By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 2:45pm
Last night, Texas executed Mark Stroman for a string of hate crimes against men he thought were Arab-Americans, including two murders, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Texas went through with the execution despite a powerful plea for clemency from a surviving victim of Stroman’s attack, Rais Bhuiyan. Joined by family members of the deceased victims, Bhuiyan called on Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to halt Stroman’s execution and commute his sentence to life imprisonment without parole. Bhuyian, drawing from his Muslim faith, wanted to do more than forgive Stroman, he wanted to save his life.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 1:52pm
In Alabama, as we’ve discussed here before, elected judges have the authority to override the jury’s sentencing decision in death penalty cases – in other words, a judge can sentence a person to die even if a jury of his or her peers decides death is not the appropriate punishment.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 3:18pm
Last night, we blogged about Texas's plan to execute Cleve Foster today. This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court granted Foster a last-minute stay of execution. Foster would have been the first person in the state to be executed using a recently announced and untested lethal injection protocol. Though the stay is unrelated to the change in protocol, it ensures that for now, Texas will not have the opportunity to test its new and experimental protocol on Foster, risking needless pain and suffering.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 5:57pm
Tomorrow, Texas plans to execute Cleve Foster using a brand new, untested lethal injection protocol. If this protocol doesn’t work properly, Foster could suffer excruciating pain during the execution.
Most death penalty states across the country employ a three-drug cocktail in their lethal injection procedures. A recent national shortage of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic which is the first drug administered, has left Texas and several other states scrambling to find substitutes, in their haste to keep executions running on schedule. After Texas’ remaining supply of sodium thiopental expired in March, Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) Director Rick Thaler announced that he would substitute a new drug — pentobarbital — for the sodium thiopental.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 5:39pm
Perhaps because men make up the overwhelming portion of the death row population in the United States, we often don't think of the 61 women sentenced to death, or the 12 women who have been executed in the modern death penalty era which commenced in 1976.
Teresa Lewis, whom Virginia executed in September of last year, was the last woman executed in the United States. Lewis had been convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of her husband and stepson, allegedly to collect insurance money. Prosecutors claimed that Lewis was the mastermind of the murders, which were committed by two men, Matthew Shallenberger and Rodney Fuller. But Lewis, with an IQ in the mentally retarded range, was no mastermind. Shallenberger, Lewis's lover, took advantage of her gender and her mental limitations in convincing her to go along with his plot.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 3:19pm
Once again, Texas prosecutors have successfully stalled proceedings which almost certainly will establish that Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 for a crime he did not commit. Willingham's relatives had sought a court of inquiry before Judge Charles Baird in Austin to present new evidence of Willingham's innocence for the first time in a court of law. Prosecutors argued that the judge was biased and should be disqualified. When Judge Baird did not agree, prosecutors sought an order from the Texas 3rd Court of Appeals that he should recuse himself, or refer the recusal motion to another judge. Yesterday, that court granted the prosecution's request, and for now, the fate of the court of inquiry remains uncertain. This latest maneuver is part of a broader pattern by Texas prosecutors and political actors to stall and thwart proceedings seeking to uncover the truth that Texas has executed innocent people.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 12:41pm
At least 136 countries across the world have rejected the death penalty by law or in practice, and worldwide support for abolition of the death penalty continues to mount. Still, the U.S. remains an outlier. Earlier this month, the United States submitted to its first Universal Periodic Review (UPR) with the U.N. Human Rights Council, in which U.N. member states had an opportunity to assess and review our country's human rights record. The U.S. death penalty — an ultimate and irrevocable human rights violation — was one of the leading concerns addressed during the review. Countries were particularly concerned with the U.S. tolerating a system in which innocent people continue to be sent to death row, people with mental illnesses are sentenced to death, and sentences are disproportionately imposed along racial lines.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 3:00pm
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote that there has not been "a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 11:33am
Last week, Alabama executed John Forrest Parker. Ten of the 12 members of Parker's jury thought he should live, but the trial judge disagreed and overrode the jury's life verdict. Parker's execution was Alabama's second in as many years in which the defendant's jury had recommended life.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 6:03pm
This week, UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston released an advance copy of his report on the state of extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions in the United States. Chief among Alston’s concerns was the capital punishment system in the United States, which, he found, creates the intolerable risk that innocent people are sentenced to death.
