Blog of Rights

­Executing Human Dignity: U.S. Death Penalty System Dominates IACHR Report

By Jamil Dakwar, Director, ACLU Human Rights Program at 4:09pm

According to a recent Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report on the death penalty in the Americas, the United States stands out as an outlier in a region that has come close to abolishing the death penalty. This report will be officially launched at a public event next Monday at the American Bar Association, moderated by the ACLU.

International Human Rights Body Seeking Answers on U.S. Civil and Political Rights Record

By Allison Frankel, ACLU Human Rights Program at 4:16pm

An international human rights body is set to question the United States on its obligations under a key human rights treaty. The U.N. Human Rights Committee, an independent body of experts tasked with monitoring compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), this week released its list of issues, which will serve as the basis for its upcoming review of U.S. compliance with the treaty. The U.S. ratified the ICCPR in 1992 and is obligated to submit to periodic reviews of its treaty implementation efforts.

James Watson, Discoverer of DNA: Patenting Human Genes Is “Lunacy”

By Sandra S. Park, ACLU Women's Rights Project at 12:11pm

Recently, Dr. James Watson filed an amicus brief opposing gene patents in our lawsuit challenging the patents on two human genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. Dr. Watson, along with Francis Crick, identified DNA’s ability to create life through its double helical structure and its information-coding sequences in 1953. His brief explains why, from the perspective of a scientist whose work laid the foundation for all genetic research, gene patenting is “lunacy.”

Justice Under Attack: The North Carolina Legislature Takes Aim at the Racial Justice Act

By Cassandra Stubbs, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 4:01pm

In 2009, North Carolina made history by becoming the first state to pass a law that addressed the systemic problems of racial discrimination in jury selection in capital cases. In the three years since the Racial Justice Act (RJA) was enacted, this law has uncovered systemic discrimination. In four cases, North Carolina death row inmates presented sweeping evidence that racial discrimination in jury selection tainted their trials, and had their death sentences converted to life without parole under the law.

Women on Death Row

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.

NJ Senator Delivers Prize-Winning Speech Against Death Penalty

By Suzanne Ito, ACLU at 5:56pm

In a speech delivered before the Memorial de Caen International Human Rights Competition in Caen, France, yesterday, New Jersey State Senator Raymond Lesniak said:

The death penalty is a random act of brutality. Its application throughout the United States is random, depending on where the murder occurred, the race and economic status of who committed the murder, the race and economic status of the person murdered and, of course, the quality of the legal defense.

…The worse damage [the death penalty] does is to a society that believes it needs to seek revenge over redemption.

The need for revenge leads to hate and violence. Redemption opens the door to healing and peace. Revenge slams it shut.

A society that turns its back on redemption commits itself to holding on to anger and a need for vengeance in a quest for fulfillment that can not be met by those destructive emotions. Redemption instead opens the door to the space that asks healing questions in the wake of violence: questions of crime prevention, questions of why some human beings put such a low value on life that they readily take it from others, questions that help us understand how to help those impacted by violence; questions that take a back seat, and are often ignored, when our minds and emotions are filled with a need for revenge.
Lesniak was behind New Jersey's repeal of the death penalty in 2007, and author of The Road to Abolition: How New Jersey Abolished the Death Penalty.

Executing Human Dignity: US Death Penalty System to Undergo International Scrutiny

By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 10:16am

The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) recently released its 2012 Year End Report, which contained some important news: the number of death sentences in the U.S. remained very close to its 2011 historic low. The 78 death sentences handed down in 2012 represented a 75 percent decline since 1996.  In addition, several states that have historically been high users of the death penalty had no new death sentences or executions, including North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.

I AM TROY DAVIS

By Tanya Greene, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU at 10:58am

The state of Georgia has blood on its hands.

Last night, Georgia strapped down an innocent human being and forced lethal poison into his veins until he died. In your name; in my name, unashamed and unhesitating.

This case had most of the worst of what we have come to fear from our criminal justice system — racism, lying witnesses, shoddy police work and innocence ignored.

The case of Troy Davis was corrupted by implications of racism from the very beginning — a black man accused of killing a white police officer, prosecuted by a district attorney in the Georgia county that has produced one-third of the state's exonerations and 40 percent of its death row exonerations.

Good and Bad Lawyers Determine Who Lives and Who Dies

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 12:46pm

In a separate post yesterday, I addressed how a person on death row's life can be decided on a technicality, an issue to be decided by the Supreme Court in Holland v. Florida. Today's post addresses another issue the Holland case raises — the role of attorney competence in deciding who gets executed in the United States.

Sweeping Ruling about Racial Bias in Capital Jury Selection Shows the Need for Sweeping Reforms

By Cassandra Stubbs, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 2:47pm

Last week, North Carolina state Judge Gregory Weeks issued a sweeping ruling setting aside the death sentences of three North Carolina prisoners...