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.
In the second time in as many months, Governor John Kasich has intervened to stop an execution. Today, he commuted John Jeffrey Eley’s sentence to life without the possibility of parole. Eley was scheduled to be executed on July 26.
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.
The North Carolina General Assembly voted yesterday to override Gov. Bev Perdue's veto of SB 416, a bill that essentially guts the Racial Justice Act (RJA), meaning the destructive bill will become law. The RJA was an historic piece of legislation designed to address the disturbing role that race plays in the death penalty by allowing defendants in capital cases to use statistical evidence to show racial bias in the system. SB 416 cripples the ability of the RJA to address systemic racial discrimination by repealing the provision that allowed defendants to file claims showing statewide discrimination in sentencing and jury selection.
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."
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.
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.
An almost-certainly innocent man was spared from death at the hands of the state of Texas yesterday when the highest criminal court in Texas threw out the death sentence of ACLU client Manuel Velez, ruling it was based on the false testimony of a state expert.
Velez was awaiting execution after the state’s expert witness falsely told the sentencing jury that, if sentenced to life without parole instead of death, Velez would be permitted lenient prison conditions and thereby pose a greater threat of danger to the public.
This week, rather than acknowledge a growing mountain of evidence of racial bias in death penalty proceedings, especially in the selection of capital juries, the North Carolina House of Representatives chose to essentially gut the Racial Justice Act (RJA). Senate Bill 416, the so-called “Amend Death Penalty Procedures” makes it so that a judge may not make a finding of racial bias in the system based on statistical proof – as North Carolina Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks did just a few months ago in the first-ever ruling under the RJA.
