to agree to guilty pleas after “12 years of pretrial litigation was not reached lightly. However, it is our collective, reasoned and good-faith judgment that this resolution is the best path to finality and justice in this case.”
It was also signed by Clayton G. Trivett Jr. and Jeffrey D. Groharing, 2 military prosecutors who had been on the case since the start.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/us/politics/sept-11-guilty-plea.html

05 July 2024 :

July 1, 2024 - California. Larry Roberts Becomes the 200th Person Exonerated from Death Row
Roberts (Black) was wrongfully convicted in 1983 for the August 17, 1980 murders of Charles Gardner, a fellow prison inmate, and Albert Patch, a correctional officer at the California Medical Center in Vacaville, California. The only witnesses to these stabbings were fellow prisoners who testified against Mr. Roberts. He was sentenced to death for both killings. Years later, the California Supreme Court overturned Mr. Roberts’ conviction for the death of the prison guard but left his death sentence in place. In Mr. Roberts’ case, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California found that prosecutors “suppressed exculpatory evidence, suborned perjury, and presented evidence the prosecutor knew or should have known was false” in the killing of a corrections officer, and granted Mr. Roberts a new trial. After 41 years, the California Attorney General’s Office has now agreed with the Court, and has said it will not retry him.
Mr. Roberts is the ninth person to be exonerated after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for a murder that took place while they were incarcerated on unrelated charges.
Mr. Roberts’ exoneration is a powerful reminder of the fallibility of the death penalty, and one more reason 50% of the American public no longer believes their government can fairly use the death penalty.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/larry-roberts-becomes-the-200th-person-exonerated-from-death-row
https://www.witnesstoinnocence.org/single-post/breaking-news-200-people-exonerated-from-death-row

07 July 2024 :

July 01, 2024 - USA. Death Penalty Information Center Releases New Report on Politicization of the Death Penalty
The United States is the only country in the world to elect local prosecutors and one of the few countries that elects judges. Nearly 90% of state judges are elected in this country, according to the report.
Today, July 1, 2024, the Death Penalty Information Center releases a new report, Lethal Election: How the U.S. Electoral Process Increases the Arbitrariness of the Death Penalty. Using new data and analysis on appellate rulings and grants of clemency, as well as individual stories and case studies from across the country, the report examines how electoral politics distort the fairness and accuracy of capital punishment.
“The U.S. electoral process inserts many elements of unpredictability and unfairness into death penalty cases. A life-or-death decision should not depend on whether an appeal or clemency petition is heard in an election year, nor should a defendant’s fate rest on who donated money to an official’s campaign fund,” said Robin M. Maher, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “But the data suggest that is exactly what is happening.”
Lethal Election includes findings from original research on state supreme court rulings in Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio. The Death Penalty Information Center found that elected supreme court justices in those states affirm twice as many death sentences during an election year than in any other year. In a new analysis of clemency data, the Death Penalty Information Center has also found that a majority (56%) of clemency grants were made by executives who were not running for reelection. The effect was even stronger, however, when executives had sole authority to make clemency decisions: in those jurisdictions, 84.6% of individual clemencies were granted when the executives did not face reelection. When executives with sole authority to grant clemency did face reelection, they only granted clemency four times in 50 years.
The report also notes how officials use the death penalty as a political issue in election campaigns and advertising. For example, three Tennessee Supreme Court justices boasted in television ads of “upholding nearly 90 percent of death sentences” when running for reelection. When Kelly Ayotte ran for U.S. Senate, her campaign ads featured her decision as New Hampshire Attorney General to seek the death penalty for a man accused of killing a police officer. Ten members of the Commission to Study the Death Penalty in New Hampshire cited Ms. Ayotte’s behavior in their recommendation to abolish the death penalty, writing, “Whether real or imagined, even the appearance of politics influencing a decision of this magnitude in the New Hampshire criminal justice system serves to diminish confidence in the integrity of the system itself.” Ms. Ayotte continues to use the same death penalty case in her 2024 campaign for New Hampshire Governor.
While some politicians continue to promote themselves as tough-on-crime, a shift in public support for the death penalty has changed the practices of prosecutors in some of the counties that historically pursued high numbers of death sentences. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where District Attorney Lynne Abraham earned the nickname “Queen of Death” for her aggressive use of the death penalty in the 1990s, voters have twice elected Larry Krasner, who has pledged never to seek the death penalty. Harris County, Texas, which has produced more executions than any other county in the U.S., has seen a significant drop in the number of death sentences since the 2016 election of District Attorney Kim Ogg, who said in 2017, “I don’t think that being the death penalty capital of America is a selling point for Harris County.”
As public support for the death penalty continues to decline and doubts about fairness and accuracy increase, elected officials are taking notice. Their behavior reflects the fact that, in many places, their constituents no longer prioritize or value zeal for the death penalty. Understanding these changes should lessen the pressure on elected officials to act reflexively and punitively. But so long as we continue to elect decision-makers and empower them with the discretion to make life-or-death decisions, there will be a continuing danger that political aspirations will take priority over considerations of humanity, dignity, and justice. This is one of the great weaknesses of the U.S. death penalty.
Key findings of the report:
Elected supreme court justices in Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio are twice as likely to affirm death penalty cases during an election year than in any other year. This effect is statistically significant when controlling for the number of cases each year.
Changing public opinion means that zealous support for the death penalty is no longer a litmus test for elected officials in many death penalty jurisdictions. Today’s elections feature viable candidates who criticize use of the death penalty and pledge reforms or even non-use, reflecting the significant decline in public support for the death penalty.
Elected governors were more likely to grant clemency in the past when they did not face voters in an upcoming election. Concerns about voter “backlash” have eased today with declining public support and low numbers of new death sentences and executions, and have led to an increased number of prisoners benefiting from clemency grants, especially mass grants, in recent years.

https://dpic-cdn.org/production/documents/Lethal-Election-Press-Release.pdf?dm=1720038451
https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/top-elected-justices-are-twice-as-likely-to-affirm-death-penalty-in-election-years-3-state-study-finds#:~:text=Elected%20state%20supreme%20court%20justices,Arbitrariness%20of%20the%20Death%20Penalty.

19 June 2024 :

June 16, 2024 - USA. Donald Trump could execute 40 prisoners in second term 'bloodbath,' anti-death penalty campaigners fear----Biden introduced moratorium and has executed no federal prisoners
Campaigners against capital punishment fear Donald Trump would execute dozens of prisoners if re-elected in the 'largest federal civilian execution spree' in U.S. history.
There are currently 40 prisoners on federal death row, which is located at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. None have been put to death during Joe Biden's presidency.
Biden, 81, is the first president to be openly against capital punishment and had vowed in his 2020 campaign to 'pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level.'
However, he instead introduced a moratorium, which Trump could immediately end if he returns to the White House.
'It's highly likely there will be an execution bloodbath if he returns to office.' Robert Dunham, Director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told DailyMail.com
In Trump's final 6 months in office a flurry of 13 federal executions were carried out. They were the 1st since 2003.
It included 3 after the 2020 election - the first time federal prisoners were put to death by an outgoing president since Grover Cleveland in 1889.
A signal of what could happen in a second Trump term is contained in 'Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,' a lengthy document produced by Project 25, which is involved in planning for a future Trump administration.
In a chapter on the Justice Department it says of the death penalty: 'Providing this punishment without ever enforcing it provides justice neither for the victims’ families nor for the defendant.
'The next conservative Administration should therefore do everything possible to obtain finality for the prisoners currently on federal death row.'
Trump himself has strongly backed execution and has called for those 'caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts.'
His first term administration executed more federal inmates than any other president since Franklin Roosevelt carried out 16 executions in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Those executed in the final months of Trump's first term included Brandon Bernard, who was put to death for his part in a 1999 killing of a religious couple from Iowa.
Bernard, who was 18 at the time of the killings, was a rare execution of a person who was in his teens when his crime was committed.
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian West had appealed to Trump to commute Bernard's sentence to life, citing, among other things, remorse Bernard expressed.
9 days before Trump left office the federal government carried out its first execution of a woman in nearly seven decades.
Lisa Montgomery, 52, was executed by lethal injection after being sentenced to death for strangling an expectant mother in Missouri and cutting the baby from her womb.
Overall, in 2020, the US government carried out more executions in a single year than all states that still conduct executions combined.
Inmates who remain on federal death row include two who were sentenced in 1993.
They also include the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Dunham called on Biden, if he loses the election, to commute all the death sentences to life without parole before he leaves office.
The outgoing President could do that 'with a stroke of a pen.'
He said: 'The proposal that advocates killing everyone on federal death row is so extreme, so lacking in principle and human dignity that it creates a moral imperative for President Biden to prevent it happening if he loses the election.
'Events that presidents do not anticipate often define their presidential legacy. This is one of those events.
'If President Biden loses and does nothing his legacy in significant part will be defined by his role in facilitating the largest federal civilian execution spree in the history of this country. I don't think he wants that to be his legacy.'
The death penalty has not been a major issue in a U.S. presidential race since 1988.
However, it could quickly become a major issue if Trump retakes the White House.
According to Gallup polling support for the death penalty against convicted murderers has fallen from 80 % in 1994 to 53 % last year.
In November Gallup found, for the 1st time, that more Americans believe the death penalty is applied unfairly than fairly - 50 % to 47 %.
The vast majority of condemned inmates are sentenced at a state level. In addition to the federal government the death penalty is legal in 27 states, although in most of those states executions have not been carried out for years.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13528503/Donald-Trump-bloodbath-execute-death-penalty.html

11 June 2024 :

JUNE 6, 2024 - Maryland. Kenneth J. Lighty gets 2 life sentences at resentencing.
The last Marylander to face the death penalty has been resentenced to life in prison plus 35 years for his role the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Eric Larry Hayes.
Kenneth J. Lighty, 41, Black, no longer faces the possibility of execution after the U.S. Attorney’s Office said last month it would not seek the death penalty again. A judge threw out Lighty’s death sentence last year and resentenced him Thursday to two consecutive life sentences, the office said.
Lighty was the last Maryland resident on federal death row before his sentence was vacated. He continued to face the death penalty in the federal system even after Maryland abolished executions for state crimes in 2013.
Lighty was 23 years old when a federal jury recommended the death penalty for him in 2006. Federal prosecutors said Lighty and two co-defendants (James Everett Flood and Lorenzo Anthony Wilson) abducted and murdered 19-year-old Eric Larry Hayes II on Jan. 3, 2002. Three weeks after the killing, Lighty and one of the other co-defendants also participated in a drive-by shooting that killed Antoine Newbill, a 22-year-old man, and injured two other people, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in 2006. Lighty was arrested with the gun in the District of Columbia on January 31, 2002. He was on probation for a drug offense and on bond pending robbery charges in Prince George’s County, Maryland at the time of his involvement in these crimes.
Lighty maintained his innocence at sentencing, according to reports from the time. His two co-defendants both received life in prison.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/2024/06/10/maryland-man-who-once-sat-on-death-row-gets-two-life-sentences-at-resentencing/
https://www.law360.com/articles/1680527/venable-wins-resentencing-for-last-md-death-row-inmate

07 June 2024 :

May 28, 2024 - USA. Guantánamo prosecutors accused of “outrageous” misconduct for trying to use torture testimony
In a pretrial hearing Tuesday at the Guantánamo Bay military tribunal, Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer for a potential witness in the war crimes case, accused government prosecutors of “outrageous” misconduct.
During the hearing for the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is charged with masterminding the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, Stafford Smith said the government attorneys had failed to release exculpatory information about Nashiri and made false statements in the course of their failure.
Stafford Smith, the lead counsel for Ahmed Rabbani, a former Guantánamo detainee who was tortured by the CIA, made the allegations after being called to the witness stand by Nashiri’s defense team.
“I’ve never, ever, in 40 years reported someone to the bar before this case.”
Stafford Smith testified that the prosecutors had filed a brief that falsely said Rabbani had not recanted his initial testimony because, Rabbani said, it was made under torture. After raising the omission, Stafford Smith said, he felt it was not getting due attention and took the unusual step of reporting the prosecutors to their state bar associations.
“I’ve never, ever, in 40 years reported someone to the bar before this case,” Stafford Smith said in court. “I don’t like doing that, but I felt I was required to.”
In the court motion last year that set off Stafford Smith’s ethics complaints, the Guantánamo prosecutors said they had no knowledge of Rabbani’s recantation or claims the testimony in question were extracted by torture. (The chief prosecutor’s office declined to comment for this story.)
Stafford Smith and Kristin Davis, another attorney from Rabbani’s legal team, told the court that, in the 2018 and 2019 “proffer sessions” to negotiate Rabbani’s release from Guantánamo, the detainee recanted his past testimony, which he told government investigators he made under torture.
The recantation should have been recorded and made available to Nashiri’s defense team under the Brady rule, which mandates the release of exculpatory evidence. A court filing by the prosecution in 2023 showed that this never happened.
Nashiri’s lawyer, Anthony Natale, said in an interview before this week’s court hearing that the prosecutors’ alleged falsehoods and failures to hand over exculpatory materials were indicative of why the Guantánamo military commissions have foundered, yielding no convictions at trial since their creation nearly a quarter century ago.
“The situation,” Natale told The Intercept, “is one of many where the government’s abandonment of our constitutional principles resulted in injustice and delay.”
Stafford Smith’s 2023 bar complaints were set in motion by the negotiations five years earlier over Rabbani’s release. Stafford Smith and Davis had agreed to allow Rabbani to cooperate with the FBI in Nashiri’s prosecution in a bid to expedite their client’s release.
In the “proffer session,” the government wanted Rabbani to confirm incriminating statements made in the early 2000s against Nashiri. It was understood among Guantánamo detainees, Rabbani told The Intercept in an interview, that giving testimony about other detainees could help facilitate an early exit from the prison camp.
He said he had seen it happen before, with former Guantánamo detainee, Ahmed al-Darbi, who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2018. Darbi — who was, like Rabbani, identified as a victim of torture by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 report on abuses during CIA terror investigations — had been offered the option to testify against Nashiri and took the deal.
That testimony from Darbi, however, was also false, according to Rabbani’s account of conversations with Darbi before either was released from Guantánamo. In the prison, Rabbani had confronted Darbi about falsehoods concerning Nashiri.
“When I scolded him, he responded that he wanted to get out no matter the price,” Rabbani told The Intercept. “I told him that he is involving al-Nashiri in things the latter hadn’t done — and you save yourself, leaving him behind in his predicament that wasn’t of his making.”
“He responded that he wanted to get out no matter the price.”
Darbi, Rabbani said, expressed contrition: “He showed remorse when it was too late.” (Darbi, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to a role in a 2002 Al Qaeda bombing of a French oil tanker, is currently serving his prison sentence in Saudi Arabia and cannot be reached for comment.)
In 2018, Rabbani’s attorneys were seeking a deal like the one that got Darbi out of Guantánamo, Stafford Smith said in court, but he had cautioned his client not to perjure himself. Rabbani, unlike Darbi, had never been charged with a crime.
Rabbani told The Intercept that, during his interviews with the FBI in 2018 or 2019, he recanted his past statements about Nashiri. Rabbani said he repeatedly raised his torture to the FBI agents and attributed his statements about Nashiri to the torture. Davis confirmed in court Tuesday that Rabbani refused to confirm his past allegations because they were made under torture.
5 years later, the Guantánamo prosecutors announced that they still planned to solicit testimony from Rabbani and potentially call him as a witness. In January 2023, prosecutors filed a pleading claiming they had no knowledge of Rabbani giving exculpatory information about Nashiri.
“The Prosecution has found no information that during the proffer sessions either detainee recanted prior statements or that they made additional allegations their prior statements implicating the Accused were the product of or result of torture,” the pleading says, referencing Rabbani and a second detainee whose statements against Nashiri had come into question.
The prosecutors’ claims of ignorance got under Stafford Smith’s skin. In late February, according to a emails obtained by The Intercept, he wrote to Navy Rear Adm. Aaron Rugh, the head of the prosecution team, alleging that the pleading contained false statements and requesting the signatories’ bar numbers. Rugh responded that he would investigate the matter but did not send the lawyers’ information. (In response to a request for comment, Rugh’s office said, “When matters are pending litigation, it would be inappropriate for the Department of Defense to comment.”)
Stafford Smith found seven of the nine lawyers’ bar numbers and reported them. Six of the complaints use nearly identical language, with slight differences in the introductions and occasional added specifics. A seventh, made later, contains more information and additional allegations. For all but one of the prosecutors, their state bar associations list no public record of discipline; one of the prosecutors has a grievance case listed, but no resolution.
“You certainly understand how serious it would need to be to report someone to the bar?” a prosecutor asked Stafford Smith at the hearing Tuesday. Stafford Smith replied, “I do, absolutely.”
The CIA tortured Rabbani for more than 540 days, according to the Senate torture report. The torture included a stint in a covert American black site in Afghanistan.
Rabbani has described being held in complete darkness for long periods and being subjected to a medieval torture technique known as “strappado”: hanging someone by their bound arms and suddenly dropping them.
Recounting his ordeal later, Rabbani said he gave incriminating statements about Nashiri sometime between 2002 and 2004 while at the black site.
Last August, the Nashiri case at Guantánamo’s military commission was shaken up when the then-judge said an early confession by Nashiri was inadmissible because it was extracted through torture. The ruling dealt a blow to the government’s longest-running death penalty case under the military commissions.
Testimony at the commission hearing on Tuesday, however, indicates that the government’s quest to use evidence obtained through torture from other detainees was well underway when the judge made his decision on Nashiri’s confession — and that the pursuit of torture testimony continues into the present.
Rabbani said that the attempts to use his testimony speaks to a failure to reckon with Guantánamo, torture, and the other excesses of the U.S. campaign against terrorism.
“America does not want to admit the bitter truth of their failure in investigations,” he told The Intercept, “and the practice of injustice and torture that is internationally prohibited.”

https://theintercept.com/collections/ghosts-of-guantanamo/#:~:text=Guant%C3%A1namo%20Prosecutors%20Accused%20of%20%E2%80%9COutrageous,Trying%20to%20Use%20Torture%20Testimony&text=Government%20prosecutors%20claimed%20they%20didn,in%20interviews%20with%20the%20government.

24 May 2024 :

May 20, 2024 - USA. Death Row USA Fall 2023 Report
As of October 1, 2023: Continued Decline of Death Row Population
As of October 2023, the number of people in the United States sentenced to death or facing the possibility of a death sentence continued its more than two-decade decline, according to the latest report issued by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF).
In its Fall 2023 edition of Death Row USA (DRUSA), LDF reports that the number of people on state, federal, and military death rows or facing pending capital trials or resentencing proceedings has fallen to 2,262. Of that total, LDF reports that 804 prisoners or 35.5% are in states with moratoria on executions, meaning there is no immediate threat of execution, and another 125 prisoners are awaiting new sentencing proceedings. The total population is now at its lowest number since 1989.
LDF also released its Spring and Summer 2023 reports, which include information regarding individuals who are on death row as the result of non-unanimous jury sentences or judicial override of jury determinations for life. According to the Spring 2023 report, Alabama, and Florida account for 474 people on death rows, despite 324 people (68.4%) of them receiving the death penalty from non-unanimous juries or judicial override. In Alabama, 129 of 167 (77.2%) death row prisoners were sentenced non-unanimously or faced judicial override, and in Florida, 193 of 307 (62.8%) people on death row were sentenced non-unanimously or by judicial override.
All Drusa can be consulted at: https://www.naacpldf.org/our-thinking/death-row-usa/

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/naacp-legal-defense-funds-most-recent-report-confirms-continued-decline-of-death-row-population

21 May 2024 :

May 20, 2024 - United Kingdom. Assange wins right to challenge US extradition
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange can bring a new appeal against extradition to the US, the High Court has ruled.
He was granted permission to appeal against the order that he be sent to the US to stand trial for leaking military secrets.
The decision means Mr Assange will be able to challenge US assurances over how his prospective trial would be conducted and whether his right to free speech would be infringed.
The 52-year-old’s lawyers hugged each other in court after the latest ruling in the legal saga.
They have argued that the case against him - relating to the release of highly classified documents almost 15 years ago about alleged US war crimes - is politically motivated.
The US argues that the Wikileaks files - which disclosed information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - endangered lives.
In a short ruling on Monday morning, two senior judges granted him permission to appeal against an earlier order allowing his extradition to the US. They ruled that he needs to be given a full appeal in the UK.
Mr Assange has resisted extradition from the UK for more than a decade, after his Wikileaks website published the confidential US documents in 2010 and 2011.
Mr Assange, who is currently in Belmarsh Prison, will now have a number of months to prepare his appeal, which will concern whether or not the US courts will protect his right to free speech as an Australian citizen.
Hundreds of people had gathered outside the court ahead of the ruling, and supporters of Mr Assange cheered as news of the decision filtered through.
It means he will remain in the UK for now.
Had the court ruled in the US's favour, Mr Assange would have exhausted all legal avenues in the UK.
Earlier on Monday, his wife Stella Assange told the BBC that she would "fight on until Julian is free", whatever the judges ruled.
Speaking outside the Royal Courts of Justice after the decision, Ms Assange welcomed the ruling and branded it a “turning point”.
She called on the US to “abandon this shameful attack on journalists, on the press and the public that has been going on for 14 years.”
The US Department of Justice described the leak as "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States".
The leaked files suggested the US military had killed civilians in unreported incidents during the war in Afghanistan.
US authorities say Mr Assange put lives at risk by failing to redact the names of intelligence operatives in the documents. They also argue that he is not being prosecuted in relation to any of the disclosures that he says exposes war crimes.
Mr Assange's legal team has argued that the case is a politically motivated form of "state retaliation".
"He exposed literally war crimes," Ms Assange told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Monday.
"This case is the revenge of that country against openness and accountability."
Then-home secretary Priti Patel signed Mr Assange's extradition order in 2022, but he returned to the High Court in February 2024 to ask for permission to appeal.
At a hearing in March, the US government was given additional time to make assurances that Mr Assange would not receive the death penalty in the US and on two other grounds:
that Mr Assange would be able to rely on the first amendment to the US constitution - which protects free speech.
that his Australian nationality would not count against him.
Last month, judges confirmed the US had provided assurances to the court.
Mr Assange and his legal team accept the assurance that he will not face the death penalty were he to be charged with other offences.
Earlier on Monday, James Lewis KC, representing the US government, said in written submissions to the court that there was “no question” that Mr Assange would be “entitled to the full panoply of due process trial rights” - including the first amendment defence – if extradited.
Separately, last month, US President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to drop Mr Assange's prosecution and return him to his native country.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw44l170xdwo

11 May 2024 :

May 08, 2024 - USA. New Cardozo Law Review Article Examines the Events in the Lives of Women on U.S. Death Row
A new article, “Gender Matters: Women on Death Row in the United States,” explores the cases of 48 women who were sentenced to death in the United States between 1990 and 2023. “We believe that women’s capital sentences are best explained by examining the events of their lives within a larger social context, and by analysing how those experiences—and the women themselves—were treated within the legal system,” said the authors, who include Sandra Babcock, a Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Nathalie Greenfield, an Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, and Kathryn Adamson, a consultant with the Center on Gender and Extreme Sentencing.
Their article provides a holistic and intersectional study of the 48 women, finding that most were mothers at the time of their arrest (85%), survivors of gender-based violence (96%), experiencing mental health challenges related to intellectual or psychosocial disabilities (80%), and without prior violent convictions (90%). 71% had no prior convictions whatsoever before they were capitally charged. The study found that many of the women were also convicted of killing someone they knew, with nearly half convicted of killing a child in their care and a fifth convicted of killing an intimate partner. Co-defendants, almost always male, were present in nearly two-thirds of cases and 61% of women had an intimate partner, mostly abusive, per trial testimony, as their co-defendant. In one quarter of cases, the state identified the crime as being committed for financial gain as a death-qualifying aggravating factor. In addition, the women were largely defended by all-male defense teams (69%) and prosecuted under male district attorneys (96%) before male judges (88%).
“Our research underscores the failure of current theoretical approaches on gender and the death penalty to capture the nuances of women’s capital cases,” the authors state. They identify and analyze two theories in particular: the “chivalry theory” and the “evil woman theory.” The first theory attempts to explain the rarity of women on death row, constituting only 2% of the entire death row population as of January 1, 2024, by arguing that women who are capitally tried are treated with leniency due to societal attitudes. “In our view, scholars’ failure to subject the chivalry theory to meaningful critique indicates a troubling readiness to accept scholarship that reaffirms societal biases regarding gender,” the authors conclude. The second theory asserts that women whose criminal behavior does not align with sex-stereotypical assumptions (e.g., unladylike behavior) do not receive the leniency of chivalry proposed in the first theory. The authors argue that this theory is oversimplistic and discounts a number of contributing factors. “[We] propose that researchers embrace the nuances of women’s stories and situate them in the larger context of the women’s death row population.”

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/new-cardozo-law-review-article-examines-the-events-in-the-lives-of-women-on-u-s-death-row

11 May 2024 :

May 7, 2024 - USA. Under 1% of Catholics follow the Pope on abortion, death penalty, euthanasia
Less than 1% of American Catholics agree with all 3 of the Catholic Church's teachings on the sanctity of life issues, showing the widespread existence of what some call "cafeteria Catholics" in the United States, according to an analysis.
Researcher Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University who publishes articles on a Substack called "Graphs About Religion," shared data Thursday about the beliefs of Catholics in the U.S., focusing on their views on abortion, capital punishment and euthanasia.
Burge attributed the motivation to conduct the research to comments made by Cardinal Wilton Gregory of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, who referred to President Joe Biden as a "cafeteria Catholic" during an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" on March 31.
Gregory defined a "cafeteria Catholic" as someone who "chooses that which is attractive and dismisses that which is challenging." Referring to Biden, Gregory stated, "Like a number of Catholics, he picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts." In other words, a "cafeteria Catholic" picks and chooses which parts of the faith to abide by, much like someone selecting food in a cafeteria rather than accepting all the teachings of the faith.
When investigating the phenomenon of "cafeteria Catholics," Burge discovered that "it's not just many Catholics who disagree with the teachings of the church."
"In fact, if you look at the data, it's nearly all of them," he wrote.
Using data from the General Social Survey dating back to 1988, he measured the percentage of U.S. Catholics who said they did not support abortion for any reason and also opposed the death penalty and euthanasia at 0.9% in 2022.
The share of U.S. Catholics who aligned with church teaching on all 3 matters reached a high of about 7% in 1989 while fluctuating between 2.6% and 6.2% in the years since. The 0.9% of U.S. Catholics whose positions on the 3 issues matched those of the church in 2022 constituted an all-time low.
After noting the Catholic Church's teaching that "Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an ends or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law," Burge presented 6 graphs documenting U.S. Catholics' positions on abortion over time based on data found in the General Social Survey collected between 1972 and 2022.
3 of the 6 graphs showed that until recently, most U.S. Catholics opposed legal abortion if a woman "wants no more kids," "is not married" or "can't afford more." However, in all 3 of those cases, support for legal abortion is at about 50%, according to the most recent data.
"From the 1970s through the 1990s, the share of Catholics who would allow an abortion [if a woman doesn't want more kids] was right around 40%. Now, about 1/2 of Catholics would support an abortion in that circumstance," Burge stated. "The trend line is largely the same when Catholics are asked about electing an abortion in a situation where the woman is not married. Now, about 1/2 of Catholics would support the right of a woman to obtain a legal abortion in that case."
On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of Catholics have consistently supported legal abortion in cases where the "mother's health" is at risk, the baby was conceived as a result of rape and the baby was determined to have a "serious defect."
The most recent statistics show support for abortions in those cases hovering at around 90%, 80% and 75%, respectively. Support for legal abortion in cases where the mother's health was in danger has never dropped below 80%, while the percentage of Catholics who favored legal abortion in the other 2 cases has never dipped below 70%.
"If you look at the stated opinion of rank and file Catholics on abortion, there's clear majority support for elective abortion in almost every circumstance," Burge wrote. "For instance, at least 3/4 of Roman Catholics favor a woman's right to obtain an abortion if she became pregnant due to a sexual assault. Nearly the same share are supportive of abortion if the child has a serious birth defect."
Burge shared a statement from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops illustrating the Catholic Church's opposition to the death penalty, highlighting their declaration that "no matter how heinous the crime, if society can protect itself without ending a human life, it should do so." He presented a graph showing consistent majority support for the death penalty among U.S. Catholics from 1974-2022, ranging from a low of 55% in 2021 to a high of 81% in 1990, with the most recent data measuring Catholic support for the death penalty at 61%.
When looking at data about U.S. Catholics' support for euthanasia, also known as assisted suicide, Burge found that about 70% of American Catholics supported helping or letting people commit suicide in cases of incurable disease in 2022. This represented a stark increase from the 36% who expressed support for euthanasia when the question was first asked in 1977.
The Catholic Church teaches that because "direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons," it is "morally unacceptable."
Burge noted that Catholics are not the only religious demographic that doesn't adhere to the teachings of their churches. He pointed to a poll conducted by Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research that asks specific doctrinal questions.
Among Evangelicals who participated in the survey, about a quarter (26%) said they don't believe the Bible is literally true. Meanwhile, more than half (56%) said that "God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam," and 43% said that "Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God."
Research from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University's American Worldview Inventory 2024 finds that only 6% of professed Christians in the United States hold a biblical worldview.
"The typical American adult is not a worldview purist but is essentially a worldview plagiarist, combining beliefs and behaviors borrowed from an average of 9 recognized worldviews into their personal worldview blend," the report stated.

https://www.christianpost.com/news/under-1-of-catholics-agree-with-sanctity-of-life-teachings-data.html#:~:text=Less%20than%201%25%20of%20American,States%2C%20according%20to%20an%20analysis.

10 May 2024 :

May 6, 2024 - USA. America’s prison system is turning into a de facto nursing home----Why are more and more older people spending their dying years behind bars?
In late 2018, Richard Washington sent a memo to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with the subject line “Notice I am being killed.”
The 64-year-old man, who decades earlier was convicted on armed robbery charges, was serving a 63-year prison sentence in Arizona. In his letter, he alleged that the Department of Corrections was refusing to give him medication for his various health issues, which included diabetes, hypertension, and hepatitis C. Because of the lack of treatment, Washington wrote, “My greatest fear is that I’m going to die more sooner than later.”
About 6 weeks later, he was dead.
In state after state, prison systems have long been plagued by inadequate health care, resulting in the spread of treatable diseases and, in many cases, preventable deaths behind bars. But a key demographic trend threatens to make that problem even worse: Over the last several decades, America’s prison population has been rapidly aging, and, as in Washington’s case, prisoners’ health needs have become more significant as a result.
People who were 55 years old or older made up about 3 % of the US prison population in 1991; by 2021, they accounted for 15 %. The total number of older prisoners is also steadily growing, with no signs of abatement: In 2020, there were about 166,000 incarcerated people aged 55 years or older; that number grew to about 178,000 in 2021 and 186,000 in 2022.
The graying of America’s incarcerated population is effectively turning the US prison system into a de facto nursing home, leaving hundreds of thousands of older people in its care each year. The result is skyrocketing costs: The Bureau of Prisons’ health care spending on federal inmates rose from $978 million in 2009 to $1.34 billion in 2016, and various state governments have seen similar increases.
Still, conditions in American prisons continue to be detrimental to people’s health and often lead to accelerated aging. Prisoners, for example, are much more likely to exhibit signs of cognitive decline, including dementia, at an earlier age than the general population, and one study found that a 59-year-old in prison has the same morbidity rate — that is, how often people get a disease — as a nonincarcerated 75-year-old.
“We have facilities that aren’t considered humane,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice. “They’re not places for elderly people who have dementia and diabetes and maybe walkers or wheelchairs.”
All of this raises both a moral and practical policy question that lawmakers have to face: Why are we forcing older people to spend their dying years in prison when they can get better care elsewhere?
People aren’t just aging behind bars; police are locking up the elderly.
One of the explanations for the aging prison population is simple: Since the 1970s and the age of mass incarceration — when the American prison population ballooned and gave the United States the distinction of imprisoning more people than any other country in the world — people have been aging behind bars.
The other explanation, however, is less obvious: Older people have been getting arrested at higher rates than they used to. In 1991, for example, people who were 55 years of age or older made up only 2 % of adults who were arrested; by 2021, they made up 8 %, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that does criminal justice research and advocacy. The Marshall Project also found a similar pattern: Between 2000 and 2020, there was nearly a 30 % increase in the number of arrests of people over 65, despite the overall number of arrests dropping by nearly 40%.
That spike is especially surprising because people tend to age out of crime: Recidivism rates for older people are significantly lower than they are for younger people. According to a 2017 report by the United States Sentencing Commission that tracked people for 8 years after they were released from prison, nearly 68 % of people who were under 21 at the time of their release were rearrested. By contrast, just over 13 % of people over 65 were rearrested.
So why are arrests among older people suddenly on the rise? The resurging trend across many American cities and states to further criminalize poverty and impose harsher punishments for petty crimes, including things like shoplifting, is partly to blame because the groups of people who become common targets for police are getting older.
“People who are unhoused and people suffering from mental health disorders and substance use disorders are also aging,” said Mike Wessler, the communications director at the Prison Policy Initiative. “If you look across the country right now, we’re obviously seeing efforts to ramp up policing of people who are unhoused, people with untreated mental health disorders, people with substance use disorder. So it’s almost a certainty that in the coming years we are probably going to see this problem get worse.”
People experiencing cognitive decline, including those suffering from dementia, can also be especially vulnerable during interactions with police. Henry Hart, a 76-year-old with dementia in Maryland, for example, was arrested when he had what his daughter described as a mental breakdown. During the incident, Hart had grown agitated and hit her, and when she called for paramedics to take him to the hospital, police showed up at the scene instead. Officers ultimately arrested him for assault despite his family members’ pleas. After spending time in jail, Hart’s condition seemed to get notably worse, according to his daughter.
“As Maryland’s population ages, experts fear that police will encounter people with dementia more often and without recognizing the condition or knowing how to respond to it,” Baltimore Sun reporters Angela Roberts and Cassidy Jensen wrote. “Arrest or jail time can be especially harmful to people with dementia, given their mental and physical vulnerability, experts say.”
There’s also evidence that beefing up law enforcement has had a negative impact on older people. While younger people have become less likely to be arrested for drug-related crimes than in the past, arrests of older people for drug-related offenses have spiked. Between 2000 and 2018, for example, drug-related arrests of people over the age of 50 rose by 92 percent — the fastest increase out of any age group. And while substance use disorder among older people is on the rise, addressing the problem through stricter law enforcement is not a practical solution.
“It’s a heck of a lot easier to order the National Guard to go stand on subway platforms than it is to figure out how to expand mental health treatment in the state; than to figure out how to address substance use disorders in the state; than to figure out how to address the housing crisis in the state,” Wessler said.
The consequences of an aging prison population
Studies have shown that incarcerated people have signs of aging at a faster rate than others as a result of prison conditions, and that each year in prison can shave years off of someone’s life.
“Health care behind bars is bad even in the best scenarios,” Wessler said. “And that’s kind of by design in a lot of respects: Prisons are not places that are therapeutic or designed to heal; they are places that are designed to punish.”
Infectious diseases tend to disproportionately affect prisoners compared to the general population, and the Covid pandemic in particular showed why prisons are especially dangerous for older people. Deaths of inmates rose by nearly 50 percent in the first year of the pandemic, and while mortality rates increased for prisoners across all ages, older people saw the highest surge in mortality. By contrast, among the general population, it was younger people who saw the highest increase in death rates.
From a public policy standpoint, the aging prison population is a failure on multiple fronts. Most importantly, prisons cause people to age more quickly and die prematurely. After all, while so-called “natural” deaths — that is, death from disease or old age — make up the vast majority of deaths behind bars, they often receive little scrutiny despite the fact that many of them have been found to be the result of medical neglect.
But it’s also costing states a lot of money — money that is clearly not well spent. In Texas, for example, the state’s prison health care costs increased by more than $250 million between 2012 and 2019, although the prison population actually decreased by 3 percent during that time. The state’s prison population aged 55 or older, on the other hand, had increased by 65 percent during that same period, according to data reviewed by the Texas Tribune.
Some lawmakers have noted this is unsustainable. As former state Sen. John Whitmire told the Tribune, “Nobody’s tougher on crime than me, but once you’ve incarcerated a guy past the point that he’s a threat to anybody, I’d like to save that $500,000 to put him in a nursing home as a condition of parole, take that money, and spend it on either other public safety efforts or prison costs.”
The system as it is, in other words, isn’t benefiting anyone. It’s both deadlier and more financially costly.
And from a moral standpoint, it’s hard for a society to defend these outcomes. “Do we morally think that it is good to have people spend their dying years behind bars, especially for drug crimes from the ’80s and ’90s?” Wessler said. “That strikes me as morally wrong in addition to being bad public policy.”
Tougher penalties turn into de facto death sentences
In many ways, America’s aging prisons are the expected end result of the tough-on-crime approaches and surge in arrests of the 1980s and 1990s.
A study by researchers at the the State University of New York at Albany, the University of Pennsylvania, and the RAND Corporation, found that young people who were locked up in the 1990s spent more time behind bars than any other generation, in large part because of tougher and longer sentences, higher recidivism rates, and escalating punishments for people who are rearrested. And that generation is now aging behind bars, unlikely to ever come out of prison.
“These extreme sentence lengths paired with narrow release mechanisms — meaning fewer ways to actually leave the system — led to this huge crisis of older adults in American prisons,” Eisen, from the Brennan Center, said. “Because what you had is more people coming in, people staying for longer, and then fewer avenues for release because of mandatory minimums, because of three strikes [laws], because of life without parole.”
While many older people in prison today are being sent there for petty crimes, it’s also true that many others, particularly those serving longer sentences, have been convicted of serious crimes. But regardless of what a person is guilty of, the fate of a death behind bars — which can be the result of inadequate medical care and botched treatments — could itself be seen as a cruel punishment, especially when people no longer pose a threat to society.
Take, for example, the case of Walter Jordan, another elderly Arizona prisoner whose story is eerily similar to Richard Washington’s. Jordan, a 67-year-old man who was convicted of 1st-degree murder and kidnapping, was serving a life sentence. In a memo he wrote to a federal judge in 2017, he alleged that the state’s Department of Corrections and its private health care contractor had delayed his treatment for skin cancer. The memo was, in his words, a “notice of impending death.”
Jordan wrote that he was in pain and suffering from memory loss. He alleged that other prisoners were also being denied care, and he wrote that as a result of his delayed treatment, he would be “lucky to be alive for 30 days.”
Jordan was right: Just over a week later, he was dead. A physician who reviewed his case found that Jordan could have survived had he received adequate care. The situation was “horrific,” the physician wrote. “He suffered excruciating needless pain from cancer that was not appropriately managed in the months prior to his death.”
There are more humane approaches. States and the federal government can start, for example, by expanding eligibility for compassionate release, which truncates sentences but tends to be reserved for people with terminal illnesses. Parole — which can sometimes have unintended consequences including strict rules that often result in parolees being sent back to prison — can also be especially beneficial to elderly prisoners who can get better health care outside of prison. And yet, tough-on-crime laws like those recently passed in Louisiana are making it harder for prisoners to be eligible for parole.
Governors can also make use of their pardon powers and commute sentences for older prisoners who have shown signs of rehabilitation. And instead of readopting a tough-on-crime approach that will likely result in more arrests of older people, states and the federal government can support social safety net programs that would lift older people out of poverty and homelessness, reducing their odds of being arrested in the first place.
America’s jail and prison population peaked in 2008, when more than 2.3 million people were behind bars. And while it has mostly declined since then — especially during Covid, when many prisoners were released as the virus ravaged prisons — it has recently been ticking back up.
“We have far too many people in our prisons,” Eisen said. One of the fastest ways to address that problem is to release older people, who generally don’t pose a public safety risk. “This is a population that shouldn’t be behind bars.”
But until lawmakers acknowledge that the current prison system is failing some of the most vulnerable people in its care, cases like Washington’s or Jordan’s will become all the more common. And more and more people who are now serving time in an American prison will slowly come to learn that their punishment has morphed into a death sentence.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24119956/prisons-elderly-aging-prisoners-criminal-justice

09 May 2024 :

May 06, 2024 - USA. Lethal drugs source of 2020/21 federal executions confirmed
Absolute Standards Inc.
Recent reporting by The Intercept confirms a story aired in April 2024 on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver identifying Connecticut-based Absolute Standards as the source of the execution drugs used in 13 federal executions in 2020 and 2021. Absolute Standards produces materials for calibrating research equipment, but in 2018, it applied to the Drug Enforcement Administration to be registered as a bulk producer of pentobarbital, the anesthetic used in federal executions and in many death penalty states.
An anonymous source told The Intercept about a meeting with the company’s owner and its director, saying, “They’d been reading about it in the papers. And they saw that people couldn’t get it. They were like, ‘Well, we make the standard, so we know how to make it. So we can just make it.’ They basically bragged about how they built this little home market.” Absolute Standards produced the raw ingredient, which was sent to an unknown company that used it to make pentobarbital.
A former official from the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), who also remained anonymous, couldn’t remember exactly how Absolute Standards was identified as a possible source of execution drugs, but said, “I know that we had people that were just calling every company that they could to find out if they were able and willing to produce it.” Out of concern that revealing the company’s identity might lead to boycotts or protests, the payments from the government were not logged in its usual public system. “I don’t recall how it was done. It was probably not done through their normal payments process,” the former BOP official said. “Everything was done discreetly, because again, the fear was that publicity would result in this company no longer wanting to be willing to do business.”
Though Absolute Standards was not publicly named as the drug supplier until 2024, it was known to members of Congress when the federal executions began during the Trump Administration. Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Jamie Raskin sent the company a letter on the day of the first federal execution in 2020, asking about its involvement, but never received a reply. A staffer for Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro raised concerns with Connecticut Attorney General William Tong that death penalty states might seek also drugs from the company. “There are several states that are now actively looking to follow the federal government’s lead in acquiring this drug and resuming executions,” she wrote. AG Tong then wrote to Absolute Standards, explaining that, “Connecticut has a strong public policy against executions.” The state abolished capital punishment in 2012. Producing execution drugs for other states, AG Tong wrote, “is contrary to the values and policies of this state.”
The revelation of the drug supplier comes three years after the last federal execution. After President Biden took office in 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium on executions and directed the Deputy Attorney General to lead a multi-pronged review of the federal government’s execution policies, including changes recently made under the Trump Administration. They included: 1) a review coordinated by the Office of Legal Policy of the Addendum to the Federal Execution Protocol, adopted in 2019, to assess the risk of pain and suffering associated with the use of pentobarbital; 2) a review coordinated by the Office of Legal Policy to consider changes to Justice Department regulations made in November 2020 that expanded the permissible methods of execution beyond lethal injection, and authorized the use of state facilities and personnel in federal executions; and 3) a review of the Justice Manual’s capital case provisions, including the December 2020 and January 2021 changes to expedite execution of capital sentences. Only the Justice Manual review has been completed, with changes that included removal of the provisions intended to speed federal executions. 
The moratorium on executions has not had any effect on the cases of those currently on federal death row, where the DOJ continues to aggressively defend their death sentences and oppose relief. One new federal death sentence has also been imposed under the Biden Administration.  Robert Bowers was convicted of killing 11 Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018. His prosecution was initiated under the Trump administration, but the case was prosecuted by the Biden Administration’s DOJ. Similarly, Sayfullo Saipov was also charged during the Trump Administration and prosecuted by the Biden Administration’s DOJ, but he was sentenced to life in prison without parole after a New York federal jury could not agree to sentence him to death.
After taking office, Attorney General Garland withdrew more than 30 notices of intent to seek the federal death penalty against defendants that had been filed during the Trump Administration. He also decided against seeking a death sentence for Patrick Crusius, who pled guilty to nearly 50 federal hate crime charges in the racially motivated killing of 23 Latinx people and injuring of 22 others in an El Paso, Texas Walmart in August 2019.
But earlier this year, AG Garland authorized the DOJ’s first new death penalty case. The DOJ will seek a federal death sentence for Payton Gendron, the then-18-year-old who killed 10 Black people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York in 2022. Mr. Gendron, who has already pled guilty to state charges and has been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, is not expected to go to trial in federal court until 2025.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/secret-execution-drug-supplier-confirmed-while-federal-death-penalty-reviews-continue-at-department-of-justice

11 May 2024 :

02/05/2024 - USA. Federal prosecutors won't challenge Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appeal case
Prosecutors have announced that they won’t challenge a federal appeals court ruling regarding possible juror bias in the death penalty case of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Defense lawyers for Tsarnaev are fighting to get his death penalty sentence overturned, arguing bias over questionable social media posts made by 2 people who sat on the jury that convicted him for his role in the bombing that killed 3 people and injured hundreds near the marathon’s finish line in 2013.
The appeals court recently ordered the judge who oversaw Tsarnaev’s trial to investigate the defense’s claims of juror bias and determine whether his death sentence should stand. Prosecutors are now agreeing to take a 2nd look.
“This letter is to inform the Court that the government will not be seeking panel rehearing or rehearing en banc (on the bench) of the decision of this case,” the U.S. District Attorney’s Office wrote in a letter to the U.S. Appeal Court.
There is no chance Tsarnaev will be freed from prison, but his sentence can end up changing to life without parole instead of death.
Defense lawyers have also argued that Tsarnaev had fallen under the influence of his older brother, Tamerlan, who died in a gun battle with police after the bombing.
Tsarnaev was convicted of all 30 charges against him, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction and the killing of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Officer Sean Collier.
Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China, Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford, and 8-year-old Martin Richard, of Boston, all died in the bombing.

https://www.boston25news.com/unavailable-location/
https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/05/02/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-boston-marathon-bombing-case-moves-ahead-feds-wont-appeal/

08 May 2024 :

May 1, 2024 - USA. (Military) Sept. 11 Trial Plea Negotiations Still Underway at Guantánamo Bay----The lead prosecutor briefed the judge on the talks in an effort to fend off a claim that members of Congress had unlawfully meddled in the negotiations.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers are still negotiating toward a plea agreement for the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks despite the Biden administration’s refusal to endorse certain proposed conditions, the lead prosecutor said in court on Wednesday at Guantánamo Bay.
“This is all whirling around us,” said Clayton G. Trivett Jr., the prosecutor, discussing key details of the negotiations in open court for the 1st time. He added that “around the edges we have agreed to do things” and that “the positions that we took at the time are still available.”
In mostly secret negotiations in 2022 and 2023, prosecutors offered to drop the death penalty from the case in exchange for detailed admissions by the accused architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and four other men who are charged as his accomplices in the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people. Since then, one of the five men has been ruled not mentally competent to stand trial.
The occasion of the briefing was a legal filing by lawyers for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the defendants and Mr. Mohammed’s nephew, asking the judge to dismiss the case or at least the possibility of a death penalty because of real or apparent political interference by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and other members of Congress last summer.
In August 2023, those members of Congress began urging relatives of Sept. 11 victims on social media to pressure President Biden to derail any deal that would prevent capital punishment.
At the time, the White House was deciding whether to endorse certain conditions sought through the talks, most related to addressing the physical and psychological damage the men had from torture in their early years of incommunicado custody by the C.I.A.
On Sept. 6, 2023, the White House declined to get involved.
Rita J. Radostitz, a lawyer for Mr. Baluchi, said that Mr. Cruz then took “a victory lap.”
“The Biden administration was prepared to give them a plea deal,” Mr. Cruz posted on social media. He went on, using the acronym for the Defense Department, “After I pressed the DoD, they reversed course & rejected the plea deal. Big win for justice.”
But both defense and prosecution lawyers told the judge on Wednesday that the White House position did not derail the talks.
When Mr. Cruz got involved, defense lawyers were “working with the prosecution streamlining all the litigation to present, in an open setting, a full examination of the events of 9/11 and answer all the victim family members’ questions about what happened,” said Gary D. Sowards, Mr. Mohammed’s lawyer.
Any deal would take the death penalty off the table and require a mini-trial and airing of the facts of the attack, he said.
The defendants want guarantees of trauma care for head injuries, gastrointestinal damage and mental illnesses blamed on their C.I.A. detention; to continue to eat and pray together communally, rather than be held in solitary confinement; and to get better communication with their families rather than recorded video calls.
But Mr. Trivett said those demands, called “policy principles,” require infrastructure, funding and executive branch approval. So he forwarded them to the general counsel of the Defense Department while his team secretly negotiated how a plea agreement would play out in the Guantánamo court.
He said Congress had legitimate interests in that aspect of the negotiations, because some assurances would require funding — and Congress decides the Pentagon’s budget.
Mr. Sowards said a negotiated settlement at Guantánamo would not resemble one in federal court, where a defendant comes to plead guilty and is sentenced without a trial.
These negotiations between prosecution and defense lawyers were working toward a lengthy, open court process that would involve a detailed plea, presentation of the crime, testimony by victims and possibly an opportunity for family members to have the defendants answer their questions, Mr. Sowards said.
In military commissions, that process can last months.
Mr. Trivett told the judge that about 20,000 people can be counted as relatives of the victims of the attacks, and there was no agreement “on what is justice in this case, what is an appropriate punishment.” He made the presentation on a rare week when only one relative was watching in the spectators’ gallery.
“I’m glad to hear they’re still talking, and that there’s an openness to bringing a plausible resolution that will give some sort of finality to everyone involved,” said Colleen Kelly, whose brother Bill was killed at the World Trade Center.
By “everyone,” she said, she meant the Sept. 11 families, the prosecution and the defense lawyers, some who have been shouldering this responsibility for two decades. Ms. Kelly, a founder of the Sept. 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows movement, came to Guantánamo on Saturday to watch a week of hearings as a court-approved “nongovernmental observer.”
This is the 3rd week of a 5-week pretrial hearing session, and as it happened, the prosecutors sponsored no family members as guest observers.
Last month, when family members were watching the proceedings, another prosecutor told the judge that, regardless of the outcome of their trial, Mr. Mohammed and the others could be held forever in a form of preventive detention.
In disclosing the details of the continuing talks, Mr. Trivett said there had been no unlawful influence on his team. “Nobody has threatened me,” he said, adding that he was under no pressure “not to negotiate consistent with what we consider to be a just result.”
On Wednesday, Darin Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Cruz, said the senator would continue his efforts.
“During his time in the Senate, Senator Cruz has led efforts to combat terrorists, from the Iran-controlled Houthis to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to Hamas, in addition to advocating against plea deals for terrorists being charged for plotting and planning 9/11. He will continue to do so,” Mr. Miller said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/us/politics/sept11-case-plea-negotiations.html

01 May 2024 :

April 22, 2024 - USA. Prosecutor Says Sept. 11 Suspects Can Be Held Past War Crimes Sentence----The argument, in a pretrial hearing, dealt with the unresolved question of whether a prisoner who completes such a sentence is entitled to release from military detention.
Regardless of the outcome of their someday trial, the men accused of plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, can be held forever as prisoners in the war against terrorism in a form of preventive detention, a military prosecutor told the presiding judge on Wednesday.
Defense lawyers were asking the judge to rule that, if convicted, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, one of the suspects in plotting the attack, would have any sentence to a term of confinement reduced by the number of days he was held by the United States before trial. He has been held since 2003.
The argument, in a pretrial hearing in the decade-old Sept. 11 case, was the latest installment over a long-running, unresolved question of whether a prisoner, once he completes a war crimes sentence, is entitled to release from military detention.
Col. Joshua S. Bearden, an Army prosecutor, said the answer was no. He urged the judge to reject the request as both premature, because the government is seeking the death penalty in the case, and beyond the scope of his authority.
No date has been set for the start of the trial of the 4 men accused of conspiring in the commercial airliner hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Hawsawi has been held for the past 20 years but not as punishment or exclusively for trial, Colonel Bearden said. The prosecutor said the charges against Mr. Hawsawi were separate from the detention that keeps him “off the battlefield” in the U.S. war with Al Qaeda.
Mr. Hawsawi is accused of helping some of the hijackers with finances and travel arrangements from the United Arab Emirates on behalf of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot. The two men were captured together on March 1, 2003, in a raid on a house in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
“Make no mistake about it,” Colonel Bearden said. “The conflict is still going on. Hostilities still exist.”
Sean M. Gleason, a lawyer for Mr. Hawsawi, a Saudi national, argued that his client was in pretrial detention from the moment of his capture because the United States had already issued an arrest warrant for him and prepared a secret indictment against him. By that measure, he said, the prisoner was so far entitled to 253 months of sentencing credit.
Mr. Hawsawi’s lawyers wrote in their brief that even though “the death penalty lurks as a potential sentence,” that should not prevent the judge from granting relief “that would open the door to a different sentence.”
His lawyers have separately asked the judge to dismiss the case because of Mr. Hawsawi’s torture in U.S. custody.
Defense lawyers for the suspects raised the issue as a pretrial matter, arguing that military commissions defendants should be entitled to sentencing credit just like other U.S. military or criminal defendants.
In 2010, the Pentagon added a rule to the Manual for Military Commissions specifically stripping war crimes judges of the right to award such credit. But Mr. Gleason argued that Congress never included that provision in the various laws that created military commissions, and so his right to credit was essentially retroactive.
The judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, did not ask questions on Wednesday about the overarching preventive detention doctrine. But he asked why one “criminal process” should not be “run like any other criminal process.”
“They are law of war detainees forever, until the hostilities have ceased,” Colonel Bearden replied.
James G. Connell III, representing another defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, has similarly sought sentencing credit. Mr. Connell argued that a defendant, especially when he considers whether to plead guilty to a crime, should know how much credit he would receive for time served.
Mr. Connell also disputed the prosecutor’s characterization of Mr. Baluchi as a “law of war detainee” in his first years in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prison network, known as black sites. Prisoners held under the law of war are entitled to visits from delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross, he said. The Sept. 11 suspects were captured in 2002 and 2003 but were not allowed to meet Red Cross representatives until October 2006, a month after their transfer to Guantánamo Bay.
Of the 30 detainees at Guantánamo Bay, 11 have been tried or convicted; 16 have been approved for transfer to other countries, with security arrangements; and three are indefinite detainees without charge or trial being held under that doctrine as prisoners of the forever war against terrorism.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/us/politics/sept-11-suspects-war-crimes-sentence.html#:~:text=Regardless%20of%20the%20outcome%20of,the%20presiding%20judge%20on%20Wednesday.

19 April 2024 :

April 16, 2024 - USA. United States Provides Binding Assurances that Julian Assange Will Not Face the Death Penalty
On April 16, 2024, the Biden Administration provided assurances to the United Kingdom that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is facing extradition to the United States on espionage charges, would not face the death penalty. A hearing is now scheduled in London on May 20 to evaluate the assurances and decide whether Mr. Assange has any remaining legal recourse. A few weeks earlier, the High Court in London granted Mr. Assange a reprieve from extradition, agreeing to grant him an appeal if the United States was unable to provide assurances that it would not seek the death penalty by April 16. 
Although none of the 18 charges Mr. Assange is currently facing are capital, the possibility that he could be charged with a capital crime in the future means that his extradition would be unlawful. In the United Kingdom, extradition of prisoners to countries where they could face the death penalty is barred unless “adequate written assurance that the death penalty will not be imposed or, if imposed, will not be carried out,” according to the UK’s Home Office guidance on extraditions. In her 66-page judgement published on March 26, the president of the king’s bench division, Victoria Sharp, noted the need for explicit assurances regarding the intentions of U.S authorities, noting calls from U.S. elected officials to capitally charge Mr. Assange. The assurances provided now confirm that “a sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on Assange,” assuring that he will not be “tried for a death-eligible offense.” 
U.S. authorities also agree that Mr. Assange, an Australian citizen, can “raise and seek” a defense under the First Amendment, but cautioned that “a decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. Courts.” The UK High Court had specifically requested assurances “that the applicant [Mr. Assange] is permitted to rely on the first amendment, that the applicant is not prejudiced at trial, including sentence, by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same first amendment [free speech] protections as a United States citizen.”  
Stella Assange, Mr. Assange’s wife, issued a statement after the U.S. assurances were made public. “[T]he US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can ‘seek to raise’ the first amendment if extradited,” she said. “The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism. The Biden administration must drop this dangerous prosecution before it is too late.”  
For years, Australia has called upon the United States to drop the charges against Mr. Assange. On April 10, during an official visit with the Japanese prime minister, President Biden responded to a question about the request, stating, “We’re considering it.” Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese told Sky News Australia the following day that, “I’m increasingly optimistic about an outcome, but one certainly has not been delivered yet. We’ll continue to argue the case at every opportunity that we have.” The Wall Street Journal had reported on March 20 that U.S. Justice Department was considering offering Mr. Assange a plea deal.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/united-states-provides-binding-assurances-to-the-united-kingdom-that-julian-assange-will-not-face-the-death-penalty-if-extradited

06 April 2024 :

April 2, 2024 - USA. Trump calls for cop killers to get ‘mandatory’ death sentence in wake of slain NYPD Detective Jonathan Diller
Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday demanded a mandatory death sentence for cop killers in the wake of the horrific murder of NYPD Det. Jonathan Diller.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, 77, was speaking at a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wis. where he called on Congress to pass legislation to ensure that those convicted of killing a police officer receive capital punishment — just days after he attended Diller’s wake in Long Island.
“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk ensuring that anyone who murders a police officer will receive immediately the death penalty,” Trump told the crowd, a line that drew a standing ovation.
“We’re going to do that, and you’ll see the whole situation come to a halt,” he added.
Trump has supported executing convicted cop killers repeatedly since at least 2015, during his first White House run, when he vowed to sign an executive order giving “anybody killing a police officer, the death penalty.”
Career criminal Guy Rivera, 34, allegedly shot and killed Diller during a routine traffic stop in Far Rockaway, Queens, last month.
Diller, 31, was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop in Far Rockaway, Queens, on March 25, 2024.
Suspect Guy Rivera allegedly opened fire on Diller on Monday evening after the cop approached the vehicle Rivera was in for parking in front of a bus stop.
Rivera was wounded when Diller’s partner returned fire. The suspect has 21 prior arrests and was found to have a shiv stored in his rectum during the shooting — in apparent anticipation of being sent to jail again.
Lindy Jones, the ex-con behind the wheel of the car during the shooting, was also arrested after a second gun was found in his car.

https://nypost.com/2024/04/02/us-news/trump-renews-push-for-cop-killers-to-get-mandatory-death-sentence-in-wake-of-nypd-det-jonathan-dillers-murder/
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2024/03/28/trump-attends-wake-of-slain-nypd-officer

30 March 2024 :

March 26, 2024 - UNITED KINGDOM. UK court says Assange can’t be extradited on espionage charges until US rules out death penalty. 
A British court ruled Tuesday that Julian Assange can’t be extradited to the United States on espionage charges unless U.S. authorities guarantee he won’t get the death penalty, giving the WikiLeaks founder a partial victory in his long legal battle over the site’s publication of classified American documents.
2 High Court judges said they would grant Assange a new appeal unless U.S. authorities give further assurances within three weeks about what will happen to him. The ruling means the legal saga, which has dragged on for more than a decade, will continue — and Assange will remain inside London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, where he has spent the last 5 years.
Judges Victoria Sharp and Jeremy Johnson said the U.S. must guarantee that Assange, who is Australian, “is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty is not imposed.”
The judges said that if the U.S. files new assurances, “we will give the parties an opportunity to make further submissions before we make a final decision on the application for leave to appeal.” The judges said a hearing will be held May 20 if the U.S. makes those submissions.
The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday.
Assange’s supporters say he is a journalist protected by the First Amendment who exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan that was in the public interest.
Assange’s wife Stella Assange said the WikiLeaks founder “is being persecuted because he exposed the true cost of war in human lives.”
“The Biden administration should not issue assurances. They should drop this shameful case, which should never have been brought,” she said outside the High Court in London.
The ruling follows a two-day hearing in the High Court in February, where Assange’s lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said American authorities were seeking to punish him for WikiLeaks’ “exposure of criminality on the part of the U.S. government on an unprecedented scale,” including torture and killings.
The U.S. government said Assange’s actions went beyond journalism by soliciting, stealing and indiscriminately publishing classified government documents that endangered many people, including Iraqis and Afghans who had helped U.S. forces.
The judges rejected six of Assange’s nine grounds of appeal, including the allegation that his prosecution is political. They said that while Assange “acted out of political conviction … it does not follow however that the request for his extradition is made on account of his political views.”
The judges also said Assange could not appeal based on allegations, made by his lawyers, that the CIA developed plans to kidnap or kill Assange during the years he spent holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, to prevent him from trying to flee.
The judges said “plainly, these are allegations of the utmost seriousness,” but concluded they had no bearing on the extradition request.
“Extradition would result in him being lawfully in the custody of the United States authorities, and the reasons (if they can be called that) for rendition or kidnap or assassination then fall away,” the ruling said.
They accepted 3 grounds or appeal: the threat to Assange’s freedom of speech, Assange’s claim that he faces disadvantage because he is not a U.S. citizen, and the risk he could receive the death penalty.
U.S. authorities have promised Assange would not receive capital punishment, but the judges said that “nothing in the existing assurance explicitly prevents the imposition of the death penalty.”
Jennifer Robinson, one of Assange’s lawyers, said that “even if we receive the assurances, we’re not confident we can rely on them.”
Assange, 52, an Australian computer expert, has been indicted in the U.S. on charges over Wikileaks’ publication in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of classified documents.
U.S. prosecutors say he conspired with U.S. army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and release secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange faces 17 counts undee the Espionage Act and one charge of computer misuse. If convicted, his lawyers say he could receive a prison term of up to 175 years, though American authorities have said any sentence is likely to be much lower.
Assange’s wife and supporters say his physical and mental health have suffered during more than a decade of legal battles and confinement.
Assange’s legal troubles began in 2010, when he was arrested in London at the request of Sweden, which wanted to question him about allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two women. In 2012, Assange jumped bail and sought refuge inside the Ecuadorian Embassy.
The relationship between Assange and his hosts eventually soured, and he was evicted from the embassy in April 2019. British police immediately arrested and imprisoned him for breaching bail in 2012. Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed.
A U.K. district court judge rejected the U.S. extradition request in 2021 on the grounds that Assange was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions. Higher courts overturned that decision after getting assurances from the U.S. about his treatment. The British government signed an extradition order in June 2022.

https://apnews.com/article/britain-wikileaks-julian-assange-espionage-appeal-98c15267f0cdf63685bfb49766749a0a

26 March 2024 :

March 25, 2024 - USA. The National Registry of Exonerations published its annual report on exonerations
84% were people of color.
This week, The National Registry of Exonerations published its annual report on exonerations that took place in 2023. According to the report, “The Registry recorded 153 exonerations last year, and nearly 84% (127/153) were people of color. Nearly 61 percent of the exonerees (93/153) were Black,” while the most frequent factor in their wrongful conviction was official misconduct. “Seventy-five homicide cases—85% of homicide exonerations in 2023—were marred by official misconduct.” Three out of four death row exonerees were people of color, and in all instances, official misconduct was the main factor.
Official misconduct, which can encompass falsifying evidence, coercing witnesses, and withholding exculpatory information—poses various challenges to the criminal justice system, most importantly in the way it affects public confidence in the integrity of its justice system and elected officials. Inadequate legal defense, mistaken witness identification, and perjury or false accusation are also causes of wrongful conviction.
Each exoneration represents a human being who lost years and sometimes decades of their lives behind bars while the guilty party remained free to possibly commit other crimes. Many states now have statutes that provide some recompense; since 1989, nearly $4 billion in compensation has been paid to wrongfully convicted persons. The amount has almost doubled since 2019. The authors note that there are disparities in compensation that will prompt future research. “Why […] are payments so much greater in New York than in other states—$6 million on average for all exonerees, compared to $1.8 million in Illinois and $1.2 million in Texas? And why did 79% of all exonerees receive some compensation in Illinois, but only 33% in Texas?”
In 2023, the four-death row exonerees were John Huffington, Jesse Johnson, Glynn Simmons, and Noel Montalvo. The number of years between conviction and exoneration was 48 for Mr. Glynn Simmons (the longest number of years before an exoneration in U.S. history), 42 for Mr. Huffington, 20 for Mr. Montalvo, and 19 for Mr. Johnson. The report notes that for all exonerees, “People exonerated in 2023 lost 2,230 years collectively for crimes they did not commit. That is an average of 14.6 years per exoneree for wrongful imprisonment.”
Among the 153 exonerations (total) that took place within 32 states (there were no federal exonerations), the largest number occurred in Illinois (24), followed by Texas (22), New York (21), and Pennsylvania (16).
The National Registry of Exonerations is a consortium of three universities: the University of Michigan Law School, Michigan State University College of Law, and the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society.
DPIC also maintains a comprehensive database and other resources on death penalty exonerations and innocence cases.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/national-registry-of-exonerations-annual-report-finds-majority-of-exonerees-are-people-of-color-and-official-misconduct-is-the-main-cause-of-wrongful-convictions

14 March 2024 :

March 11, 2024 - USA. Top US Nitrogen Gas Producers Ban Use in Executions----"Drug manufacturers don't want their medicines diverted and misused in torturous executions and the makers of nitrogen gas share the same objection: They do not want their products to be used to kill," said one campaigner.
3 of the leading U.S. manufacturers of medical-grade nitrogen gas said this week that they will not allow their products to be used in executions, a move that came after Louisiana approved the controversial capital punishment method recently used to kill an Alabama prisoner who appeared to be in agony before he died.
Airgas—owned by the French company Air Liquide—along with Air Products, and Matheson Gas told The Guardian that they are banning the use of their nitrogen gas products in the previously untested execution method used to cause death by hypoxia, or deprivation of oxygen to vital tissues.
Veterinarians consider nitrogen gas unethical for euthanizing animals and United Nations human rights experts have asserted that the execution technique may violate international anti-torture law.
"Airgas has not, and will not, supply nitrogen or other inert gases to induce hypoxia for the purpose of human execution," the company said.
Matheson Gas told The Guardian that use of its products in executions is "not consistent with our company values," while Air Products told the U.K.-based newspaper that it has established "prohibited end uses for our products, which includes the use of any of our industrial gas products for the intentional killing of any person (including nitrogen hypoxia)."
Four states—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma—have approved nitrogen gas for use in executions. Last week, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, signed legislation passed by the GOP-controlled state Legislature expanding execution methods to include the electric chair and nitrogen hypoxia. This, despite the agonizing execution in January of 58-year-old Kenneth Smith, who was killed by the state of Alabama by nitrogen hypoxia on January 25 after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his last-ditch appeal.
Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual adviser to U.S. death row inmates, witnessed Smith's killing, which he described as "horrific and cruel." Hood and other witnesses said Smith convulsed violently for several minutes while he was strapped to a gurney and forced to breathe nitrogen gas through a mask. Even prison guards were taken by surprise as the gurney shook and Smith struggled for his life.
Alabama officials had claimed that nitrogen hypoxia is "perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised."
States have sought alternative means of killing condemned prisoners—including nitrogen gas and firing squads—ever since the European Union banned the sale and export of lethal injection drugs in 2011.
Maya Foa, co-executive director of the anti-death penalty group Reprieve, told The Guardian that "drug manufacturers don't want their medicines diverted and misused in torturous executions and the makers of nitrogen gas share the same objection: They do not want their products to be used to kill."
"States which claim that the lethal injection or gas inhalation are 'humane' methods of execution are merely seeking to mask what it means for a state to forcibly put someone to death," Foa added. "The makers of these products see through the lie and naturally want nothing to do with it."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/nitrogen-gas-execution

06 March 2024 :

March 1, 2024 - EUROPEAN UNION. Statement on the latest executions in US
by the Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Peter Stano
The European Union deeply regrets the execution of Ivan Cantu in the State of Texas on Wednesday. For over 20 years, Mr Cantu has consistently claimed his conviction was based on false testimony and questionable evidence, but was denied a new evidentiary hearing.
We also take note of the fact that the State of Idaho resumed its use of capital punishment also on Wednesday after a 12-year break. The execution of Thomas Creech was called off after officials unsuccessfully tried to insert an IV line to administer the lethal injection. The EU recalls that lethal injection, like all execution methods, is a cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment.
The EU strongly opposes the death penalty at all times and in all circumstances. It is a violation of the right to life and fails to act as a deterrent to crime. It represents the ultimate punishment that makes miscarriages of justice irreversible. 196 innocent people have been exonerated from death row in the United States to date.
The EU continues to call for the universal abolition of the death penalty. In this context, the EU welcomes the fact that 29 US states have either abolished capital punishment or imposed a moratorium on executions. However, we are concerned by the fact that the number of executions in the US increased last year, as 24 people were executed in five states despite a steady, overall decline of the use of capital punishment in the US since 2020.
The EU calls for states that maintain the death penalty to implement a moratorium and move towards abolition, in line with the worldwide trend.

https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/us-statement-spokesperson-latest-executions_en

01 March 2024 :

February 29, 2024 - USA. On February 28 in Idaho, the execution of Thomas Creech was halted after nearly an hour of trying to insert needles. In the United States these kinds of "accidents" are called "botched executions," The term encompasses both executions that were nevertheless completed and thus resulted in the death of the condemned person and those that were aborted with the condemned person's survival. A professor at the University of Colorado, Michael L. Radelet, dean of Sociology, keeps an up-to-date list of "Post-Furman Botched Executions," meaning Furman the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling (Furman v. Georgia) that declared that state's death penalty law unconstitutional, and by extension the laws of all other states. The various states adjusted their laws, and in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court declared that the new laws returned the death penalty "constitutional." Executions resumed the following year, 1977.
Professor Radlet's list, with a brief description of events, can also be found on the Death Penalty Information Center's website at https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/botched-executions.
The list, updated as of Feb. 28, shows the following names: 

1. August 10, 1982. Virginia. Frank J. Coppola. Electrocution.
2. April 22, 1983. Alabama. John Evans. Electrocution.
3. September 2, 1983. Mississippi. Jimmy Lee Gray. Asphyxiation.
4. December 12, 1984. Georgia. Alpha Otis Stephens. Electrocution.
5. March 13, 1985. Texas. Stephen Peter Morin. Lethal Injection.
6. October 16, 1985. Indiana. William E. Vandiver. Electrocution.
7. August 20, 1986. Texas. Randy Woolls. Lethal Injection.
8. June 24, 1987. Texas. Elliot Rod Johnson. Lethal Injection.
9. December 13, 1988. Texas. Raymond Landry. Lethal Injection.
10. May 24, 1989. Texas. Stephen McCoy. Lethal Injection.
11. July 14, 1989. Alabama. Horace Franklin Dunkins, Jr. Electrocution.
12. May 4, 1990. Florida. Jesse Joseph Tafero. Electrocution.
13. September 12, 1990. Illinois. Charles Walker. Lethal Injection.
14. October 17, 1990. Virginia. Wilbert Lee Evans. Electrocution.
15. August 22, 1991. Virginia. Derick Lynn Peterson. Electrocution.
16. January 24, 1992. Arkansas. Rickey Ray Rector. Lethal Injection.
17. April 6, 1992. Arizona. Donald Eugene Harding. Asphyxiation.
18. March 10, 1992. Oklahoma. Robyn Lee Parks. Lethal Injection.
19. April 23, 1992. Texas. Billy Wayne White. Lethal Injection.
20. May 7, 1992. Texas. Justin Lee May. Lethal Injection.
21. May 10, 1994. Illinois. John Wayne Gacy. Lethal Injection.
22. May 3, 1995. Missouri. Emmitt Foster. Lethal Injection.
23. January 23, 1996. Virginia. Richard Townes, Jr. Lethal Injection.
24. July 18, 1996. Indiana. Tommie J. Smith. Lethal Injection.
25. March 25, 1997. Florida. Pedro Medina. Electrocution.
26. May 8, 1997. Oklahoma. Scott Dawn Carpenter. Lethal Injection.
27. June 13, 1997. South Carolina. Michael Eugene Elkins. Lethal Injection.
28. April 23, 1998. Texas. Joseph Cannon. Lethal Injection.
29. August 26, 1998. Texas. Genaro Ruiz Camacho. Lethal Injection.
30. October 5, 1998. Nevada. Roderick Abeyta. Lethal Injection.
31. July 8, 1999. Florida. Allen Lee Davis. Electrocution.
32. May 3, 2000. Arkansas. Christina Marie Riggs. Lethal Injection.
33. June 8, 2000. Florida. Bennie Demps. Lethal Injection.
34. December 7, 2000. Texas. Claude Jones. Lethal Injection.
35. June 28, 2000. Missouri. Bert Leroy Hunter. Lethal Injection.
36. November 7, 2001. Georgia. Jose High. Lethal Injection.
37. May 2, 2006. Ohio. Joseph L. Clark. Lethal Injection.
38. December 13, 2006. Florida. Angel Diaz. Lethal Injection.
39. May 24, 2007. Ohio. Christopher Newton. Lethal Injection.
40. June 26, 2007. Georgia. John Hightower. Lethal Injection.
41. June 4, 2008. Georgia. Curtis Osborne. Lethal Injection.
42. September 15, 2009. Ohio. Romell Broom. Lethal Injection (failed).
43. September 27, 2010. Georgia. Brandon Joseph Rhode. Lethal Injection.
44. January 16, 2014. Ohio. Dennis McGuire. Lethal Injection.
45. April 29, 2014. Oklahoma. Clayton D. Lockett. Lethal Injection.
46. July 23, 2014. Arizona. Joseph R. Wood. Lethal Injection.
47. December 9, 2015. Georgia. Brian Keith Terrell. Lethal Injection.
48. February 3, 2016. Georgia. Brandon Jones. Lethal Injection.
49. December 8, 2016. Alabama. Ronald Bert Smith, Jr. Lethal Injection.
50. October 19, 2017. Alabama. Torrey McNabb. Lethal Injection.
51. November 15, 2017. Ohio. Alva Campbell. Lethal Injection (failed).
52. February 22, 2018. Alabama. Doyle Lee Hamm. Lethal Injection (failed).
53. October 28, 2021. Oklahoma. John Marion Grant. Lethal Injection.
54. May 11, 2022. Arizona. Clarence Dixon. Lethal Injection.
55. June 8, 2022. Arizona. Frank Atwood. Lethal Injection.
56. July 28, 2022. Alabama. Joe Nathan James, Jr. Lethal Injection.
57. September 22, 2022. Alabama. Alan Eugene Miller. Lethal Injection (failed).
58. November 16, 2022. Stephen Barbee. Texas. Lethal Injection.
59. November 16, 2022. Arizona. Murray Hooper. Lethal Injection.
60. November 17, 2022. Kenneth Eugene Smith. Alabama. Lethal Injection (failed).
61. February 28, 2024. Thomas Creech. Idaho. Lethal Injection (failed).

26 February 2024 :

February 24, 2024 - USA. Trump Ally Charlie Kirk Suggests Children Should Watch Public Executions
Charlie Kirk, founder and president of the conservative organization Turning Point USA, suggested in a recent episode of The Charlie Kirk Show that children should watch public executions.
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of killing someone as punishment for a convicted crime. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), there are 27 states that carry out the death penalty and 23 states that have abolished the lethal practice.
Meanwhile, several executions are scheduled to take place in the United States this year, starting with what was the nation's first execution using nitrogen gas in Alabama.
24 inmates were put to death in the U.S. in 2023. Texas carried out the most executions—8—followed by Florida with 6 and Oklahoma and Missouri with 4 each. Alabama carried out 2 executions.
On his weekly panel discussion, "ThoughtCrime," Kirk was discussing death penalties of those convicted of crimes, adding that not only does he believe there should be public executions, but that children should watch them. "Death penalties should be public, should be quick, it should be televised. I think at a certain age, its an initiation...What age should you start to see public executions?" Kirk asked.
Kirk, along with his co-hosts Jack Posobiec, Tyler Bowyer and Blake Neff, continued to discuss at what age should children watch the public executions, with one co-host pointing out as young as 12 years old.
"I think maybe age 12, 6th grade or so when you are old enough... " Neff said.
While Bowyer pointed out that it should be at an age when someone "can embrace the meaning" of the execution.
In response, Kirk said, "I think it should be taken in a holy way and I don't mean holy in a bad way, I mean that this is heavy.
In addition, Kirk asked whether crime would go up or down if children were to watch public executions, "Here's a question for anyone that might be not persuaded. Would crime go up or down?"
Bowyer said, "It would go way down," with Kirk then asking, "So why is this even a question?"
Newsweek has reached out to the Charlie Kirk Show via an email online form for comment.
This is not the 1st time Kirk, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has been at the forefront of controversy before as pastor Darrell Scott, a radio host and another Trump supporter, said earlier this month that Kirk is attempting to inspire a new generation of the "Hitler youth."
Scott, pastor at the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland, Ohio, appeared on The Tudor Dixon Podcast, hosted by Dixon, a former Michigan gubernatorial candidate, where they discussed Kirk and another conservative commentator, Candace Owens.
"In those years right after high school but before you enter all the way into full adulthood, those are some critical years in a person's life," Scott said. "Those years can make or break the rest of your life...and Charlie is trying to grab them right then and there and form these opinions in their mind of white oppression, white victimhood, Black man bad, white man better. He's really trying to infect this [Republican] Party with that ideology to turn this party into what this party's detractors say this is.
"I even said he's trying to raise up a new generation of Hitler youth...I know I was kind of extreme in my statements, but I'm drawing the comparison to him because this guy thinks he's slick. He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room and he's not."

https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-death-penalty-public-executions-1873073#:~:text=On%20his%20weekly%20panel%20discussion,that%20children%20should%20watch%20them.

25 January 2024 :

January 24, 2024 - USA. US Supreme Court declines to halt execution of Alabama inmate Kenneth Smith set to be the first to die by nitrogen gas
The US Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to halt the execution of Alabama death row inmate Kenneth Smith, who is scheduled to be put to death this week using nitrogen gas – a wholly new method some experts have decried as veiled in secrecy amid concerns it could lead to excessive pain or even torture.
Smith is due to be executed during a 30-hour window starting Thursday for his part in a 1988 murder for hire. The state 14 months ago aborted an effort to execute him by lethal injection because officials could not set an intravenous line before the execution warrant expired.
Smith and his attorneys last week asked the Supreme Court to pause the execution so they could argue trying to execute Smith a second time would amount to cruel and unusual punishment, violating the Eighth and 14th amendments.
On Wednesday, the justices declined Smith’s requests. They did not provide an explanation in their brief order, and there were no noted dissents.
Still, litigation continues ahead of Smith’s scheduled execution by nitrogen hypoxia, a method only Alabama, Oklahoma and Mississippi have approved and none has used; only Alabama, which adopted the method in 2018, has outlined a protocol for it, indicating officials plan to deliver the nitrogen to Smith through a mask.
Smith’s attorneys filed another separate request Wednesday for a stay of execution in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, saying Alabama altered its execution plans by changing the schedule for Smith to have his last meal.
That change was made, the attorneys said, in response to evidence that Smith “has been vomiting repeatedly” — one of several concerns previously raised by Smith and the state’s critics, who fear Smith could vomit into the mask, causing him to choke and raising the risk of a tortuous death.
“While there is no doubt that a stay of execution is the exception and not the rule, it is difficult to imagine a more exceptional case than one in which a State intends to employ a novel protocol for a never-before-used method of execution, using a plan that continues to shift less than 48 hours before the execution is scheduled to begin,” the attorneys wrote.
In response, the state said the evidence Smith had been vomiting was largely from his own self-reporting. The Department of Corrections, the state said, only altered the last meal schedule to alleviate Smith’s concerns.
The state urged the court to deny the request for a stay, saying Smith’s “recent delays and latest filing make a mockery of the judicial process.”
During the November 2022 attempt to execute him, officials “jabbed Mr. Smith repeatedly in his arms and hands” in an effort to access his veins, causing the inmate “severe physical pain and psychological torment, including post-traumatic stress disorder,” his lawyers wrote in their appeal to the Supreme Court.
Smith’s execution would mark only the second time in US history that a state would attempt to execute an inmate a second time after initially failing, they said.
The state opposed Smith’s appeal, pointing out this week in a filing with the Supreme Court it would use a different method this time and describing nitrogen hypoxia as “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised.”
“Such treatment is much better than Smith gave Elizabeth Sennett nearly thirty-six years ago,” Alabama wrote, referring to the victim in the 1988 case.
United Nations experts, however, have “expressed alarm” over Smith’s looming execution, saying this month in a news release, “We are concerned that nitrogen hypoxia would result in a painful and humiliating death.” The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Alabama to halt the execution, saying it “could amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment under international human rights law.”
“It’s not that nitrogen gas won’t kill you,” Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Emory University, told CNN. “But will it kill you in a way that would comport with the constitutional requirement that it not be cruel and it not be torture?”
Smith was sentenced to death for his role in the 1988 murder for hire of Sennett. Her husband, minister Charles Sennett, hired someone who hired two others, including Smith, to kill his wife and make it look like a burglary for $1,000 each, according to court records.
Sennett, who court records say was having an affair and had taken out an insurance policy on his wife, killed himself a week after her murder as investigators’ focus turned to him. Smith was eventually arrested after investigators searched his home and found the Sennetts’ VCR, which he’d taken in the course of the killing.
Smith claims he could feel ‘superadded pain’
Smith expressed a desire to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia both before and after the 2022 execution attempt. But that was before the state had a protocol, a federal judge noted this month.
His stated preference likely owed to his belief the state wasn’t close to finalizing a protocol, the judge wrote, adding if the state were forced to execute him using nitrogen, it would effectively place him “in an indefinite holding pattern” – keeping him safe from execution.
That changed in August, when Alabama suddenly agreed to execute Smith using nitrogen gas and released the protocol, which bore copious redactions the state said it needed to maintain security. Still, the protocol illuminated some aspects of how officials intended to carry out the execution, namely delivering the nitrogen using a mask.
While Alabama later agreed not to try to execute Smith again using lethal injection, he then challenged the nitrogen hypoxia protocol, claiming it left him at risk of “superadded pain” and could cause him to have a stroke or leave him in a vegetative state if it fails, court records show. He proposed the state either amend its protocol or execute him by firing squad.
The judge’s ruling early this month cleared the way for Alabama to proceed, finding there was “simply not enough evidence to find” the protocol would cause Smith superadded pain.
“It could, in a highly theoretical sense, but only if a cascade of unlikely events occurs,” the judge wrote. “Or it may well be painless and quick. Execution by nitrogen hypoxia is novel, and it will remain novel even if the Defendants employ Smith’s proposed amendments to the protocol.”
While the judge acknowledged the “heavily redacted” protocol maintained the Department of Corrections “familiar veil of secrecy over its capital punishment procedures,” he also noted the state had provided Smith’s team with an unredacted protocol.
The office of Republican Gov. Kay Ivey declined to provide an unredacted copy of the nitrogen hypoxia execution protocol or respond to CNN’s questions about experts’ concerns over it. Smith’s attorneys declined to provide a copy of the unredacted protocol to CNN, citing a protective order by the court.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/24/us/alabama-kenneth-smith-execution/index.html

24 January 2024 :

January 23, 2024 - USA. The Slow Undoing of America's Death Penalty
On Jan. 25, Alabama intends to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith by a method known as nitrogen hypoxia. The method has never been used to kill a human being.
As we begin a new year, and a new method of execution, it is abundantly clear that a majority of Americans have grown to doubt the efficacy of the death penalty. For the 1st time, the number of executions exceeded the number of new death sentences nationwide.
There are fewer prosecutors seeking the death penalty, fewer juries imposing the death penalty and fewer states carrying out the death penalty. In fact, the 24 executions in 2023 were carried out in only 5 states — Texas, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma and Alabama.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, only 21 people were sentenced to death in 2023. Those sentences were meted out in only seven states — Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas.
A Gallup poll conducted in 2023 found that 50% of Americans believe the death penalty is administered unfairly. Many Americans see the death penalty as an arcane and unfair punishment. However, politicians continue to use the death penalty to win political points and demonstrate their tough-on-crime bona fides.
One example is Alabama's rush to use a new execution method that experts believe may violate condemned prisoners' rights. According to CBS News, experts warn that using nitrogen hypoxia for an execution likely violates "a body of principles adopted by the U.N. to protect detained people and an international treaty against torture that the U.S. signed decades ago."
In another example of political posturing, Florida prosecutors have announced they intend to seek the death penalty in a child rape case. The pursuit of capital punishment comes after lawmakers passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law, a measure allowing the death penalty for those convicted of sexually assaulting children under the age of 12.
In Pennsylvania, according to the Uniontown Herald-Standard, a bill was recently introduced allowing the punishment of death for someone who is convicted of the rape of a child.
These new laws come in spite of a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling — Kennedy v. Louisiana — that specifically prohibited the death penalty as an option for the crime of raping a child. What could be more evidence of political grandstanding than trying to enact a law that has been clearly deemed unconstitutional?
Contrary to the ill-conceived efforts in Florida and Pennsylvania, a number of states have recently outlawed the death penalty. Virginia is the most recent state to abolish the death penalty, dumping the punishment in July 2021. As a result, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, half of all U.S. states have abolished the death penalty or currently prohibit executions. In fact, 32 states have either abolished the death penalty or have not carried out an execution in more than a decade.
Is the death penalty inching toward a national consensus opposing executions?
Examining the death penalty in America's largest state provides some perspective on today's death penalty. Since capital punishment was reinstated in California in 1978, 13 condemned inmates have been executed. During those 45 years, 166 death row inmates have died from natural causes, suicide, drug overdoses or undetermined causes.
The absurdity of the death penalty doesn't end there. In Pennsylvania, where Gov. Josh Shapiro continued a "moratorium" implemented by his predecessor, only 3 men have been executed in more than 45 years.
Shapiro not only continued the previously imposed moratorium on signing death warrants; he called on the legislature to abolish the death penalty. He did not hide behind the idea that the death penalty is arbitrary or too costly; Shapiro said the death penalty is immoral.
Last year, a month into his term, Shapiro said, "The Commonwealth shouldn't be in the business of putting people to death, period." He continued, "At its core, for me, this is a fundamental statement of morality, of what's right and wrong in my humble opinion. And I believe as governor that Pennsylvanians must be on the right side of this issue."
A refreshingly straightforward response to an otherwise politically corrupted issue of life or death.

https://www.creators.com/read/Crime-and-Conduct/01/24/the-slow-undoing-of-americas-death-penalty#:~:text=There%20are%20fewer%20prosecutors%20seeking,%2C%20Missouri%2C%20Oklahoma%20and%20Alabama.

13 January 2024 :

January 12, 2024 - USA. U.S. to Seek Death for Man Who Killed 10 in Racist Supermarket Massacre
The decision to seek the execution is a 1st for the Biden administration. The president ran in open opposition to the death penalty.
The Justice Department on Friday said in court papers that it would seek to execute Payton Gendron. Gendron, who was 18 at the time, killed 10 Black people in a racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. It is the first time that President Biden’s administration has sought the death penalty in a new case.
Gendron, now 20, had already been sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole on state charges last year. He had pleaded guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder and a single count of domestic terrorism motivated by hate.
The federal government has charged Mr. Gendron with hate crimes and gun charges that could bring the death penalty.
Prosecutors said in the Friday filing that the circumstances of the charges were “such that, in the event of a conviction, a sentence of death is justified.”
The decision marks the 1st time that Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has personally authorized capital punishment in a new case since he assumed office in March 2021.
Austin Sarat, a professor of law and political science at Amherst College who has long written critically about capital punishment, said Mr. Biden’s administration has shown “consistent inconsistency” in its actions regarding federal death penalty cases.
Mr. Biden is the first president to openly oppose the death penalty, Mr. Sarat said. But Mr. Garland has the final say on whether to seek capital punishment in federal prosecutions. And the Justice Department’s decisions under Mr. Garland have been “really hard to follow,” Mr. Sarat said.
Former President Donald J. Trump resumed carrying out the federal death penalty after a nearly two decade hiatus, even as the overall number of executions in the United States fell. The federal government executed 13 people in Mr. Trump’s last year in office, including three in the final days of his presidency.
Mr. Biden campaigned on ending the federal death penalty, promising to pause federal executions and urging states to follow suit when he took office in 2021. That year, the Justice Department, under Mr. Garland, imposed a moratorium on federal executions.
However, even with the pause on executions themselves, the Justice Department has taken a mixed approach on pursuing capital sentences. Early in the Biden administration, the Justice Department withdrew capital punishment requests in 7 cases.
But in the case of Sayfullo Saipov, Mr. Garland denied the defense’s request to drop the pursuit of the death penalty if the trial ended in a conviction. After the conviction of Mr. Saipov, who in 2017 drove a pickup truck down a Manhattan bicycle path, killing 8 people, a jury deadlocked on the death penalty, returning a sentence of life in prison.
In contrast, the jury deliberating the case of Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 worshipers in their Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, unanimously agreed last year on a sentence of death. Mr. Garland did not withdraw the request for the death penalty in that case.
The Justice Department has also “doggedly” fought appeals brought by people on federal death row, Mr. Sarat said. The administration’s inconsistency has left many death penalty opponents disappointed, he said.
“They had high hopes that the administration would take a definitive decision against the death penalty,” Mr. Sarat said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/nyregion/payton-gendron-buffalo-death-penalty.html