Welcome to the next generation of Lifelines, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s newsletter! This is our first entirely electronic issue—optimized to allow you to share and comment on the content as well as find other information related to topics you care about. Read More
While we celebrate a major victory this year with the repeal of the death penalty in Maryland and the steadily mounting pressure against capital punishment across the country continues, there are a few outlier states where vocal elected officials seem determined to continue the use of this deeply flawed, unnecessary and outdated practice. The legislatures in two such states, Florida and North Carolina, generated headlines earlier this year with controversial actions. Read More
In the years that followed, support for the death penalty skyrocketed, peaking in 1994 with 80 percent of the population supporting its use, according to Gallup. Now a poll confirms, what many close to this issue already believed, that support for the death penalty is on the decline -- at 60 percent -- the lowest level of support for the practice in 41 years, according to Gallup's analysis. Moreover, in polls that present more information about the death penalty to respondents, including alternatives to capital punishment, majority support for the practice vanishes. Read More
Donald Cabana, a former Mississippi prison warden who presided over executions, was not the usual ally for me and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. But Donald Cabana loathed the death penalty. As I mark his passing and celebrate his life, he died this month at 67, I think about the vantage point from which he formed his opinions about capital punishment. Read More
I have not seen a system built yet, that can equip the most principled and dedicated of us as prosecutors, judges, jurors, or military tribunals with the god-like ability to see into the soul of another human being and without fail sort out the irredeemable, from the weak, the wicked or the wrong. Read More
Does Trayvon Martin have anything to do with race and the death penalty? Some may think the senseless killing of an unarmed Black teenager is completely unrelated to the racial discrimination in our capital punishment system. But nothing could be further from the truth. Read More
Grave Injustice is a highly readable study for anybody interested in a thoughtful, but critical examination of the death penalty in modern America. Stack reveals capital punishment as a broken, largely symbolic relic at odds with the very essence of a pluralistic democracy. Gladly for the reader Stack writes very well. Read More
In this video, Kenneth C. Frazier, President and CEO of Merck, speaks at the American Law Institute's 90th Annual Meeting about his role as a death penalty lawyer and the flaws in the judicial system as it relates to capital punishment. Read More
