State And Federal Info
Robert Drew, a Vermont native, was executed in Texas on August 2, 1994. Drew maintained his innocence, but was denied a hearing on new evidence. Prominent Vermonters, including then-Governor Howard Dean, Representative Bernard Sanders, and Catholic Bishop Kenneth Angell asked Texas Governor Ann Richards for clemency for Drew.
In 1819, two brothers in Manchester were sentenced to death for the alleged murder of their brother-in-law. The brothers were spared at the last moment, however, when the supposed “dead” man showed up in town.
In 1838, Vermont’s legislature defeated an abolition bill by only three votes. If the bill had passed, it would have made Vermont the first state to abolish the death penalty.
The Vermont legislature took no action to reintroduce capital punishment after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all existing death-penalty laws in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, ending the death penalty in the state.
Arbitrariness
Sep 28, 2018
A federal judge in Vermont has accepted a plea deal between Donald Fell and federal prosecutors, permanently removing Fell from death row and ending a case that had raised serious questions about the constitutiona…
Arbitrariness
Dec 14, 2016
After a two-week long “extensive hearing regarding the unreliability and arbitrariness of the death penalty system, the excessive delay involved in executions, and the growing decline in the use of the death penalty,” U.S. District Court Judge
Deterrence
Jul 15, 2016
A court hearing is under way in the capital trial of Donald Fell in a Vermont federal district court challenging the constitutionality of the federal death penalty. This week, death penalty experts testified for t…
Arbitrariness
Feb 12, 2016
U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford has ordered an evidentiary hearing on Donald Fell’s (pictured) challenge to the constitutionality of the federal death penalty. In court filings seeking to bar federal prosecutors from s…
Arbitrariness
Nov 30, 2015
Lawyers for capital defendants and death row inmates across the country have begun to respond to what lawyers in one federal case described as the “clarion call for reconsideration of the constitutionality of the death penalty” issued by Supreme C…
Innocence
Feb 04, 2011
On February 1, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D‑Vermont) introduced legislation (S. 250) that would reauthorize the Justice for All Act. The Act, first passed in 2004, provided important tools and assist…
Deterrence
Jan 01, 2011
The FBI recently released the latest version of its Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States 2005. The report showed that the murder rate in 2005 (5.6 murders per 100,000 people) was the same as in 2001, with little change in the i…
