Rhode Island

06/20/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

Feds Should Stop Forcing Death Penalty on Rhode Island

By Steven Brown, ACLU of Rhode Island at 4:18pm

A man named John Gordon was hanged by the state of Rhode Island in 1845. The concern about the fairness of his execution was so great that seven years later, Rhode Island became the second state in the country to abolish the death penalty. No person in the state has been executed since. For inexplicable reasons, the U.S. Department of Justice seems hell-bent on changing that.

Almost two years ago, Jason Wayne Pleau robbed and murdered a gas station manager who was making a bank deposit in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Pleau was taken into state custody on probation violation charges, and since then he has, through his attorneys, agreed to serve a sentence of life imprisonment without parole for this heinous crime. However, the U.S. Attorney doggedly pushed to have him turned over to federal custody (because the crime involved a bank) where he could be punished with the death penalty. Rhode Island’s governor, Lincoln Chafee, a staunch opponent of capital punishment, refused to turn over Pleau, but a federal appeals court recently ordered him to do so. On Monday, it was announced that the U.S. Government would indeed bring Pleau to trial and seek death.

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06/14/2012
NDAA

And Now Rhode Island

By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 2:29pm

Rhode Island’s state legislature adjourned on Tuesday – or, according to their floor calendars, sometime after 2 am on Wednesday morning. (Ouch!) As in most state legislatures, the last day of session saw a flurry of activity, a rush to pass important bills that legislators could not allow to die with the session. Among those must-pass bills in the Rhode Island House of Representatives? A resolution calling on Congress to repeal Sections 1021 and 1022 of the Fiscal Year 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Those are the dangerous detention provisions authorizing the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield. The members of the Rhode Island House, like so many of you, found those provisions so abhorrent that they could not go home for the summer/campaign season until they had officially expressed their disapproval to Congress.

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05/15/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

Rhode Island's Rightful Stand Against the Federal Government

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 2:44pm

Last week, the Rhode Island ACLU announced its disappointment with a federal circuit court's decision overturning Gov. Lincoln Chafee's efforts to prevent the institution of federal death penalty charges against Jason Wayne Pleau, whom Rhode Island was already prosecuting in state court. We join that sentiment here.

Pleau has been charged with the robbery and murder of a gas station manager who was making a bank deposit. Rhode Island, like every other state, has laws designating these crimes as murder and robbery, courts in which to prosecute the crimes and prosecutors and defense attorneys ready to work the case. But because the victim was making a bank deposit, and bank robberies violate federal criminal statutes, the crime could also theoretically be prosecuted in federal court.

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