Entries by Taylor Bonner

On January 20, 2026, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Amos Wells, a Black man in Texas who was sentenced to death in 2016 after a trial marked by racial bias and harmful stereotypes. The brief urges the Court to grant certiorari to address the continuing harm caused by the false stereotype that Black men are inherently violent. Central to Mr. Wells’ death sentence at trial was testimony about monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), often…

“We don’t need more death. We need more care.” — Anna Lee, victim family member
- In a December 9, 2025, opinion article in The Tennessean, Anna Lee, a murder-victim family member whose beloved great-uncle’s killer, Nick Sutton, was executed six years ago explains how the death penalty has not brought her family healing or justice. In the piece, Ms. Lee compassionately describes the long-term emotional and financial toll the capital punishment system imposes…

On November 19, 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released Fatal Flaws: Innocence, Race and Wrongful Convictions, the second installment in its multi-part series examining racialized and structural failures in the nation’s capital punishment system. The first report of the series, Fatal Flaws: Revealing the Racial and Religious Gerrymandering of the Capital Jury, explored how the process of death qualification distorts the composition of capital juries. This newly published…

On October 30, 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Hampshire and the ACLU Capital Punishment Project jointly filed a 27-page amicus brief on behalf of Michael Addison, an African American man and the only remaining person under a death sentence in New Hampshire. Mr. Addison was convicted in 2008 of capital murder for the fatal shooting of a white Manchester police officer. The filing cites findings from the Capital Jury Project (CJP), which show that “death-qualified” jurors…

On October 13, 2025, Governor Gavin Newsom signed the latest set of amendments to California’s Racial Justice Act (CRJA) into law, strengthening a groundbreaking piece of legislation that prohibits criminal convictions and sentences based on race, ethnicity, or national origin. Under this law, capitally convicted prisoners can pursue meaningful relief, beyond just the reversal of a death sentence, if the state is found to have violated these protections. “With these clarifications of the…