NEWSDEATH PENALTY

Yesterday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued an unlimited stay in the execution of Hank Skinner.

Skinner was set to be executed tomorrow evening for the murders of his girlfriend and her two adult sons on New Years Eve of 1993 in Pampa, TX. Since the beginning, Skinner has maintained his innocence in the crime and there are numerous factors that make a strong case for DNA testing.

But the fight for testing crime scene evidence for DNA is just beginning. Earlier this year, Rick Perry signed into a law SB 122, a bill that amended Texas' post-conviction DNA evidence testing law. Now, the court must decide if that law applies to Skinner's appeals. According to the Texas Tribune, the post conviction law has been changed three times since its adoption in 2001, each time with the purpose of removing restriction on access to testing. In Texas, 45 innocent men have been exonerated using DNA testing. In October, 57 year-old Michael Morton was freed after serving 25 years in Texas jail for killing his wife. Morton was able to walk out of prison as a free man after DNA testing proved his innocence and linked another man to the murder.

Below is a letter from Kimberly Davis, the sister of Troy Davis who is set to be executed on September 21, 2011. Last week, Kimberly started a petition at Change.org and more than 200,000 of you signed it to help convince the Georgia Board of Parons & Parole to grant clemency to Troy. Now, she's asking just once more for your help in preventing the execution of her brother.

Dear fellow Change.org members,

Thanks in part to your amazing mobilization and effort, 650,000 signatures were delivered to the Georgia Board of Pardons & Parole, asking them to grant clemency for my brother, Troy Davis, who is slated to be executed by the state of Georgia this Wednesday despite evidence of innocence.

Despite recanted and conflicting witness testimony, the state of Georgia Department of Corrections plans to executeTroy Davis at 7:00 PM on September 21, 2011.

Kim Davis, Troy's sister, came to Change.org and started a petition asking the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to save her brother's life at a clemency hearing set for September 19 - two days before his scheduled execution. In just a few days, more than 200,000 people joined the campaign, voicing their support for Kim and Troy.

At a press conference taking place tomorrow morning, Amnesty International and the NAACP, two organizations that have been working hard to stop Troy Davis' execution for years, will be adding the signatures collected by Kim's Change.org petition to their own successful petitions and presenting them to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles.

The ongoing debacle of California’s death penalty took a few dramatic turns last week: in the span of just a few days a new poll showed a shift in public opinion in favor of cutting the death penalty, Gov. Jerry Brown took the first step towards doing just that by cutting plans for a new death row, and the department of corrections announced that the state’s hold on executions will last at least through the year if not longer.

At the same time, the California Democratic Party pushed even farther in their advocacy against the death penalty.

All told, it’s got people asking: Is California finally ready to dump the death penalty?

If you’re one of the three people (other than my parents) who’ve read my change.org bio, you’ll already know that before I started campaigning for the repeal of California’s death penalty and sentencing reform in LA County, I spent a few years living in Atlanta, Georgia – home to Coca Cola, Cartoon Network, and a criminal justice system intent on executing a man who may well be innocent.

I’ve never met him, but Troy Anthony Davis, on Georgia’s death row since 1991 despite grave doubts concerning his guilt, is the reason I left the work I was pursuing in graduate school and devoted myself to working against the death penalty.

I remember the exact moment. In September 2008, I got a call from a classmate who knew I had been involved in human rights activism in the past. He asked if I’d ever heard of Troy Davis, and I confessed that I hadn’t. He told me he was scheduled to be executed in a few days and asked me to research the case and let him know if I wanted to get involved. When I got home, I Googled the name. I invite you to do the same.

California’s budget debacle is more dire than ever, so it’s no surprise that Governor Jerry Brown is hunkering down in search of solutions as he approaches the California Democratic Party’s state convention at the end of the month. But some of his fellow Democrats and a growing number of other organizations around the state are staring one budget solution in the face and just want Jerry to open his eyes: CUT THIS!

The state’s death penalty is an ineffective waste of tax dollars that we simply can’t afford, yet while the Governor and Assembly slash everything from preschool to geriatric care, the state remains poised to spend $1 billion on the death penalty over the next five years.

That’s a billion dollars that can be saved with a few strokes of the Governor’s pen – all he has to do is convert the death sentences of those awaiting execution to life without parole, and POOF! The death penalty is cut from the budget and California saves $1 billion without releasing a single prisoner.

While he’s been acting oblivious to this fact, plenty of others around the state aren’t. The ACLU, the League of Women Voters, and leaders in the California Democratic Party are alerting the Governor to this solution.

Some advocates of the death penalty say capital punishment serves family members of murder victims. Prosecutors like LA County’s Steve Cooley, one of the nation’s most prolific death penalty prosecutors, often claim they seek the death penalty because it provides victims’ family members with closure, though many crime victims and victims' advocates have questioned the myth of “closure” when it comes to the death of a loved one. But like every other justification for the death penalty, this theory often fails the test.

A growing number of victims’ advocacy organizations are taking a stand against the death penalty because it prioritizes executions above the real needs of victims. Groups like Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, and California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty have shown how the needs of victims are often shunted aside in favor of the politics of executions.

Randy Steidl was a poster child for the death penalty, the kind of man supporters of state executions could point to as a criminal – convicted in 1987 of murdering a newlywed couple in Illinois and burning down their home with their bodies in it – who clearly deserved the ultimate punishment.

In the years following his conviction, Steidl's guilt was repeatedly reaffirmed by Illinois judges, with even the state Supreme Court upholding his death sentence. No one could say he didn't receive a fair chance at justice, that he had not been given amble opportunity to make his case in court.

There was just one problem with pointing to Steidl as a case study in why we need capital punishment: he was innocent. In 2004, nearly two decades after being tried and found guilty of a double homicide, Illinois prosecutors dropped all charges against Steidl, a move that came after the key witnesses during his trial repeatedly recanted their testimony against him.

Another week has gone by and, naturally, that means another round of shocking revelations about the United States’ addiction to lethal injection drugs, evoking memories from Requiem for a Dream. This time, the latest recipient of a Public Records Act request from your friendly neighborhood ACLU lawyer is the FDA, the agency that earlier this month claimed it wasn’t its job to regulate drugs used in lethal injections.

The ACLU keeps uncovering more to the story, but each new revelation just raises more unanswered questions.

Months ago, when state officials first started reporting that they had gotten their hands on the lethal injection drug sodium thiopental despite a nationwide shortage, the ACLU of Northern California began filing a series of Public Records Act requests to find out exactly how -- and from where -- they had gotten it. The first request went to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), and after a few weeks of the CDCR illegally withholding the documents, the ACLU went to court, forcing the department to release a flood of documents with about as much big black marker as actual information. But in between those black marker redactions, the ACLU gleaned some incredible facts: CDCR had spent thousands of hours of staff time and tens of thousands of dollars on what they called a “secret mission” to find the drug anywhere in the world and procure it at any cost.