On Jan. 25, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) plans to execute Kenneth Smith by forcing him to breathe pure nitrogen gas, an untested execution method with profound legal and ethical consequences. Death penalty abolitionists worldwide have railed against this form of capital punishment, but these efforts have thus far failed to alter the state’s [...]
Our Supreme Court is now and has always been a political and ideological institution. But the Court fares the worst when it engages in naked partisan politics strongly favoring one side. Congress should take this political question out of the hands of the justices and remove Trump’s disqualification from state ballots pursuant to the last [...]
It is in the best interest of the Jewish people and the state of Israel that my fellow Jewish leaders whose moral compass compels them to criticize elements of the Israeli government’s response to Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 terrorist attack do so openly. They should speak truth to power, despite any fears for job security, [...]
“The Taliban’s new curriculum is all about killing people in the name of Jihad,” a Kabul-based teacher* told me in a recent interview. “I’m not going to teach that material, even if I know it means I will almost certainly lose my job,” the teacher said, citing an early draft of the new curriculum. Upon [...]
As we prepare to usher in 2024, the outlook on Alabama’s administration of the death penalty holds many terrible knowns, and an even greater number of grim unknowns. At the top of any capital punishment-watcher’s list: Is Alabama really going to move forward with the first state-sanctioned nitrogen gassing execution in US history? If all goes according [...]
In a distressing and seemingly interminable saga within the UK justice system, individuals sentenced to a mere two years have found themselves ensnared in unyielding decades-long stints of confinement—a grim consequence of the since-abolished Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) policy. In 2020, Lord Brown, a former justice of the UK Supreme Court wrote he had “no [...]
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 [...]
“The most tragic thing in the world and in life, readers and brothers of mine, is love. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine against death, for love is death’s brother.” Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life Looking Beneath: World [...]
The Taliban’s misguided belief that confining women to their homes protects them has led to an escalating mental health crisis and pervasive violence that are driving Afghan women to a despair from which far too many feel that suicide is the only means of escape. It was in this context that I enrolled several months [...]
On November 15, 2023, more than five weeks after Hamas‘ heinous October 7 attack on Israel, and after thousands of lives were lost, the Security Council, the United Nations body with the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, finally managed to pass a somewhat controversial resolution in response to the crisis. [...]
