The execution of Marcellus Williams is a horrible injustice. This didn’t have to happen. Just a couple weeks ago, prosecutors—with the support of the victim’s family—had reached a plea agreement with Marcellus that took death off the table. Missouri AG Andrew Bailey and the Missouri Supreme Court scuttled that agreement without any regard for the wishes of the victim's family. A week later, the trial court judge reversed course and blocked efforts by St. Louis County prosecutors to vacate Marcellus’s conviction.

It’s outrageous that Missouri is so close to executing Marcellus Williams. He was convicted at a trial where prosecutors intentionally struck at least one Black person from the jury pool. Witnesses were paid to point the finger at Marcellus. His DNA is not on the murder weapon. Trial prosecutors handled the murder weapon without gloves, irreparably contaminating it. The current St. Louis County prosecuting attorney admitted fault and was willing to enter a plea agreement where Marcellus would be re-sentenced to life in prison.

The State of Texas killed Ivan Cantu last night. I was there with him, standing near his face, holding his hand, and praying into his ear until the chemicals killed him. God's grace was with him and with me. He was one of the most faith-filled, self-directed people I have ever encountered. His strength helped me. His last words were directed calmly and clearly to the victims' families watching him die from the witness chambers.

Yesterday, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a brief in support on one of Richard Glossip's pending appeals at the U.S. Supreme Court. AG Drummond agrees that Richard is entitled to a new trial due to prosecutorial misconduct. AG Drummond presents the question before the Supreme Court in the case:

Unless a court intervenes, Missouri will execute Michael Tisius tomorrow, June 6th. When Michael was 19 years old, he made a terrible mistake and killed two jailers while attempting to free a former cellmate. But Michael is not the worst of the worst and does not deserve to die. Michael's difficulties began before he was born. His mother, Patty, was abandoned by her own mother at a young age. Patty's father died suddenly when she was 13 years old.

Today is the 20th World Day Against the Death Penalty, with a focus this year on the relationship between capital punishment and torture. The entire death penalty process is torturous for every person involved. Those on death row spend decades awaiting the eventual day when the government will take them into a room, render them defenseless, and kill them through one of several torturous methods of execution. This is mental torture.

Alabama tried and failed to execute Alan Miller by lethal injection on September 22nd. Prison workers stabbed him with needles over and over again for 90 minutes. Now Alabama wants another chance to kill Alan "as soon as possible." theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… The Alabama Department of Corrections was well aware that medical professionals have struggled to access Alan Miller's veins for his entire adult life. Alan weighs 351 pounds. It is extremely difficult for qualified anesthesiologists to access veins on a person of that size.

Today is #IndigenousPeoplesDay. Did you know that the incarceration rate for Native Americans is 38% higher than the national average? Racism and profiling lead to more arrests, harsher sentencing, and more abuse in the prison system for Native Americans. Native Americans are arrested two times more often than non-indigenous people for property and violent crimes. Statistics also show that Native Americans receive longer sentences from judges and spend more time in prison before parole.

Benjamin Cole is the next person scheduled for execution in Oklahoma. He is a frail, 57-year-old man with a damaged brain. Cole suffers with progressive and severe mental illness. He is wheelchair bound and much of the time catatonic. @GovStitt should stop this execution. In December 2002, Benjamin Cole caused injuries that resulted in the death of his daughter, Brianna Cole. We remember Brianna and mourn her death. While there is some question as to whether the injuries may have been accidental, Cole accepted responsibility and expressed regret.

This afternoon, a judge ruled that it is unlawful to carry out executions by use of the electric chair or firing squad under the South Carolina Constitution's prohibition against cruel, unusual, and corporal punishments. This reinstates a de facto execution moratorium in S.C. South Carolina, like many states, has struggled in recent years to obtain lethal injection drugs. In 2021, the state legislature amended the law and made electrocution the default method of execution, then applied the change retroactively to every person on death row.

Prisons, the places where we warehouse human beings, are mostly hidden from sight, hidden from mind, and the people who are locked away in them are preserved, in our collective consciousness, as they were when they were convicted. The stories of who they have become 10, 20, 30, 40, even 50 years later, still imprisoned, are rarely told.

Oklahoma's planned two-year-long execution spree exemplifies so many of the common problems in our death penalty system. These 25 men represent the reality of capital punishment in America. Our system condemns the people who are the most vulnerable, not the "worst of the worst." At least eight of the 25 men scheduled for execution in Oklahoma have been diagnosed with severe brain damage. Sentencing juries heard little or no evidence about the extent of their mental impairments.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued another death penalty-related opinion today in the case of Shoop v. Twyford. The decision uses circular logic to cut back further on the ability of death row prisoners to develop evidence that their sentences are unconstitutional. The case is about an order issued by a federal district court requiring Ohio to transport Raymond Twyford to a hospital for medical testing. Twyford was seeking to argue that a traumatic brain injury should have been presented earlier in this case.

If there’s a way a lethal injection execution can go wrong, it’s probably happened in Oklahoma over the past decade. Why are federal courts allowing Oklahoma to operate this incompetent killing apparatus as what amounts to an unregulated human experiment on death row prisoners? 2014: Lethal injection drugs are injected into Clayton Lockett’s muscle instead of a vein. He remained conscious despite being declared unconscious and died of a heart attack after trying to get up from the execution gurney.

Last Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada reached the landmark decision that a sentence of life imprisonment with no realistic possibility of parole is cruel and unusual punishment and illegal under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 🧵 (1/?) The case, R v Bissonnette, stems from the horrible 2017 mosque shooting that occurred in Quebec City. Six worshippers were killed and five others were seriously injured. The perpetrator pleaded guilty to all charges.

Daniel Taylor was 17 years old when Chicago police beat him until he made a false confession to a double murder he could not have committed because he was incarcerated at the time of the crime: chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022… When the Illinois Attorney General’s office reviewed the prosecutor’s trial file, a handwritten note was found indicating that seven police officers told the prosecutor that Daniel Taylor was in a police station holding cell at the time of the double murder.

The SCOTUS ruled against Arizona death row prisoners David Ramirez and Barry Jones this morning by a 6-3 vote. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent describes the majority’s opinion as “perverse” and “illogical.”

https://twitter.com/helenprejean/status/1468738451704979456

Justice Thomas’s majority opinion begins with a gruesome recounting of the crimes Ramirez and Jones were convicted of committing (although Jones may be innocent).

Virgil Presnell has been awaiting execution for almost 50 years. Justice Breyer has repeatedly raised constitutional concerns about excessive delays in the death penalty process. This most extreme case may prompt the Justice to address this issue again before his retirement.

https://twitter.com/helenprejean/status/1526308491333279745

In his dissent in Glossip v. Gross, Justice Breyer recognized that delays in the death penalty system are largely caused by the constitutionally required appeals and federal review processes. These safeguards are necessary because "death is different."

Absent intervention from the courts, Georgia will execute Virgil Presnell tomorrow. He has been incarcerated for almost 50 years. Virgil's life story is a difficult read but it is important that we face the truth about who we execute in America: As Virgil's lawyer wrote in the clemency petition, any discussion of the case must start at the beginning. On May 4, 1976, Virgil kidnapped two young girls, sexually assaulted them, and killed one of the girls, Lori Ann Smith. These were horrible crimes. I pray for the families.

In 1987, the SCOTUS decided the case of McCleskey v. Kemp. It is one of the most shameful Supreme Court decisions in American history. The Court ruled that clear racial bias in the death penalty system is just a "discrepancy," not a "major systemic defect." In the majority opinion, the Court wrote that, "Apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system."

Although Clarence Dixon’s history of mental illness was well-known to the state, the judge in his death penalty case allowed him to fire his court-appointed public defender and represent himself at trial: ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/clarenc… As a result, the jury didn’t hear that two days prior to Deana Bowdoin’s murder, Dixon had been on trial for assault. Then-Arizona state court judge Sandra Day O’Connor had found Dixon not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered the district attorney to civilly commit him.