You may think we’re a free people, living in a free country, but the government can kill you even if you’re innocent. Our legal system, generally speaking, allows government officials to arbitrarily take your life. Our political leaders can embroil our country in a war, enact conscriptio[...]
Posts Tagged ‘death penalty’
October 13th, 2024 - 6:59 pm § in Law and Courts
Should this man be executed?
Tremane Wood is on Arizona’s death row, and fighting for his life. Death penalty opponents and liberal media are also trying to rescue him from the death penalty. When trying to overturn a death sentence in the U.S., lawyers specializing in this work often focus on legal process arguments inst[...]
September 26th, 2024 - 7:41 pm § in Law and Courts
Do nitrogen gas executions work?
Of course they work. The method has been used twice now, and both those inmates are dead. So far, Alabama is the only state to execute anyone with nitrogen gas. It didn’t go off very well either time. The first the inmate “appeared conscious for several minutes into the execution, and sh[...]
June 6th, 2023 - 9:24 pm § in Law and Courts
What liberal propaganda looks like
When Michael Tisius (photo, left) was 19, he participated in a jailbreak. He killed two unarmed guards, and landed on Missouri’s death row (see story here). Twenty-three years later, as his execution approached, Huffington Post ran a story (here) pleading for commutation of his death sentence.[...]
March 12th, 2023 - 11:28 pm § in Law and Courts
Texas death factory
No, not the Mexican border. The courtrooms of Harris County, Texas. This county’s judges send more people to death row than any other U.S. county. This isn’t some out of the way place where justice is meted out by cowboy judges to hapless defendants represented by country lawyers. Harris[...]
February 22nd, 2023 - 1:06 pm § in Law and Courts
What if a state refuses to obey the Supreme Court?
Arizona badly wants to execute cop killer John Montenegro Cruz (photo, left), and has defied Supreme Court rulings standing in the way. In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled that if prosecutors seek a death sentence by telling jurors a defendant is a threat to society, the judge must allow his attorneys [...]
Trump’s Supreme Court is a hanging court
The Supreme Court is no longer a place you can go to stop the execution of an innocent person, or of someone whose sentencing was influenced by racial bias. Since 2019, when Trump put his first two appointees on the court, the new conservative court majority hasn’t accepted a single death pena[...]
June 19th, 2022 - 5:55 pm § in Law and Courts
Why I’m for the death penalty
You can put names on my reasons. Timothy McVeigh, for example, the Oklahoma City bomber who murdered 168 people, including 19 kids, and injured 680 more with a truck bomb in 1994 and was executed in 2001. Today’s name: Ricky Dubose. He was convicted this month of murdering two prison guards du[...]
May 24th, 2022 - 7:18 pm § in Law and Courts
SCOTUS reactionaries are blind to dubious death sentences
The Supreme Court’s conservatives don’t want federal judges to consider death row inmates’ innocence claims. Still want to argue they’re pro-life? Read story here. Clarence Thomas finally got to do what he’s been itching for years to do: Write a majority opinion saying [...]
May 11th, 2022 - 4:48 pm § in Law and Courts, Racism
He was innocent, but they didn’t execute him like Texas would have
Claude Garrett of Tennessee served 30 years of a life sentence before the state decided the fire that killed his girlfriend was an accident. But at least they didn’t kill him. After a judge ruled Garrett, now 65, demonstrated “actual innocence” he was released from prison on Tuesda[...]