By Michael Risher, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California at 2:22pm
Last week the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said it would rehear the ACLU of Northern California's lawsuit challenging a California law that mandates that DNA is collected from anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony.
On July 3, U.N. delegates and NGO representatives from around the world gathered at the U.N. Headquarters in New York for an invigorating conference entitled “Moving Away From the Death Penalty - Lessons from National Experiences.” Panelists, ranging from high-level U.N. officials to state-level prosecutors to individuals directly impacted by the death penalty, shared their experiences with death penalty abolition and examined the human rights implications of the ultimate punishment.
On Wednesday, retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gave an interview at the annual conference of the 5th Judicial Circuit in Chicago, and explained his changed view on the death penalty.
In 1976, Justice Stevens was among the majority opinion in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court decision that found the death penalty does not violate the Eighth or 14th Amendments, thereby reinstating it. But at Wednesday's event, he explained his change of heart.
By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 11:10am
The inauguration of Barack Obama, one day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, has prompted a healthy discussion in the nation about racial and socioeconomic inequality.
As part of that discussion it is important to point out that, just like the divisions in the Jim Crow south, the death penalty continues to divide us by race and socioeconomic status.
In 1976, when the Supreme Court approved the modern death penalty statutes that were supposed to ensure that death sentences were no longer arbitrary and discriminatory, the Court stated that "capital punishment is an expression of society's moral outrage at particularly offensive conduct . . ."
By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 4:43pm
The confederate flag, deliberately adopted as a symbol of white race domination and control, no longer flies on the steps of the Shreveport, Louisiana courthouse. Last week, Caddo Parish commissioners voted 11-1 to take it down, after litigation charging racial bias in several death penalty cases argued under the flag got the attention of the Louisiana Supreme Court and the national media.
An unusual collection of advocates, exonerated men and a crime victim gathered this week in Raleigh, North Carolina, to highlight the role that race plays in wrongful convictions. The group filed an amicus brief in the case of Melvin White, an African-American death row inmate in North Carolina who maintains his innocence and has filed a claim under North Carolina’s historic Racial Justice Act.
By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 11:58am
"A life in Cameron County [Texas] is worth just the same as a life in other parts of the United States."
This pointed sentence came in Judge Elia Corenjo Lopez's 63-page order this week, in which she recommended that former death-row prisoner and ACLU client Manuel Velez be given a whole new trial.
By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 10:44am
Welcome to March Madness at the ACLU! We know you usually turn to other sources for this kind of coverage, but we've got something important to add. As you're filling out winning brackets, imagine this scenario: the tournament selection committee decides that squads who fly blue as a team color are three times more likely to be invited to the tournament than non-blue teams. Duke, Kansas, and Michigan are likely in, but say goodbye to most of these powerhouses: Louisville (red & black), Indiana (red & white), Miami (green & orange), and Michigan State (green & white).
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.”
