By Tanya Greene, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU at 5:02pm
Monday, a “special master” in St. Louis begins review of the case of Reggie Clemons to determine if his trial was fair and his death sentence is just. Reggie Clemons is on Missouri’s death row for murders he did not commit.
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 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.
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 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.
By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 3:54pm
Georgia: On Monday, the State of Georgia stands ready to strap Warren Hill to a gurney, place IV lines in his arms, and pump his body with poison until he dies. Warren Hill has an IQ of 70, and is intellectually disabled (mentally retarded). That was the finding of a Georgia trial judge who held a hearing and looked at the relevant evidence – applying United States Supreme Court precedent barring execution of the intellectually disabled under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the court ruled that Hill could not be executed.
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."
