Capital Punishment
Challenging Death Qualification and the Death Penalty in Kansas
Every person accused of a crime is entitled to a jury of their peers that represents a fair cross section of their community. But that is never the reality for Black and brown people facing the death penalty. A process called death qualification excludes people from capital juries if they do not believe in the death penalty. Death qualification rigs juries to be whiter and more likely to convict. It discriminates against Black prospective jurors, women, and people of individual faiths that oppose capital punishment.
Our fight against death qualification is just one piece of our ongoing challenge to Kansas’ use of the death penalty. The ACLU, together with the law firms Hogan Lovells and Ali & Lockwood, Democracy Forward, and the Kansas State Board of Indigents’ Defense Services’ Death Penalty Defense Unit has brought constitutional challenges on behalf of four people charged in separate cases with capital murder. In each case, the case has resolved without a death sentence. In Wyandotte County, the judge issued an order finding extensive and irredeemable defects in the application of the death penalty.
Status: Ongoing
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60 Capital Punishment Cases
U.S. Supreme Court
Mar 2025
Capital Punishment
Tabler v. Lumpkin
In Tabler v. Lumpkin, the ACLU represents a Texas death row prisoner whose lawyers refused to represent him at a hearing to determine his capacity to decide whether to give up his state post-conviction appeals, leaving him effectively unrepresented at that hearing. Our petition asks the Supreme Court to review Richard Tabler’s case and to hold that when a defendant’s lawyers abandon him, his waiver of further appeals should not bar his access to federal habeas corpus review of the constitutionality of his conviction.
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U.S. Supreme Court
Mar 2025
Capital Punishment
Tabler v. Lumpkin
In Tabler v. Lumpkin, the ACLU represents a Texas death row prisoner whose lawyers refused to represent him at a hearing to determine his capacity to decide whether to give up his state post-conviction appeals, leaving him effectively unrepresented at that hearing. Our petition asks the Supreme Court to review Richard Tabler’s case and to hold that when a defendant’s lawyers abandon him, his waiver of further appeals should not bar his access to federal habeas corpus review of the constitutionality of his conviction.
Utah Supreme Court
Jan 2025
Capital Punishment
Menzies v. Utah Department of Corrections
Article I, section 9 of the Utah Constitution protects incarcerated individuals from both cruel and unusual punishment and unnecessarily rigorous treatment. This case asks whether death-sentenced plaintiffs seeking to challenge certain execution methods as cruel and unusual or unnecessarily rigorous under this provision must identify, in their pleadings, an alternative method of execution. The U.S. Supreme Court has required this alternative for Eighth Amendment challenges, but the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, alongside the Capital Punishment Project and ACLU of Utah, filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, arguing that federal caselaw does not limit the greater protections provided by section 9 of the Utah Constitution. Forcing prisoners challenging a method of execution to identify an acceptable alternative method is cruel, coercive, and not necessary to the administration of Utah’s death penalty laws.
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Utah Supreme Court
Jan 2025
Capital Punishment
Menzies v. Utah Department of Corrections
Article I, section 9 of the Utah Constitution protects incarcerated individuals from both cruel and unusual punishment and unnecessarily rigorous treatment. This case asks whether death-sentenced plaintiffs seeking to challenge certain execution methods as cruel and unusual or unnecessarily rigorous under this provision must identify, in their pleadings, an alternative method of execution. The U.S. Supreme Court has required this alternative for Eighth Amendment challenges, but the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, alongside the Capital Punishment Project and ACLU of Utah, filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, arguing that federal caselaw does not limit the greater protections provided by section 9 of the Utah Constitution. Forcing prisoners challenging a method of execution to identify an acceptable alternative method is cruel, coercive, and not necessary to the administration of Utah’s death penalty laws.
Florida Supreme Court
Dec 2024
Capital Punishment
Michael Jackson v. State of Florida
This case gets at the very heart of our right to a jury trial. Traditionally and historically, the right to a jury trial has promised that a person could not be punished unless every single person in a group of one’s peers agreed, by jury vote, that that was the just outcome. However, Florida feels differently. When it comes to the death penalty, Florida is one of only two states that has decided that the “right to a trial by jury” does not guarantee that a person will be sentenced to death by a unanimous jury. Instead, in Florida, a person can be sentenced to die even if four people on their jury think they should live. The state requires just eight of twelve jury votes for a death sentence, which not only disproportionately affects people of color, but the very ideals at the heart of the rights of citizenship.
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Florida Supreme Court
Dec 2024
Capital Punishment
Michael Jackson v. State of Florida
This case gets at the very heart of our right to a jury trial. Traditionally and historically, the right to a jury trial has promised that a person could not be punished unless every single person in a group of one’s peers agreed, by jury vote, that that was the just outcome. However, Florida feels differently. When it comes to the death penalty, Florida is one of only two states that has decided that the “right to a trial by jury” does not guarantee that a person will be sentenced to death by a unanimous jury. Instead, in Florida, a person can be sentenced to die even if four people on their jury think they should live. The state requires just eight of twelve jury votes for a death sentence, which not only disproportionately affects people of color, but the very ideals at the heart of the rights of citizenship.
Court Case
Aug 2024
Capital Punishment
Criminal Law Reform
Abdullahi Khalif Noor v. Melissa Andrewjeski
Abdullahi Khalif Noor is a Somali refugee, who was a cab driver living in Seattle when convicted of rape and assault, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He has always maintained his innocence. He challenged his convictions in Washington state courts, arguing that prosecutors had suppressed evidence of his innocence in violation of due process and Brady v. Maryland.
Unsuccessful in the Washington state courts, he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court. He was again unsuccessful, and sought to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Ordinarily, when a party loses in federal district court they can immediately appeal the decision. But Mr. Noor was barred from doing so because he had not obtained a document Congress has required habeas petitioners receive from federal courts before they can appeal since 1908 — then called a certificate of probable cause, but now called a certificate of appealability (COA).
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Court Case
Aug 2024
Capital Punishment
Criminal Law Reform
Abdullahi Khalif Noor v. Melissa Andrewjeski
Abdullahi Khalif Noor is a Somali refugee, who was a cab driver living in Seattle when convicted of rape and assault, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He has always maintained his innocence. He challenged his convictions in Washington state courts, arguing that prosecutors had suppressed evidence of his innocence in violation of due process and Brady v. Maryland.
Unsuccessful in the Washington state courts, he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court. He was again unsuccessful, and sought to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Ordinarily, when a party loses in federal district court they can immediately appeal the decision. But Mr. Noor was barred from doing so because he had not obtained a document Congress has required habeas petitioners receive from federal courts before they can appeal since 1908 — then called a certificate of probable cause, but now called a certificate of appealability (COA).