American Civil Liberties Union

This week, Northwestern and the University of Michigan law schools released a National Registry of Exonerations, a new database chronicling the ever-growing number of exonerees from our nation’s criminal justice system.   The database includes over 2,000 people who spent time – sometimes decades – in prison after being wrongfully convicted of serious crimes. This includes over 100 wrongfully convicted of capital murder – which means they were awaiting execution before their sentences were reversed. The Death Penalty information Center, which tracks information about the death penalty, has documented 140 cases where inmates were released from death row with evidence of their innocence.

April 22 marks the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, in which the Court ruled that a defendant cannot rely upon statistical evidence of systemic racial bias to prove his death sentence unconstitutional, no matter how strong that evidence may be. McCleskey has been roundly condemned as a low point in the quest for equality that begs to be revisited. To mark the occasion, every day this week the ACLU Blog of Rights will feature a new post about McCleskey and its legacy. You can read all the posts here, and visit mccleskeyvkemp.com to learn more.

In the 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a defendant’s fundamental right to any and all favorable information that might prove he or she was innocent of a crime. From that case came the “Brady Rule” –the constitutional obligation for the prosecution to disclose any material evidence favorable to the accused.

This summer, travelers should be on the lookout for some new American drug addicts, slouching around the foreign capitals where Americans abroad seek to score. They are a little older than most of the druggies, and they aren't looking to get high. They're looking to kill. Uncle Sam himself — or some of his states, like Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, California and Nebraska — are desperate for dope. They've run out of sodium thiopental, the drug that's used to lethally inject prisoners during executions, and they're jonesing.