American Civil Liberties Union

More than two years after the North Carolina Legislature enacted an historic law barring race discrimination in death penalty cases, Marcus Robinson and his lawyers were in Cumberland County Superior Court earlier this week to argue his claim under the Racial Justice Act (RJA). They came prepared to present statistics showing that prosecutors across North Carolina discriminated against African-Americans who had come to court willing and able to serve on juries. A courtroom of concerned citizens came to hear this evidence. Prosecutors, however, were not ready to confront it. In fact, the entire hearing centered on why the prosecutors claimed not to be ready.

The highest criminal court in Texas yesterday halted an historic hearing in which lawyers for a man accused of murder and facing the death penalty argued that capital punishment is unconstitutional because it carries high risks that innocent people could be executed.

Lawyers for John Green this week presented in a Houston trial court evidence showing that Texas risks executing innocent people by relying on junk science, faulty eyewitness identification, unreliable informants, false confessions and other shoddy evidence. They cited two high-profile cases — those of Claude Jones and Cameron Todd Willingham — in which evidence has recently surfaced suggesting that both men executed by the state of Texas might well have been innocent of the crimes they were accused of committing.

The last-minute legal maneuverings over the pending execution of Albert Brown in California this past week put a spotlight on sodium thiopental, one of drugs used in lethal injection executions.

Physicians use sodium thiopental as an anesthetic for patients undergoing surgery. In most all of the 35 states with the death penalty, prisons use sodium thiopental as part of a lethal three-drug cocktail to execute condemned inmates.

(Originally posted on ACS Blog.)

"Society changes. Knowledge accumulates. We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes. Punishments that did not seem cruel and unusual at one time may, in the light of reason and experience, be found cruel and unusual at a later time." These were the eloquent words of retiring Justice John Paul Stevens in Graham v. Florida, in which the Supreme Court this term decided that the punishment of life without parole for minors who did not kill is cruel and unusual punishment. But Justice Stevens' words apply with equal force to his approach to the death penalty during his nearly 35-year tenure on the Court, which regrettably ends today.