Blog of Rights
Denny
LeBoeuf
Denny LeBoeuf is the director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, which works toward the end of the death penalty by supporting repeal and reform with public education, advocacy and targeted litigation. She has been a capital defender for over 20 years, representing persons facing death at trial and in post-conviction in state and federal courts, and she teaches and consults with capital defense teams nationally. LeBoeuf also serves as the director of the ACLU’s John Adams Project, assisting in the defense of the capitally charged Guantánamo detainees. She holds a J.D. from Tulane University and a B.A. from Hunter College.
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05/10/2013
U.S. Death Penalty

Two Minutes in the Life of an Innocent Man Recently Freed from Death Row

By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 11:44am

After fifteen years on Louisiana's death row, Damon Thibodeaux was exonerated, the courts finally recognizing his innocence. He has moved to Minneapolis and is getting on with his life.

Watch the video on Damon Thibodeaux's exoneration

Watch the video here.

Damon's birthday and mine are two days apart, and for many years we would "celebrate" together while he was on death row. When I visit him this summer in Minneapolis to carry on our tradition, I expect we will have a MUCH better party.

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12/31/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

Lives Lost in 2012: Who Did We Kill?

By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 2:14pm

At the end of the year many news sources review a year’s worth of obituaries, usually the passing of the famous. Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. Whitney Houston, Dave Brubeck. Joe Paterno, a reminder that people’s lives are complicated, and we don’t really know public people as we think we do. Rodney King. Sherman Helmsley. Tony Scott and Don Cornelius, powerful men in entertainment. Etta James, Donna Summer, and Levon Helm.

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10/01/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

A Good Ride from Death Row

By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 5:17pm

Friday morning, September 28th, Damon Thibodeaux woke up on Death Row. By early afternoon he was a free man, walking out of Louisiana State Penitentiary after 16 years imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. He was the 141st person exonerated after being sentenced to death.

Damon was my client for 14 years. I had visited him for many years, me the lawyer, him the client. Me in a suit, him in belly chains. On Friday, Damon my friend sat unencumbered in the front seat of my car as we drove away from the prison better known as “Angola” to the world outside and usually called “the farm” by its inhabitants. When the deputy warden and the guards at the front gate called him “Mr.” Thibodeaux and shook his hand, Damon replied, “Goodbye - hope we never meet again. No offense.”

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06/29/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

Forty Years after Furman: Still "Fastened to the Obsolete"

By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 11:15am

We celebrate this day 40 years ago, when the Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia, declared the death penalty unconstitutional.

The Court divided in 1972 as it had never done before. Nine Justices wrote nine separate opinions, with a majority of five agreeing that the death penalty was arbitrary – "freakishly" imposed on some convicted persons while others, equally as guilty, were allowed to live. Random severity is not equal justice, they said: this offends the Eight Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Worse, they found, “if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race."

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06/08/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

Killing the Mentally Ill

By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 4:00pm

Reading today’s editorial in the New York Times led me to ask: when will our country finally stop the execution of the severely mentally ill?

The editorial rightly praises Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who on Tuesday provided at least a temporary stay of execution for death-sentenced prisoner Abdul Awkal, who was scheduled to be killed on Wednesday. 

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04/17/2012
McCleskey v. Kemp

If Germany Had the Death Penalty: a Thought Experiment

By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 10:10am

Does America deserve to have the death penalty?

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02/06/2012
Racial Justice Act

The Face of Exclusion and the Racial Justice Act

By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 6:18pm

There’s a simple assumption at the heart of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), which allows death row inmates to present statistical evidence to support the contention that race discrimination played a part in their case and possibly have their death sentence converted to life in prison without the possibility of parole. That assumption is this: whether or not a convicted murderer gets the death penalty should be based on his crime and his character, and not on his race.

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02/02/2012
Death Penalty and Mental Illness

Too Crazy to Kill

By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 11:58am

Unless Edwin Hart Turner gets clemency from the governor or a last-minute stay, he will be executed on February 8 by the state of Mississippi.

Turner murdered two men in botched hold-ups. His attorneys do not claim that he is innocent of their murders, and no one can diminish the tragic loss to two families. But executing Turner should be off the table: he is severely mentally ill, and it violates the Constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and international human rights law to execute the mentally ill. Virtually every mainstream organization representing mental health experts and families of the mentally ill says so, and the American Bar Association (which does not take a position on the death penalty itself) agrees.

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01/17/2012
Guantánamo

Guantánamo and the Death Penalty: Two Terrible Ideas Come Together

By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 1:38pm

The "new" military commission has a new motto: "Fairness, Transparency, Justice." But this week is all about a system that cannot seem to provide basic rights to a defendant.

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01/09/2012

Lady Justice Rolls the Dice: the Death Penalty is "Random Horror"

By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 5:19pm

The death penalty is supposed to be for the worst of the worst. The system of capital punishment in the United States has always assumed it was so, from its beginnings. Not all crimes may be punished with death, and not all trials for death-eligible crimes result in a death sentence. Therefore, the law must be set up to make rational distinctions, in order to guide prosecutors and juries to winnow out “the worst of the worst” as the recipients of the death penalty.

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