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.
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.
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.”
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 5:13pm
One less person faces possible death at the hands of Alabama’s arbitrary capital punishment system, after the State agreed to stop seeking the death penalty for ACLU client LaSamuel Gamble late last week. Gamble, who has been on death row for nearly 16 years, was resentenced to life in prison without parole.
Gamble was a mere 18 years old when he accompanied his 16-year old friend Marcus Presley on a robbery of a pawn shop just outside of Birmingham. During the robbery, Presley shot and killed the two employees at the store. Both Gamble and Presley received death sentences for the crime, but Presley’s sentence was converted to life when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the death penalty could not be imposed on defendants who were under 18 at the time of the crime.
By Anthony Graves, who spent years in solitary confinement on Texas’ death row before being proven innocent in 2010. Yesterday he testified about the experience at a Senate subcommittee hearing on solitary confinement. His website is www.anthonybelieves.com.
On November 1, 1994, I heard the gavel fall and the judge announce, “Anthony Graves, I hereby sentence you to death by lethal injection.” The jury had already convicted me of murdering six people and burning down their house down to cover up the crime. I was completely innocent: they had the wrong guy. I was scared of dying for a crime I did not commit, but I believed in my innocence and hoped someone, somewhere would make it right.
By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 5:09pm
A person does not need to go any farther than a Law & Order episode to understand the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We hear the officers on TV tell suspects that if they cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for them. The Framers of the Constitution made the statement more artfully when they wrote that the accused in every criminal prosecution “shall enjoy the right to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”
In Gideon v. Wainright, the Supreme Court explained the importance of this right, stating, “[I]n our adversary system of criminal justice, any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” The right to counsel protects all of us from being subjected to criminal prosecution in an unfair trial. But nowhere is this right more important than when the accused faces the death penalty.
