Articles

In an editorial on April 13, the New York Times described the death penalty as “cruel, immoral, and ineffective at reducing crime” and called it “so riddled with error that no civilized nation should tolerate its use.” The Times described how prosecutorial misconduct and an “all-too-common mind-set to win at all costs” played a substantial role in the convictions of many of the 152 innocent men and women who have been exonerated after beingly wrongly sent to death row and had contributed to the…

In an unusual joint editorial on March 5, four national Catholic publications called for an end to the death penalty in the U.S. The editors of America, National Catholic Register, National Catholic Reporter, and Our Sunday Visitor urged “the readers of our diverse publications and the whole U.S. Catholic community and all people of faith to stand with us and say, ‘Capital punishment must end.’” Citing opposition to the death penalty in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and statements by…

A new report from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) of Alabama has documented more lynchings in American history than previously reported, particularly of African Americans in the South, and has drawn parallels between this practice and the modern death penalty. According to EJI, the report — titled Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror —“makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and…

In light of the three botched executions that took place in 2014, the Washington Post published an editorial urging states not to drop “a veil of secrecy over executions.” In particular, the editorial board opposes a proposed law in Virginia, which, “would make practically everything about executions in Virginia a state secret — even the building in which they take place. ” “It’s hard to see the compelling need for that kind of blatant censorship, which in other states has been challenged by…

A recent editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reiterated its opposition to the death penalty, even as Missouri prepares to execute the man convicted of killing a former Post-Dispatch reporter. Marcellus Williams is scheduled to be executed on January 28 for the murder of Lisha Gayle (pictured), who left her job as a journalist three years before she was killed. The paper noted Gayle’s likely opposition to the death penalty: “It would be surprising, in light of her other causes and passions…

DPIC’s 2014 Year End Report was featured in numerous editorials since its release on December 18, including: “Thirty-five people were put to death in 2014, the fewest in 20 years, according to a report last month by the Death Penalty Information Center….[W]hile the death penalty may be increasingly infrequent, it is all too often a brutal end to a brutal life….The people executed in recent years were not the ‘worst of the worst’ — as many death-penalty advocates like to imagine — but those who…

Commentary on Scott Panetti’s scheduled execution on December 3 in Texas: “By any reasonable standard — not to mention the findings of multiple mental-health experts over the years — Mr. Panetti is mentally incompetent…A civilized society should not be in the business of executing anybody. But it certainly cannot pretend to be adhering to any morally acceptable standard of culpability if it kills someone like Scott Panetti.” ‑N.Y. Times, Nov. 23, 2014 “In a 1986 decision, the Supreme Court…

In a recent editorial, the Washington Post urged Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley to commute the sentences of the four men remaining on the state’s death row, saying, “To carry out executions post-repeal would be both cruel, because the legislation underpinning the sentence has been scrapped, and unusual, because doing so would be historically unprecedented.” Maryland is one of three states that have repealed the death penalty prospectively but still have inmates on death row. The others are…

An article in the most recent issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review examines the practice of excluding African-Americans from jury service, particularly in death penalty cases in North Carolina. In Bias in the Box, Dax-Devlon Ross notes, “Alongside the right to vote, the right to serve on a jury is an enduring pillar of our democracy….Nevertheless, there is perhaps no arena of public life where racial bias has been as broadly overlooked or casually tolerated as jury exclusion.” Ross traces the…

An article in the latest edition of The Angolite, a magazine published by prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, tells the stories of the ten men who have been exonerated from death row in that state. The piece prominently features Glenn Ford, the state’s most recent inmate to be freed. Ford spent 30 years on death row before being released in 2014. Among the other cases described is that of John Thompson, who was freed after it was revealed that prosecutors intentionally…