I was at the train station in Charlottesville talking to two women about our mutual appreciation for the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, which they would see in DC. They shared about their work as librarians. I shared about Equal Justice USA and our desire for every community to be safe and healthy, where violence is…
EJUSA staff members and partners traveled to Montgomery, Alabama to visit Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The tour group included partners from our Evangelical Network and Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. Here are reflections from our staff. Demetrius Minor, Manager, Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty We…
In a year in which political campaigns and media drove public perception of rising crime to record highs, support for the death penalty in 2022 remains near the lowest it’s been in 50 years. Even among conservatives, support for the death penalty fell five percentage points, despite a barrage of media stoking fear in the…
Each December, the team at the Death Penalty Information Center provides an enormous and essential service to justice reform when it releases its annual year-end report. The report tells the comprehensive story—in statistics and graphics, in narrative, and in expert analysis—of the death penalty in the U.S. for the previous 12 months. The reports of…
Reimagining Justice This Month highlights stories about effective responses to violence – responses that disrupt cycles of violence, heal trauma, and address structural racism. A Visit to Montgomery’s Legacy Museum, The New Yorker Recently, EJUSA staff visited the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, AL, to reflect upon history of and…
“Lindy Lou, Juror Number 2” is a documentary about a conservative Christian grandmother from Mississippi who helped sentence a man to death. Two decades later, an overwhelming sense of regret compels her to track down her fellow jurors. This film raises important questions about the death penalty and the impact on jurors of making high-stakes sentencing…
State capitals are buzzing as lawmakers return for this year’s state legislative sessions. It’s no surprise that the death penalty is on the agenda in so many places, given the growing movement away from executions. There has long been strong support for death penalty repeal in Kansas, but due to many circumstances, repeal bills haven’t…
The death penalty remains in steep decline across the United States, and a recently released report (PDF) illustrates how capital punishment is falling out of favor even in Texas. According to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, this year the Lone Star State sentenced the fewest number of people to die since 1976….
Harvard’s Fair Punishment Project released the second installment of a report showing the dysfunction in the use of the death penalty in the only 16 counties that continue to use it with any regularity. “Too Broken to Fix: An In-depth Look at America’s Outlier Death Penalty Counties,” looks at the 16 “outlier counties” – of 3,143 counties…
In a new short film from the #DeathPenaltyFail campaign, Anthony Ray Hinton tells the firsthand story of spending 30 years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Watch the film today and then support the Thunderclap to make sure more and more people see and hear Hinton’s powerful story.