Three years ago, EJUSA joined our partners at the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty and a broad coalition of supporters to celebrate Connecticut’s repeal of the death penalty. Now, the Connecticut Supreme Court has taken things a step further and ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. Repeal in Connecticut was prospective, meaning it only…
Last week, death penalty supporters in Nebraska submitted petition signatures to put repeal legislation in front of voters in the 2016 election. The signatures have now been sent to county clerks, who will attempt to verify them against registered voters in the next 40 days. The official numbers will come out in October from the Secretary…
Today, a group of death penalty supporters submitted signatures for a referendum on death penalty repeal – enough to suspend repeal and put it on the November 2016 ballot if they are all verified. The media might tell you that this kills the repeal of the death penalty that you helped achieve this spring. They…
June’s Supreme Court Decision in Glossip v Grossaddressed one small debate about a specific lethal injection protocol. It also opened the door to many new questions about the future of the death penalty and the likelihood that the Supreme Court will one day rule on the constitutionality of the policy itself. At the heart of…
EJUSA’s Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty (CCATDP) project spoke to a standing room only crowd of young liberty activists at last month’s Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) National Conference. YAL members at the workshop learned more about the death penalty and the movement to end it. One participant approached EJUSA’s Marc Hyden after the…
After 18 years, Steve Dear will hang up his hat as executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty (PFADP). When Steve started at PFADP, it was a statewide organization in North Carolina with just a few hundred determined supporters, mostly in the Raleigh-Durham area. Under Steve’s leadership, PFADP has grown to a…
On the last day of its spring session, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a long-anticipated death penalty case, Glossip v Gross. Though the case’s scope was narrow – only relevant to one drug used in a handful of state execution protocols – the oral arguments held in April unfolded with rare courtroom drama and…
It’s hard to imagine that after all that work done to pass repeal in Nebraska, the debate over the death penalty is still not over. But it’s not. Why? Because some lawmakers are clinging so desperately to the death penalty that they are scrambling to get illegal execution drugs and trying to force the issue…
While Texas may seem like an outlier in the national trend away from the death penalty, even the Lone Star State is turning away from the antiquated, broken system. For the first time in more than 20 years, no jury in the previous 6-month period has imposed the death penalty. Read the full story in…
Some recent high profile exonerations featured defendants who confessed to crimes they did not commit. One new study presents research into some of the causes of these “false confessions” by looking at cases where innocent people plead guilty and confessed to rapes they never actually committed. Read about the study in The Crime Report.