By Christopher Hill, State Strategies Coordinator, ACLU Capital Punishment Project

In Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, the main character is prosecuted and executed for an unnamed crime. We like to think that this kind of absurd surrealism only happens in literature. But something similarly absurd is occurring in the U.S. death penalty system.

Texas planned to execute Jeffery Wood tonight for murder even though he did not kill anyone nor did he intend that anyone be killed. He was not even in the building when the person he was convicted of killing was murdered. The fact that a judge has stayed his execution for last-minute assessment of his mental competency doesn't detract from the absurdity that he's still on death row.

August 6, 1945 was the horrible dawn of the atomic age at Hiroshima.

It's also the less well-known debut of an equally iconic, equally American killing technology:  the electric chair, which claimed its first victim on August 6, 1890 in New York's Auburn Prison.

This weird hybrid of penal reformism, naive techno-optimism and cutthroat corporate competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse made a nauseating botch of its maiden usage upon the person of otherwise obscure wife-murderer William Kemmler.

Cross-posted from Executed Today

By Natasha Minsker, Death Penalty Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California

A panel of experts, including 10 law enforcement officers and prosecutors, unanimously  agrees that California’s death penalty is utterly broken. To fix it, we’ll  need to spend over $ 200 million per year. The current failed system already costs over  $ 137 million more each year than our alternative of permanent imprisonment. Today’s report forces all Californians to ask: how much we are willing to pay for our death penalty when we have an alternative that punishes criminals and protects our communities without making us bankrupt?

In a rare move, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals (which handles cases from North and South Carolina, as well as Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia) granted relief to death row inmate Dr. William Gray [1] earlier this week. The Court said that Gray, who was sentenced to die for the 1992 murder of his wife in Lenoir County, should receive a new sentencing hearing because his lawyers failed to investigate and present considerable evidence that Gray was severely mentally ill.

Dr. Gray had been exhibiting bizarre behavior for months before he shot his wife. After he was arrested, he was kept in the state mental hospital for five weeks. Once Dr. Gray returned to the jail, he had to be kept in the juvenile cell block for his own safety. Everyone around him in the months before and after the murder noticed that Gray had made a precipitous decline into mental illness, but his attorneys – neither of whom had tried a capital case before - presented no such evidence to the jury. Now William Gray has a second chance.

Angry politicians vowed to keep writing laws that condemn child rapists to
death, despite a Supreme Court decision saying such punishment is
unconstitutional.

"Anybody in the country who cares about children should be outraged that we have a Supreme Court that would issue a decision like this," said Alabama Attorney General Troy King, a Republican. The justices, he said, are "creating a situation where the country is a less safe place to grow up."

The court's 5-4 decision Wednesday derailed the efforts of nearly a dozen states supporting the right to kill those convicted of raping a child — and said execution was confined to attacks that take a life and to other crimes including treason and espionage.

More here: Unbowed, politicians vow to execute child rapists

I live in a European country. Even with such phenomena as universal health care and free university education, there are lots of things that are horribly wrong where I live. Even so, it is at least somewhat comforting to know that in vitrually all European countries, the death penalty is considered a dark spot in history rather than a vehicle for justice. F.i., in order to acquire EU membership, a state must no longer practice capital punishment. If a state still executes people, that state is not considered civilized enough to be a part of the European Union.

In other words, European leaders have moved out of the middle ages.

In the US, however, even the most "progressive" presidential candidate has not.

Today's 5-4 ruling that rejects the death penalty for child rapists shows the clear divide not just on the Supreme Court, but in American society in large.  If we needed any further example of how polarized we are in this country, decisions such as these are more than eager to point it out.  If we needed a means to gauge how we have evolved over the centuries, this easily provides it.  

This decision also makes a strong case for the need to elect Barack Obama in November.  A McCain Presidency would swing the balance of the court ever more resolutely towards the right and undermine reform measures passed by what will likely still be a Democratic-controlled Congress.  The majority of American society still favors the procedure, but our appointed and elected gatekeepers have asserted they know better than the rest of us and made the decisions for ourselves.  This authoritarian impulse one either embraces as a necessary means of control or rails against as running contrary to the popular will.    

By Natasha Minsker, Death Penalty Policy Director for the ACLU of Northern California

It’s never too late

After 30 years of executions, the state of California is finally conducting an exhaustive review of the death penalty system. While the report will not be released to the public for another few weeks, the troubling evidence they reviewed is already known.

By Brian Stull, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project

The Supreme Court’s decision last week in Boumediene v. Bush reaffirmed the crucial importance of the ancient writ of habeas corpus. Boumediene constitutes a monumental victory for the rule of law, and over the lawlessness of the Bush administration’s failed policy of detaining terrorism suspects while denying them the right to challenge their imprisonment. But while the Boumediene decision addresses detainees’ rights to challenge their detention at Guantanamo, its lessons can also be applied to the troublesome and severe constrictions placed on the writ’s availability for death-sentenced prisoners languishing on our own state death rows.

A couple of weeks ago, your resident historiorantologist posited the idea that, in spite of where knee-jerk definitions might lead us, the three clowns who have occupied the Office of the Attorney General during the Bush "administration" are, in fact, products of Enlightened (or, at the very least, Enlightenment) thinking.  At first blush, this seems impossible – these are, after all, neocon mouth-breathers who think habeus corpus translates to "have corpses" – but as I hopefully showed in Enlightened Justice, the tendency to conflate jurisprudence and violence in the 16th-18th centuries pretty clearly indicates that the Torture Trio would be quite at home in the post-Magna Carta, pre-Cesare Becarria world.

Those centuries are, of course, the very ones that saw the dawning Industrial Age enter daily life in a big way, and it was inevitable that crime and punishment would be one of the battlegrounds between philosophy and "progress."  Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we'll have a look at Early Modern responses to calls for humane executions and (ultimately futile) attempts to hold back the trend toward mechanical dehumanization.

The recent 5-4 ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States in Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. U.S. is rightly seen as a victory for those who oppose the hard-line stance of the Bush Administration.  While some believe the decision was merely a corrective to re-establish the role and the scope of the Court, this decision also encapsulates a microcosm of popular opinion.  

Sadly, many people cease to understand the logic of putting terrorist suspects on trial at all, and the most hawkish of them feel as though they should have been summarily executed on the battlefield in a "shoot first, ask questions later" fashion.  Even John Kerry modified his stance against capital punishment by adding an infamous caveat that the death penalty would never be used in his presumptive administration except, of course, for terrorists.  It had the feeling of an awkward campaign pledge tacked on for purely political reasons, and it's one of the reasons Senator Kerry did not win the Presidency in 2004.

This is a new series of articles I'm hoping to write, detailing why I feel that the left is correct on a variety of issues.  The second such issue I will be examining is one that many people seem to be misinformed about, and so I invite you to join me beyond the jump for an examination of...  THE DEATH PENALTY AND YOU.

Now that the Supremes have cleared the decks to begin the nasty business of administrative murder again, I went back and re-read an essay on capital punishment I'd put together a couple of years ago. I think it's held up well. Originally published here.
Also available here.  Join me below the fold, won't you?

By Brian Stull, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project. Brian helped represent Levon "Bo" Jones, an innocent man who was released from prison on May 2, 2008, after unjustly and erroneously spending 14 years on North Carolina's death row.

I've always known Bo Jones was innocent. But I had seen too much injustice in the last eight years working as a criminal defense lawyer to trust that his innocence alone  would set him free.

Here are the top stories in criminal justice reform, taken from the Justice Newsladder.

Here are the top stories in criminal justice reform, taken from the Justice Newsladder.

By Christopher Hill, state strategies coordinator with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which produced the groundbreaking Kerner Commission Report. Wanting to understand why uprisings happened in places like Newark and Detroit, President Lyndon Johnson gave the commission a set of questions: "What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?" The most quoted line from the report is that the United States is "moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."  

In its customary five-to-four decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution only prohibits "unusual" punishments. "‘Cruel and usual‘ are hunky-dory" wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. "Punishment is supposed to be cruel, and believe me the Founding Fathers were inured to suffering. Look at everyone’s teeth on the John Adams series. And that was probably their cleanest orifice."

The Court did offer some guidelines as to the definition of an unusual punishment. "It would have to be too obscure for Jeopardy" explained Roberts.