Entries tagged with “ACLU”
Nov 26, 2025
Article of Interest: ACLU Releases New Report Citing Pervasive Racial Imbalance in Capital Punishment System
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…
Nov 17, 2025
ACLU Files Amicus Brief for New Hampshire’s Sole Death Row Prisoner, Raising Concerns About Racial Disparities and Disproportionate Sentencing
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…
Religion
,Women
,Jul 08, 2025
ACLU Report Shows How Death Penalty Jury Selection Discriminates Against Black Americans, Women, and People of Faith
A new report from the ACLU documents how the process of selecting juries for death penalty cases systematically excludes Black prospective jurors, women, and people of faith, fundamentally undermining the constitutional promise of a trial by a jury of one’s peers. The report, Fatal Flaws: Revealing the Racial and Religious Gerrymandering of the Capital Jury, examines the practice of “death qualification,” a requirement that potential jurors must be willing to impose a death sentence to serve on…
Oct 29, 2024
Hearings Begin on Constitutional Challenge to Kansas’ Death Penalty and Capital Jury Selection Process
On October 28, 2024, hearings began in Kansas’ Wyandotte County District Court regarding the constitutionality of the state’s death penalty and its capital jury selection process. A coalition of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, the ACLU of Kansas, the Kansas Death Penalty Unit, and the law firms Hogan Lovells and Ali & Lockwood brought the challenge. The team argues that the death penalty, which is rarely used in Kansas, is “arbitrary, racially discriminatory, unreliable, and unnecessary”…
Issues
Sep 23, 2022
North Carolina ACLU Challenges Death Qualification of Jurors as Racially and Sexually Discriminatory
Lawyers for a North Carolina capital defendant have filed a sweeping challenge to the method by which death-penalty jurors are empaneled, arguing that the combination of a process known as “death qualification” and discretionary jury strikes produces a jury so racially and sexually unrepresentative that it violates a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Death qualification refers to the process of removing potential jurors from service in a capital case because of their expressed opposition to…
Executions
May 10, 2022
ACLU Review of Quintin Jones Execution Documents Finds Texas “Woefully Unprepared to Carry Out an Execution”
Documents that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) withheld from public disclosure for months reveal that “confusion and lack of training” have left the state “woefully unprepared to carry out an execution,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union. On June 4, 2021, the ACLU filed a request with TDCJ for records related to the state’s May 19, 2021 execution of Quintin Jones, in which the execution team failed to bring media witnesses into the chamber. The execution, which…
Issues
Victims' Families
,Mar 05, 2021
Wyoming Senate Committee Passes Bill to Repeal State’s Death Penalty
A Wyoming state senate committee has advanced to the full Senate a bill to repeal the state’s death penalty. After taking testimony from witnesses including the state public defender’s office, family members of murder victims, a death-row exoneree, anti-death-penalty activists, religious organizations, and a national expert on capital punishment, the all-Republican Senate Revenue Committee voted 4 – 1 on March 4, 2021 to pass Senate File 150. The vote marked the second time in three years that a…
State & Federal Info
Federal Death Penalty
,Feb 09, 2021
More Than 80 Civil Rights and Advocacy Organizations Urge President Biden to End Federal Executions
A coalition of 82 civil rights and advocacy organizations have called on President Joe Biden to honor his campaign promise of “ensuring equality, equity, and justice in our criminal legal system” by taking executive action to end federal executions. The groups, led by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, asked Biden to commute the sentences of everyone on federal death row, dismantle the federal death chamber, rescind the federal execution protocol and other guidelines issued by…
Issues
Federal Death Penalty
,Feb 03, 2021
Records Disclose Taxpayers Picked Up a Nearly Million Dollar Price Tag for Each Federal Execution
The Federal Bureau of Prisons spent nearly $4.7 million dollars on the first five executions carried out by the Trump administration in July and August 2020, according to redacted government financial records recently obtained by the ACLU. The government’s January 2021 disclosures in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, detailed the extraordinarily high price tag absorbed by taxpayers as a result of the administration’s choice to conduct executions during the worst global…
Executions
Upcoming Executions
,Conditions on Death Row
,Federal Death Penalty
,Dec 03, 2020
COVID-19 Prison Outbreaks Kill Death-Row Prisoners in Ohio and Missouri and Infect At Least 11 on Tennessee’s Death Row
New COVID-19 outbreaks on the nation’s death rows have killed prisoners in Ohio and Missouri and sickened at least 11 men on Tennessee’s death row. James Frazier (pictured, left), 79, Ohio’s oldest death-row prisoner, died of the virus on November 19, 2020 after 15 years on death row. He suffered from dementia following a series of strokes, and his lawyers had recently filed a petition to bar his execution on grounds of mental incompetency. Richard “Ricky” Davis (pictured, right), 56, who…
Executions
Executions Overview
,Federal Death Penalty
,Sep 22, 2020
ACLU: Documents Show Federal Executions Likely Caused Prison COVID-19 Outbreak
Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act show that the federal government’s choice to bring hundreds of people to the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana to carry out five executions in July and August in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic likely caused a COVID-19 outbreak that has already killed three and hospitalized others. In a statement issued September 21, 2020, the ACLU blasted federal officials for repeatedly carrying…