By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project & Sarah Solon, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 11:22am
A trial is supposed to be a search for the truth. That can never be more important than in a death penalty case, when someone's life is at stake.
It seems that this simple sentiment has been forgotten by the state of Alabama, which has been trying to send Montez Spradley to death row for the last several years for a crime he did not commit. The problem? Securing a capital conviction seems to be much more important to the prosecution than the search for the truth. And it is just this sort of problem that can lead to the ultimate horror: an innocent man on death row.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 5:13pm
One less person faces possible death at the hands of Alabama’s arbitrary capital punishment system, after the State agreed to stop seeking the death penalty for ACLU client LaSamuel Gamble late last week. Gamble, who has been on death row for nearly 16 years, was resentenced to life in prison without parole.
Gamble was a mere 18 years old when he accompanied his 16-year old friend Marcus Presley on a robbery of a pawn shop just outside of Birmingham. During the robbery, Presley shot and killed the two employees at the store. Both Gamble and Presley received death sentences for the crime, but Presley’s sentence was converted to life when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the death penalty could not be imposed on defendants who were under 18 at the time of the crime.
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 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 3:44pm
In June 1993, Damien Echols, 18, Jason Baldwin, 16, and Jessie Misskelley, 17, who would come to be known as the “West Memphis Three,” were wrongfully arrested for the murders of three young boys in the small Arkansas town of West Memphis, just across the Tennessee border.
You may be familiar with HBO’s Paradise Lost three-part series on the case, which helped expose the gross injustices that led to the convictions against these three young men – and a death sentence against Damien – for crimes they did not commit. Now, a new, powerful documentary,West of Memphis, tells the story from the defense team’s perspective as the prosecution’s case against the three teenagers unravels.
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 1:45pm
A single plaque hangs on the wall outside the warden's office of Holman State Prison in Atmore, Alabama. It honors the execution team of the Alabama Department of Corrections with the Commissioner's Award of the Year, 2007. As you wait for admittance to visit a client on death row, the plaque is a painful reminder of the men who were executed by the team on those very same prison grounds.
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 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 5:46pm
Darold Ray Stenson was to be executed by the State of Washington today. His execution would have marked the first execution in the state in over seven years. Thankfully, both state and federal courts have granted him a temporary stay, and at least for the next 90 days, Mr. Stenson will live.
Statistical evidence suggests that troubling sentencing disparities exist in Washington based on the race of the victim. Washington prosecutors have sought death almost three times more when one or more of the victims is white than when the victims are persons of color, and a defendant in Washington is more likely to be sentenced to death if he killed a white victim. Both of Mr. Stenson's victims were white.
