Entries tagged with “LGBTQ+ Bias”
Issues
Jun 28, 2024
New Resource: LGBTQ+ People and the Death Penalty
In honor of Pride Month and commemorating the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the Death Penalty Information Center is pleased to present a new resource about how use of the death penalty affects LGBTQ+ people. We take a comprehensive look at topics ranging from America’s history of punishing queer sex with execution, to discriminatory comments made against queer defendants in capital trials, to the challenges of gender transition on death row. As early as 1636, the American…
Issues
Jun 17, 2024
Research Roundup: Anti-Queer Practices in Capital Cases
This is the first in a new monthly series covering academic research and articles in the field of capital punishment. In the 2020 article, “Queer and Unusual: Capital Punishment, LGBTQ+ Identity, and the Constitutional Path Forward,” Matt Kellner surveys the legal and historical landscape of anti-queerness in the death penalty throughout history. He begins by highlighting the illustrative case of Charles Rhines. Mr. Rhines, a gay man, was sentenced to death on January 26, 1993 in South Dakota…
Issues
Upcoming Executions
,Women
,Dec 27, 2022
Missouri Set to Execute Amber McLaughlin on January 3 in First U.S. Execution of a Transgender Person
On January 3, 2023, Missouri is set to execute Amber McLaughlin (pictured), the first transgender person scheduled to be put to death in the United States. Tried as Scott McLaughlin, her jury rejected three of the four aggravating circumstances advanced by St. Louis County prosecutors but split on its sentencing verdict. The vast majority of death-penalty states require a unanimous jury vote for death before the death penalty may be imposed. But under Missouri law, a nonunanimous jury vote is…
Issues
Upcoming Executions
,Nov 04, 2019
South Dakota Prisoner Executed After Supreme Court Denies Review of Anti-Gay Bias, Denial of Mental Health Expert
Whether South Dakota death-row prisoner Charles Rhines (pictured) lives or dies may depend less on whether he was constitutionally convicted and sentenced to death and more on whether the courts value finality more than they value fairness. As Rhines filed two separate petitions in the U.S. Supreme Court and an appeal in the South Dakota Supreme Court on November 1, the South Dakota Department of Corrections announced that his execution, scheduled for the week of November 3, 2019, would be…