Search Results for: California prisons

A lawyer-turned-death penalty abolitionist and a Jewish cantor join forces for JURIST to argue that the Jewish community has a unique obligation to voice resistance to Alabama’s plans to begin using nitrogen gas as a means of executing death row convicts. In Part 1, Stephen Cooper reflects on his great-grandmother’s death in a Nazi death [...]

In its euthanasia guidelines, the American Veterinary Medical Association advises against the use of nitrogen gas to kill rats. And yet Alabama is pushing ahead with plans to experiment with using the gas to execute its condemned. Even defendants convicted of the cruelest of murders cannot, except for cynically and spitefully, be said to be [...]

In November of 1985, legendary liberal Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. declared, “the fatal constitutional infirmity of capital punishment is that it treats members of the human race as non-humans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded.” With Alabama primed to gas condemned prisoners to death with nitrogen — and with other [...]

The “Texas Lawyer’s Creed” was promulgated by the Supreme Court of Texas and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on November 7, 1989. Established to eliminate abusive tactics within the practice of law, it was thought to be a seminal moment in the legal profession; the culmination of months of hard work and spirited debate [...]

Marjorie Cohn is a professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California. She has authored publications arguing against the legality of the 2003 US military intervention in Iraq as well as the US-led NATO interventions into Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia. Professor Cohn is also a national board member of Assange [...]

“The existence of `system’ in the world is obvious to every observer of nature, no matter whom.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959)           Whether conspicuous or obscure, terrorism generally presents itself as a systemic challenge. This means, inter alia, that seemingly singular strategic and legal matters may actually be many-sided and interrelated. Regarding legal issues, though [...]

Floridians gathered across the state Thursday to protest a recently enacted law that imposes restrictions on undocumented immigrants. In what protesters dubbed, “a day without immigrants,” thousands walked off the job to voice their opposition to Governor Ron DeSantis’s approval of Senate Bill (SB) 1718. In Immokalee, Florida, dozens of businesses closed in support of the [...]

The California Reparations Task Force Wednesday convened for a two-day public comment period to decide how reparations to Black Californians should be paid. The meetings will be live streamed on the California Office of the Attorney General website. California Assembly Bill 3121 (AB 3121), which was signed into law September 2020, establishes the task force [...]

The Appellate Court of Maryland Tuesday reinstated the conviction of Adnan Syed for the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and remanded the case. Hae Min Lee’s brother Young Lee appealed the vacature of Syed’s conviction on the grounds that he did not receive notice of Syed’s hearing. In his appeal, Lee argued that he [...]

The US Supreme Court Tuesday declined to block the execution of Missouri inmate Leonard Taylor despite new evidence potentially proving a wrongful conviction. Taylor died by lethal injection at the state prison in Bonne Terre on Tuesday. Taylor was convicted of the murders of his girlfriend Angela Rowe and her three children in 2004 but [...]