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Amnesty International Death Penalty Blog

From Amnesty International

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Last Entry: November 05, 2008 at 15:31:17

Words of an Iranian Child Offender Facing Execution

Posted on June 11, 2008
Mohammad Feda'i was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday, June 11th, along with ten others, before his and fellow child offender Saeed Jazee's executions were stayed for an additional month. Tortured into signing a murder confession after voluntarily coming forward to police to report a fight that he had witnessed, Feda'i has been on death row in Iran since the age of 16...

Virginia Commutes Percy Walton!

Posted on June 10, 2008
Good news! Activist efforts and thoughtful consideration by Virginia have led to the commutation of Percy Walton's death sentence. Mr. Walton's execution was to be the 100th in Virginia, which is second only to Texas in executions. Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia announced his decision for Walton's commutation Tuesday evening and reflected in a statement that after thinking...

Words of an Iranian Child Offender Facing Execution

Posted on June 10, 2008
Mohammad Feda'i was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday, June 11th, along with ten others, before his and fellow child offender Saeed Jazee's executions were stayed for an additional month. Tortured into signing a murder confession after voluntarily coming forward to police to report a fight that he had witnessed, Feda'i has been on Iranian death row since the age of 16...

Georgia Still Can?t Get it Right

Posted on June 05, 2008
Executioners last night in Georgia struggled for 35 minutes to find a vein in which to administer the lethal injection into Curtis Osborne's body. Once a vein was finally found, it took 14 minutes before Osborne was pronounced dead. This, just after Georgia declared its lethal injection procedures to be sound when they became the first state to hold an execution after the Supreme Court ruled...

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Georgia Still Cant Get it Right

Sonnier Stay

Posted on June 04, 2008
Last night, less than two hours before he was scheduled to be executed, Derrick Sonnier received a stay from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The motions on his behalf (a Motion for Stay of Execution, and a longer, more detailed Petition for Writ of Prohibition), were filed by attorneys with the Texas Defender Service...

As Arbitrary As Ever

Posted on June 03, 2008
Tonight, with the execution of Derrick Sonnier, Texas is set to resume executions after more than 8 months of going without. Of the 28 currently pending executions in the US, there are 13 others scheduled in Texas between now and October. And two other executions are scheduled for this week: Curtis Osborne in Georgia tomorrow, June 4, and David Hill in South Carolina on Friday, June...

"Boss Hog"

Posted on May 29, 2008
The Georgia capital punishment system continues to be haunted by the way way less than adequate representation many on death row received at their trials. Inadequate Defense Counsel at Trial, and Lack of Defense Counsel for State Habeas Corpus Proceedings are the first two "Problem Areas" listed in the Executive Summary of the ABA's Death Penalty Assessment Report for Georgia, published in...

Deference, Or Indifference?

Posted on May 28, 2008
Terry Lyn Short is scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma on June 17 for the death of Ken Yamamoto, who was killed in a fire in 1997. Short was convicted of setting that fire, largely based on the testimony of a jailhouse informant named Jay Brown, who was rewarded for his words with leniency in charges he was facing (such testimony, for obvious reasons, is notoriously unreliable)...

More From Virginia

Posted on May 20, 2008
There are now over 20 pending executions in the United States. The list is striking, in that almost every execution that isn't likely to be stayed is set to take place in the Old Confederacy. That the death penalty is a significantly Southern phenomenon is not exactly news (almost 80% of US executions since 1976 have taken place in the South), but the current list of scheduled executions is a...

Mississippi Mess

Posted on May 15, 2008
Earl Wesley Berry is scheduled to be executed May 21 for the murder of Mary Bounds. Whatever the alleged benefits of the death penalty are in theory, several aspects of this case demonstrate what an ugly sordid mess it is in practice. One of the problems in Earl Wesley Berry's case is that he may be mentally retarded...

Another Death Penalty Supreme Court Case

Posted on May 12, 2008
The US Supreme Court agreed today to hear the case of Edward Nathaniel Bell (Bell v. Kelly), who was scheduled to be executed in Virginia on July 24. The main issue in Bell's case is that his attorneys presented absolutely no mitigating evidence during the sentencing phase of his trial, basically leaving the field to the prosecution and virtually ensuring that he would get a death sentence...

"...one of the worst criminal justice systems in this country"

Posted on May 09, 2008
On Sunday, 60 Minutes profiled Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins, who has proactively sought out and exposed the wrongful convictions of his predecessor, Wade. In all, 18 men from Dallas County have been cleared by DNA testing; a total of 33 men have been cleared across Texas...

Georgia Again

Posted on May 07, 2008
The state of Georgia has always had a special place in the history of the US death penalty. It was Supreme Court cases out of Georgia that both halted (Furman v. Georgia, 1972) and restarted (Gregg v. Georgia, 1976) executions in the US. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled in McCleskey v...

129

Posted on May 02, 2008
After 13 years on North Carolina's death row, Levon "Bo" Jones was exonerated. Jones is the 129th person exonerated from death row in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 and the eighth condemned man to be freed from North Carolina's death row in less than four months...

Cuba ceases fire, for now

Posted on April 30, 2008
Cuba's death penalty is usually carried out by firing squad but Cuba is ceasing the fire. Past Monday, new Cuban President Raul Castro announced that all death sentences had been commuted to prison terms of 30 years to life, with the exception of 3 people charged with terrorism...

What is it going to take?

Posted on April 29, 2008
The death penalty is arbitrary, unfair, not a deterrence of crime, more costly than life imprisonment and, moreover, it is a human rights violation that is taking away the lives of people who well may be innocent. More than 126 prisoners have been released form U...

Innocence in Texas

Posted on April 28, 2008
The Dallas Morning News reported yesterday that prosecutors in Dallas, Texas have decided to take a second look at convictions in which DNA evidence CANNOT exclusively prove guilt or innocence. This is a welcome extension to a decision a year ago by Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins and The Innocence Project of Texas to review convictions in the state amid a wave of DNA...

Death Penalty at the AGM

Posted on April 23, 2008
Amnesty International's Annual General Meeting (AGM) will be held this week-end (April 25-28th, 2008) in Washington, DC. It will be the occasion for activists from all over the world to gather, share their vision of a fairer world and above all go on seeking solutions together...

Lethal injection and doctors

Posted on April 21, 2008
In my previous post on the Baze v. Rees decision, I noted that Justice Alito, in a separate concurring opinion, raised the question of doctor participation in executions, and argued that an alternative to a current execution protocol can't be considered "feasible" or "readily available" if that alternative requires "participation - either in carrying out the execution or in training those who...

Protecting Children

Posted on April 17, 2008
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in the case of Kennedy v. Louisiana regarding the constitutionality of imposing the death penalty for the rape of a child, when no murder has taken place. It has been 44 years since the last execution in the U...

BAZE v. REES

Posted on April 16, 2008
Today, the Supreme Court, in the case of Baze v. Rees, ruled 7-2 that lethal injection is constitutional, in Kentucky and elsewhere, as long as there is no "substantial risk of severe pain", and as long as there is no alternative procedure which is "feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain...

Good News, Bad News

Posted on April 15, 2008
There is good news and bad news in Amnesty International's 2007 Death Penalty Statistics. The good news is that the world, slowly but surely, continues to move away from the death penalty. With Uzbekistan's abolition of capital punishment in January of this year, there are now 135 countries which have rejected the death penalty in law or practice...

Who is killing in your name?

Posted on April 11, 2008
Overblown claims about security threats to justify government secrecy are an all too common feature of our current political landscape. But executions are a government function and the public has a right to know how, and by whom, they are carried out...

Reflections on Abolition - from an AI activist in Nebraska

Posted on April 10, 2008
It has been two weeks since the Nebraska Unicameral rejected LB 1063, the legislative bill to repeal the death penalty in the state of Nebraska. Time away from the event has been beneficial, giving me pause to reflect and gain some clarity on abolition in Nebraska...

THE WORST LAWYERS

Posted on April 09, 2008
We often say that those who end up on death row are usually not the "worst of the worst" but those with the worst lawyers. Yesterday Senator Russell Feingold held a hearing on The Adequacy of Representation in Capital Cases; the witnesses suggested that bad lawyering was a central problem with the death penalty in the US...

Prosecutorial misconduct

Posted on April 08, 2008
What do Glen Chapman, Jonathan Hoffman and Alan Gell have in common? They are all innocent men released from death row after spending years in prison; in all three cases, issues of serious prosecutorial misconduct led to their wrongful convictions, and all three cases took place in North Carolina...

You got it all wrong

Posted on April 03, 2008
On Tuesday (3/1/2008), the Governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine, announced a stay of excecution for Edward Bell, who was scheduled to be executed on April 8, and declared a moratorium on every execution in the state until the United States Supreme Court reaches a verdict in the case of Baze v...

Death Penalty is a waste of critical resources

Posted on April 02, 2008
The Hidden Death Tax and Death by Geography are the new reports release on March 27, 2008 by the ACLU of Northern California. These reports demonstrated that California's death penalty is arbitrary, unnecessary and a waste of critical resources. The Hidden Death Tax details the high cost of California's death penalty, based on records of actual trial expenses and state budgets...

Activism with a beat

Posted on March 25, 2008
Hip-hop artist, Andre Latallade, also known as Capital-X, will walk 1700 miles through 10 of the states with the highest execution rate to advocate for the abolishment of capital punishment in the US. Latallade has decided to begin his "walk for life" on March 31 at 5 a...

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