On July 18th, Judge Gail Tusan of the Fulton County Superior Court indefinitely stayed the execution of Warren Hill, a person with mental retardation, to consider the merits of his lethal injection challenge. Today, the State did not appeal the ruling. Read More
This video, produced by the Odyssey Network, discusses the legacy of racial discrimination in the death penalty and the importance of the faith community’s role in galvanizing public opposition to capital punishment. Read More
A Fulton County judge has upheld a stay of execution for Warren Hill, expressing concern that a new state law, which allows the Department of Corrections to keep secret the identities of those who make and distribute the lethal injection drugs used to carry out an execution, is unconstitutional. The state's attorneys plan to immediately appeal the ruling to the State Supreme Court. If the court overturn's Judge Tusan's injunction, it remains possible that Hill could still be executed on Friday, July 19th at 7pm ET. Read More
Fulton County Superior Court has temporarily stayed tonight's scheduled execution of Warren Hill so that a briefing can take place on Mr. Hill's complaint challenging the extreme secrecy surrounding the execution in light of Georgia's new Lethal Injection Secrecy Act. Read More
“When the public gets the facts and knows the alternatives, they are happy to have the death penalty become a thing of the past,” explained Rust-Tierney. In their lengthy interview, Rust-Tierney and Lynn discuss the impact of death penalty repeal in Maryland. Rust-Tierney observed that there is “no constituency for the death penalty” and the politics are changing. People are doing the right thing as they see the death penalty unraveling and they are stepping away from it. Read More
Diann Rust-Tierney discusses the role of innocence on public opinion, educational efforts, the importance of strong political leadership and ways to get involved with the death penalty abolition movement. Read More
What separates Maryland from other states that have had recent abolition campaigns is the consistent presence of a single governor with the initiative to pass abolition legislation. While bills in other states have had gubernatorial support, Governor Martin O’Malley was the only governor to formally make abolition a part of his legislative agenda. Read More
On May 2, 2013, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley signed a bill to repeal the death penalty, making Maryland the eighteenth state to abolish the death penalty and the sixth to do so in six years. The successful campaign that led to this moment involved a broad coalition of community and organizational partners who worked for the better part of a decade until they finally prevailed when the Maryland legislature passed the bill to end capital punishment. Read More
Former Ohio Supreme Court Justice, Evelyn Lundberg Stratton, has joined the growing ranks of judges and prosecutors who now oppose the death penalty. Read More
In 2009 North Carolina blazed a trail by becoming the first state to pass a Racial Justice Act in response to evidence of bias in death penalty cases, including jurors admitting racial bigotry and the exonerations of three African-American death row inmates in the preceding three years. The intent of the law was ensure that, if North Carolina is to have a death penalty, every effort is made to ensure that racial bias plays no role in that system. Read More
For Mark Elliott, Executive Director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP), it was the killing of a Jewish prisoner by the state that put him on the road to abolish capital punishment. Read More
Will Georgia execute a man who has been found to have an intellectual disability by every single doctor who has examined him? That is the disturbing question in the case of Warren Hill, who faces execution on Monday, July 15. Read More
In an interview published earlier this year by the evangelical magazine, Sojourners, Richard Viguerie explains how his political conservative philosophy and Christian faith inform his opposition to capital punishment. Read More
The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty established Rachel’s Fund in the memory of Rachel King, a leading abolitionist. Rachel, through her writing and advocacy, sought to create a better understanding of the needs of families of murder victims and families of people on death row. It is Rachel’s vision of communities coming together to promote healing and to change public policy on the death penalty that our Rachel’s Fund program is intended to promote. See these materials for state affiliates. Read More
The Catholic Mobilizing Network to End Use of the Death Penalty (CMN) has done a great service by creating this two page resource for the faith community. Read More
Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime (2012, National Center for Victims of Crime) by Susan Herman presents a new framework for delivering justice to victims. Herman, who has more than 30 years of criminal justice experience, including eight years as executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime, offers the metaphor of two ladders of justice—one for offenders and one for victims—with separate paths and responses. The criminal justice system controls the path for offenders—which includes apprehension, persecution, sanctioning, and eventual reintegration into society. Yet, the path to justice for victims “at every level—individual, community, and governmental—is ineffective, fragmented, and dismissive.” Read More
Each April since 1981, the Office of Victims of Crime has helped to mobilize communities throughout the country in their annual observances of National Crime Victims’ Rights Week (NCVRW) by advancing victims’ rights and honoring crime victims and those who advocate on their behalf. Read More
In 2006, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissenting opinion that there was not “a single case, not one, in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.” This assertion outraged many in the death penalty abolition movement whose experience told them otherwise. Read More
St. Louis University Professor Tobias Winright uses a literary vignette from The Lord of the Rings as a jumping off point for a powerful reflection on Christian faith and the death penalty in his article, “Gandalf, Gollum, and the Death Penalty,” published in the January 2013 edition of Sojourners Magazine. Read More
In 1976 the Supreme Court upheld one of the country’s most controversial practices — capital punishment. Since then, over 1,300 Americans have been executed by the state. Read More