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Death penalty: Soon to be a relic

Death penalty: Soon to be a relic

"Ol' Sparky, the Lone Star State's official instrument of death for 40 years, resides these days in the Texas Prison Museum in ...

3:37 AM

The Growing Gap Between the U.S. and the International Anti-Death-Penalty Consensus

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzYtit8NJDCRLIRlPKKePilrpPrgqvvSJJBLPmvCxqlhBl0iw0IaNUoc55CgHp6LLD3M9qJnPQVLaPhx25qJuvQiXgEPWYkagbnUz2SSF1ZOG8HSqdNmNxfTJNShoQ3hQP-meHLGxu_FI/s1600/Gallows%252C+Department+of+Corrections%252C+Smyrna%252C+Delaware%252C+1991.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Disused gallows in Smyrna prison, Delaware, 1991" border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzYtit8NJDCRLIRlPKKePilrpPrgqvvSJJBLPmvCxqlhBl0iw0IaNUoc55CgHp6LLD3M9qJnPQVLaPhx25qJuvQiXgEPWYkagbnUz2SSF1ZOG8HSqdNmNxfTJNShoQ3hQP-meHLGxu_FI/s400/Gallows%252C+Department+of+Corrections%252C+Smyrna%252C+Delaware%252C+1991.jpg" title="Disused gallows in Smyrna prison, Delaware, 1991" width="373" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Disused gallows in Smyrna prison, Delaware, 1991</td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>In employing the death penalty, the U.S. insists it abides by international law. But it declines to make the most important international commitment - to reject the penalty as a violation of human rights. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Last week, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for a worldwide "moratorium on the use of the death penalty" - the 6th that the U.N. has approved in the past decade. Each one has gained the support of more of the organization's members. The latest vote was 117 countries in favor to 409 against. (31 abstained, and 5 did not vote.) In addition to a call for a halt to executions worldwide, the resolution urges countries that maintain the death penalty to increasingly restrict its imposition and to apply international laws that protect the rights of those facing the penalty. The rights include that a death sentence may be imposed only for the "most serious crimes," defined as intentional crimes that have "lethal or other extremely grave consequences," and that execution be carried out only after "a final judgment rendered by a competent court," following a legal process that insures a fair trial and that provides access to appeal to a higher court and the opportunity to seek a pardon or a commutation of the sentence.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the General Assembly, the United States cast one of the nay votes. Stefanie Amadeo, the deputy representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, explained the country's position, which is basically unchanged since the U.S. opposed the 1st resolution against the death penalty, in 2007: "The ultimate decision regarding these issues must be addressed through the domestic democratic processes of individual Member States and be consistent with their obligations under international law," which does not prohibit capital punishment. The position reflects the American reality of supporting the death penalty in principle, but increasingly outlawing it in practice. As Jeffrey Toobin reported recently, the U.S. maintains the death penalty under federal and military law and under the laws of 31 states - even though only 5 states conducted executions in 2016 and executed only 20 people in total, the lowest number in 25 years.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><h3>Global norms</h3><br />The U.S. stresses the importance of observing global norms. "Just as the United States is committed to complying with its international obligations," Amadeo said, "we strongly urge other countries that employ the death penalty to do so only in full compliance with their international obligations." Meanwhile, in the past 40 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly sought to restrict the application of the death penalty to the worst of the worst offenders - 1st, to people who commit the most heinous murders and, then, only to adults who commit them, excluding youth under the age of 18. In addition, it generally takes a decade or more for a state to carry out an execution because of challenges to a death sentence allowed under due process of law.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Among the states with the death penalty, 12 have not carried out an execution for a decade or more, and another five have not executed anyone for at least 5 years. In California, where the last execution was in 2006, there were 750 people on death row as of December 2nd. Rather than being executed (the state has executed only 13 people since 1978) it is much more likely that a death-row inmate will die as a result of natural causes or suicide.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Roger Hood, an emeritus professor at Oxford, and Carolyn Hoyle, who directs Oxford's Centre for Criminology, last year published the 5th edition of "The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective." Their book documents the many ways that people are sentenced to death in violation of international law - for drug-trafficking, for example, rather than for "the most serious crimes," in unfair proceedings and with no opportunity to ask for clemency, and while imprisoned in terrible conditions. These and other realities, they write, are moving "the debate about capital punishment beyond the view that each nation has, if it wishes, the sovereign right to retain the death penalty" to persuading "countries that retain the death penalty that it inevitably, and however administered, violates universally accepted human rights." Countries that employ the death penalty and insist that they are abiding by international law, including the U.S., decline to join in making the most important international commitment about the penalty, which is to reject it as a violation of human rights.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There has long been a gap between the idealism that the U.S. expresses when boasting of its dedication to the rule of law, especially the protection of individual rights, and the reality of its persistent refusal to abide by major international human-rights commitments. The U.S. was a leader in the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the U.N. adopted in 1948, but stopped supporting the international system to carry it out because, among other reasons, Jim Crow laws directly violated the declaration. There is a sizable list of human-rights treaties - on the Rights of the Child, for example, and on the International Criminal Court - that the U.S. has signed but not ratified. Even when the U.S. ratifies treaties, the government often adds a caveat that excludes protection of some basic rights.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As a result, the U.S. has ended up in some rough company, particularly when it comes to the death penalty. In the past generation, the number of countries that have stopping using the death penalty has doubled, from about 50 to about 100. Of the 57 member states of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and of the 35 member states of the Organization of American States, only the U.S. carried out executions last year. The countries that executed the most offenders were, in order, China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. China executed thousands of people, though its secrecy about its use of capital punishment makes it impossible to know exactly how many. Excluding China, Iran (with close to 1000 or more), Pakistan (326), and Saudi Arabia (158) executed almost 9 out of 10 people put to death worldwide - "often after grossly unfair trials," according to Amnesty International, and "for crimes - including drug trafficking, corruption, 'adultery,' and 'blasphemy' - that do not meet the international legal standards for the use of the death penalty." In 2015, according to Amnesty International, at least 1634 people were executed, an increase of more than 50 % from the year before and the highest number in a quarter of a century. (The organization expects to release figures for 2016 in the spring.)<br /><br /><h3>The influence of the U.S. on the death penalty worldwide</h3></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The United States, in other words, ranks with countries that conspicuously are not in full compliance with their international obligations. And its responsibility is sometimes worse than guilt by association. As Maya Foa, the director of the death-penalty team at Reprieve, an international human-rights organization, told me, "The U.S. clearly leads and influences global death-penalty practice. Our partners, who are lawyers and human-rights defenders in jurisdictions that retain the penalty, tell us that the use of the death penalty by the U.S., a 'developed' nation, is used to justify the death-penalty practice in the jurisdictions they work in." Reprieve is providing legal and investigative assistance to people facing execution in 11 countries, in Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, and in the U.S.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In August at a rally in Istanbul, after the failed coup attempt in Turkey, the BBC reported, the country's President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said, "They say there is no death penalty in the E.U. ... Well, the U.S. has it; Japan has it; China has it; most of the world has it. So they are allowed to have it. We used to have it until 1984. Sovereignty belongs to the people, so if the people make this decision I am sure the political parties will comply." He said that the Turkish people might want to restore the death penalty to punish those responsible for killing hundreds of citizens during the attempted coup. That has not happened yet, but, if it does, its purpose, Erdogan suggested, will be a display of cold-blooded power.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The influence of the U.S. on the death penalty worldwide has sometimes been constructive. In 1976, for example, when the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for a state to make the death penalty mandatory for any crime, it marked the beginning of the decline of mandatory death sentences around the world. "The fundamental respect for humanity underlying the Eighth Amendment," the Court said, "requires consideration of the character and record of the individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Indian Supreme Court employed this logic when it struck down the mandatory death sentence in the country's penal code, in 1983. The legislature, it held, could not compel judges "to shut their eyes to mitigating circumstances and inflict upon them the dubious and unconscionable duty of imposing a preordained sentence of death." More recently, the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide reports, 18 other countries have followed suit and struck down the mandatory death penalty, including almost every Caribbean nation and Uganda, Malawi, and Kenya.<br /><br /><h3>Replacing Justice Scalia</h3></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In their latest edition of "The Death Penalty," Hood and Hoyle write optimistically about the U.S. example: "Those who campaign for abolition worldwide can hope that it will not be many years before the U.S. Supreme Court will be able to find that the majority of states, in line with a majority of countries worldwide, does not support the death penalty for anyone." Donald Trump has said that he will replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia - the Court's most vehement defender of the death penalty for almost 30 years - with someone in his mold. But, even when that happens, there will be a possibility that Justice Anthony Kennedy will join the Court's moderate liberals in striking down the death penalty, for reasons Justice Stephen Breyer articulated in 2015: "The Court in effect delegated significant responsibility to the States to develop procedures that would" insure the fairness of the capital-punishment system, he wrote. "Almost 40 years of studies, surveys, and experience strongly indicate, however, that this effort has failed." If the Court continues to uphold the death penalty, on the other hand, the gap between the U.S. and a large and growing majority of the rest of the world will continue to increase.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Source: The New Yorker, Lincoln Caplan, December 31, 2016. Mr. Caplan, a former New Yorker staff writer, is a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and the author of the new book "American Justice 2016: The Political Supreme Court."</div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">⚑ | Report an error, an omission; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: <a href="mailto:deathpenaltynews@gmail.com">deathpenaltynews@gmail.com</a>.</div><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4" style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; border: 0px solid rgb(255, 204, 0); color: black; text-align: center; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr>   <td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/WebDPN/" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL4sspwgGptzvuHVklum5TwxKppRN-lIC5TN8RLZFq_B4ZOtBrX1ssXPNKQ6XpSyQFRJRtVQN45HMkpt3VX0JtOW0TovwxZAurG-AV6gh98IAXo7Ip6QlpkZr9WrM3_m943Mwy-gGxBAY/s1600/Find+us+Facebook.jpg" /></a></div></td>   <td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://twitter.com/WebDPN" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiULIPEaT_P6oIauxAZd17XRRxljesDLS7iIjdQXT7Xct99uHeohx4IYmiAB6S044gTjMDGSy50sL2vDzOyPZ-3vJj9zwcYQ2rgzJh9v1-QDiunKAQtLLLqJ83s38qN3HABxGIC8GsIOD0/s1600/Find+us+twitter.jpg" /></a><span id="goog_1427852018"></span><span id="goog_1427852019"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a></div></td>  </tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><b>Opposed to Capital Punishment? 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The Growing Gap Between the U.S. and the International Anti-Death-Penalty Consensus

Disused gallows in Smyrna prison, Delaware, 1991 In employing the death penalty, the U.S. insists it abides by international law. But it dec...

5:43 AM

The Stolen Supreme Court Seat

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoM_w-5SulQFmfKpQkOFtwTQ3s1C6xwNtdhtnywBdeJBR8u3ZAvdU8adYjrYgZQFkSH_3Utu_p-zYNKH1ET6p6sb3xXn6XlWGtNFGwU62zJng8Hma6XvFHEKXh98usba6YuHAOkae5EOQ/s1600/US+Supreme+Court.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="US Supreme Court" border="0" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoM_w-5SulQFmfKpQkOFtwTQ3s1C6xwNtdhtnywBdeJBR8u3ZAvdU8adYjrYgZQFkSH_3Utu_p-zYNKH1ET6p6sb3xXn6XlWGtNFGwU62zJng8Hma6XvFHEKXh98usba6YuHAOkae5EOQ/s400/US+Supreme+Court.jpg" title="US Supreme Court" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Soon after his inauguration next month, President-elect Donald Trump will nominate someone to the Supreme Court, which has been hamstrung by a vacancy since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. There will be public debates about the nominee’s credentials, past record, judicial philosophy and temperament. There will be Senate hearings and a vote.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">No matter how it plays out, Americans must remember one thing above all: The person who gets confirmed will sit in a stolen seat.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was stolen from Barack Obama, a twice-elected president who fulfilled his constitutional duty more than nine months ago by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/opinion/merrick-garland-for-the-supreme-court.html" target="_blank">nominating Merrick Garland</a>, a highly qualified and widely respected federal appellate judge.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was stolen by top Senate Republicans, who broke with longstanding tradition and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/us/politics/supreme-court-nomination-obama.html" target="_blank">refused to consider</a> any nominee Mr. Obama might send them, because they wanted to preserve the court’s conservative majority. The main perpetrators of the theft were Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and Charles Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. But virtually all Republican senators were accomplices; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/21/us/politics/where-republican-senators-stand-on-the-supreme-court-nomination.html" target="_blank">only two</a> supported holding hearings.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Republican party line — that it was an election year, so the American people should have a “voice” in the selection of the next justice — was a patent lie. The people spoke when they re-elected Mr. Obama in 2012, entrusting him to choose new members for the court. And the Senate <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/16/opinion/in-election-years-a-history-of-confirming-court-nominees.html" target="_blank">has had no problem</a> considering, and usually confirming, election-year nominees in the past.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, Supreme Court appointments have always been political, and the court’s ideological center has shifted back and forth over time. But the Senate has given nominees full consideration and a vote even when the party in power has opposed a president’s choice. That is, until this year, when Republicans claimed that though the Constitution<a href="http://www.annenbergclassroom.org/page/article-ii-section-2" target="_blank"> calls for the Senate’s </a><a href="http://www.annenbergclassroom.org/page/article-ii-section-2">“advice and consent,”</a> senators aren’t obligated to do anything. This is a bad-faith reading of that clause, even if there is no clear way to force a vote. It certainly obliterates a well-established political norm that makes a functioning judicial branch possible. As Paul Krugman <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/how-republics-end.html" target="_blank">wrote </a><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/how-republics-end.html">in his column</a> on Monday, institutions are not magically self-sustaining, and they “don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This particular norm is of paramount importance because the court’s institutional legitimacy depends on its perceived separation from the elected branches — <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/us/politics/john-roberts-criticized-supreme-court-confirmation-process-before-there-was-a-vacancy.html?_r=0" target="_blank">a fragile concept</a> in the best of times. By tying the latest appointment directly to the outcome of the election, Mr. McConnell and his allies took a torch to that idea — an outrageous gambit that, to nearly everyone’s shock, has paid off. But while Republicans may be celebrating now, the damage they have inflicted on the confirmation process, and on the court as an institution, may be irreversible.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHIpsBYs9L2DTMlBp5Ls6uKMHG6PP5nRzPH47iLYv9tlLwbydOo6PHINg-FgcUqDQ5r4_yr3Nj69XtcxA5-xhYA_h3oJHSD65p9m8j_JJGrfLiH57-Cl0B7JD22tLlfxaXyk3Mk-Sto7E/s1600/Antonin+Scalia+Death_PH09.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHIpsBYs9L2DTMlBp5Ls6uKMHG6PP5nRzPH47iLYv9tlLwbydOo6PHINg-FgcUqDQ5r4_yr3Nj69XtcxA5-xhYA_h3oJHSD65p9m8j_JJGrfLiH57-Cl0B7JD22tLlfxaXyk3Mk-Sto7E/s400/Antonin+Scalia+Death_PH09.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The slope is both slippery and steep. If Republicans could justify an election-year blockade, what’s to stop Democrats in the future from doing the same? For that matter, why should the party controlling the Senate <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-20/supreme-court-nominations-will-never-be-the-same" target="_blank">ever allow</a> a president of the opposing party to choose a justice<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-20/supreme-court-nominations-will-never-be-the-same">?</a> Indeed, in the weeks before the election, Senate Republicans were threatening, with the encouragement of leading conservative thinkers, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/opinion/a-coup-against-the-supreme-court.html" target="_blank">never to confirm anyone</a> to fill the vacancy if Hillary Clinton won.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Can anything be done to repair the harm? One step — as obvious as it is unlikely — would be for Mr. Trump to renominate Mr. Garland. Conservatives will scoff, but they know he is as qualified for the job as anyone in the country. When Mr. Garland was floated as a possible choice for the Supreme Court in 2010, Orrin Hatch, the senior Republican senator from Utah, called him a “consensus nominee” and said there was <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-hatch-idUSTRE6456QY20100506" target="_blank">“no question”</a> that he would be confirmed with bipartisan support. That’s partly why Mr. Obama nominated him this time, and also why Mr. McConnell denied him a hearing — he knew he couldn’t prevent a Senate vote once Americans saw an eminently qualified and reasonable jurist testify on live TV.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the very least, Mr. Trump could follow President Obama’s example and pick a centrist — someone who commands wide respect and operates within the bounds of mainstream legal thought. That would be an appropriate gesture from a man who lost the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes and will enter office with the <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/199352/trump-transition-approval-lower-predecessors.aspx" target="_blank">lowest approval</a><a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/199352/trump-transition-approval-lower-predecessors.aspx"> ratings</a> in recent history.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The shameful, infuriating actions of the Senate Republicans won’t be ignored in the history books. In a desperate effort to keep a conservative majority on the court, they rejected their own professed values of preserving American institutions. There’s little hope that they will come to their senses now, but they and Mr. Trump have the power, and the obligation, to fix the mess they created.</div><br />Source: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/24/opinion/sunday/the-stolen-supreme-court-seat.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>, The Editorial Borad, December 24, 2016<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">⚑ | Report an error, an omission; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: <a href="mailto:deathpenaltynews@gmail.com">deathpenaltynews@gmail.com</a>.</div><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4" style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; border: 0px solid rgb(255, 204, 0); color: black; text-align: center; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr>   <td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/WebDPN/" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL4sspwgGptzvuHVklum5TwxKppRN-lIC5TN8RLZFq_B4ZOtBrX1ssXPNKQ6XpSyQFRJRtVQN45HMkpt3VX0JtOW0TovwxZAurG-AV6gh98IAXo7Ip6QlpkZr9WrM3_m943Mwy-gGxBAY/s1600/Find+us+Facebook.jpg" /></a></div></td>   <td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://twitter.com/WebDPN" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiULIPEaT_P6oIauxAZd17XRRxljesDLS7iIjdQXT7Xct99uHeohx4IYmiAB6S044gTjMDGSy50sL2vDzOyPZ-3vJj9zwcYQ2rgzJh9v1-QDiunKAQtLLLqJ83s38qN3HABxGIC8GsIOD0/s1600/Find+us+twitter.jpg" /></a><span id="goog_1427852018"></span><span id="goog_1427852019"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a></div></td>  </tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><b>Opposed to Capital Punishment? 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The Stolen Supreme Court Seat

Soon after his inauguration next month, President-elect Donald Trump will nominate someone to the Supreme Court, which has been hamstrung by...

9:23 AM

Trump to inherit more than 100 court vacancies, plans to reshape judiciary

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc43GKgsYq-I6vGT5-te_WaIR-sKbg9J0xslQmc9EyChWUPsJVSCfkaEFypntmQkmNNmLIyuU-OQ_S2ea-LXn8bNKoqc_MWMyi2jxHp9AWoDXTQ5a3vZEuQROAxsb9dB9IlDECEzwzDEI/s1600/SOL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc43GKgsYq-I6vGT5-te_WaIR-sKbg9J0xslQmc9EyChWUPsJVSCfkaEFypntmQkmNNmLIyuU-OQ_S2ea-LXn8bNKoqc_MWMyi2jxHp9AWoDXTQ5a3vZEuQROAxsb9dB9IlDECEzwzDEI/s400/SOL.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Donald Trump is set to inherit an uncommon number of vacancies in the federal courts in addition to the open Supreme Court seat, giving the president-elect a monumental opportunity to reshape the judiciary after taking office.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The estimated 103 judicial vacancies that President Obama is expected to hand over to Trump in the Jan. 20 transition of power is nearly double the 54 openings Obama found eight years ago following George W. Bush’s presidency.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees slowed to a crawl after Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015. Obama White House officials blame Senate Republicans for what they characterize as an unprecedented level of obstruction in blocking the Democratic president’s court picks.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The result is a multitude of openings throughout the federal circuit and district courts that will allow the new Republican president to quickly make a wide array of lifetime appointments.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">State gun control laws, abortion restrictions, voter laws, anti-discrimination measures and immigrant issues are all matters that are increasingly heard by federal judges and will be influenced by the new composition of the courts. Trump has vowed to choose ideologues in the mold of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon — a prospect that has activists on the right giddy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“I’m optimistic he’ll come at this right out of the gate,” said Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative group that has opposed many of Obama’s court choices.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“Every president can expect to make a huge impact,” Severino added. “[Trump] is unique in having campaigned really hard on this issue — the significance of the courts, and of the Supreme Court in particular.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Supreme Court vacancy created by Scalia’s death in February was a motivating issue for many conservative voters, especially evangelical Christians, to turn out for Trump. Senate Republicans refused to hold even a hearing on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, for the Scalia seat.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Democrats accuse Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, of intentionally denying Obama’s nominees a fair hearing and running out the clock in hopes that a Republican would succeed him, as Trump has.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Twenty-five of Obama’s court nominees were pending on the Senate floor, after having been approved out of the committee with bipartisan support, but did not get a vote before the Senate ended its two-year term before the holidays, according to White House spokesman Eric Schultz.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“Republican tactics have been shameful and will forever leave a stain on the United States Senate,” Schultz said. “Republican congressional dysfunction has now metastasized to the third branch of government, and that is not a legacy to be proud of.”</div><br /><b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-to-inherit-more-than-100-court-vacancies-plans-to-reshape-judiciary/2016/12/25/d190dd18-c928-11e6-85b5-76616a33048d_story.html" target="_blank">Click here to read the full article</a></b><br /><br />Source: The Washington Post, Philip Rucker and Robert Barnes, December 25, 2016<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">⚑ | Report an error, an omission; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: <a href="mailto:deathpenaltynews@gmail.com">deathpenaltynews@gmail.com</a>.</div><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4" style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; border: 0px solid rgb(255, 204, 0); color: black; text-align: center; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr>   <td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/WebDPN/" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL4sspwgGptzvuHVklum5TwxKppRN-lIC5TN8RLZFq_B4ZOtBrX1ssXPNKQ6XpSyQFRJRtVQN45HMkpt3VX0JtOW0TovwxZAurG-AV6gh98IAXo7Ip6QlpkZr9WrM3_m943Mwy-gGxBAY/s1600/Find+us+Facebook.jpg" /></a></div></td>   <td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://twitter.com/WebDPN" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiULIPEaT_P6oIauxAZd17XRRxljesDLS7iIjdQXT7Xct99uHeohx4IYmiAB6S044gTjMDGSy50sL2vDzOyPZ-3vJj9zwcYQ2rgzJh9v1-QDiunKAQtLLLqJ83s38qN3HABxGIC8GsIOD0/s1600/Find+us+twitter.jpg" /></a><span id="goog_1427852018"></span><span id="goog_1427852019"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a></div></td>  </tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><b>Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! <a href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=JBVXEBZLP3WKW" target="_blank">DONATE!</a></b></div><form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" target="_blank"><div style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/fr_FR/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" /></div></form><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div>

Trump to inherit more than 100 court vacancies, plans to reshape judiciary

Donald Trump is set to inherit an uncommon number of vacancies in the federal courts in addition to the open Supreme Court seat, giving the ...

8:52 AM

US capital punishment fall to 40-year low in 2016

<div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkBu3-pmv1QknN8Gd_H9VQIr3726mikiS-OEZcOvhZm_oOxE16L-gYbwRdNrWCL8u_CyeolNlwykgiiV9BVyeaiUDvDPQf0WlY6baTOgppYaxivgX5cSlESRPWGBTDhHnTkNAE1U398a8-/s1600/21st+century.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="326" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkBu3-pmv1QknN8Gd_H9VQIr3726mikiS-OEZcOvhZm_oOxE16L-gYbwRdNrWCL8u_CyeolNlwykgiiV9BVyeaiUDvDPQf0WlY6baTOgppYaxivgX5cSlESRPWGBTDhHnTkNAE1U398a8-/s400/21st+century.gif" width="400" /></a></div><b>Fewer death sentences were handed down in the US this year than at any time in the last four decades, a study finds.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Only 30 such penalties were imposed in 2016, the lowest since the US Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976 after a four-year hiatus.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Five states, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Florida and Missouri, carried out 20 executions.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It continues a 20-year downward trend in US capital punishment, says the Death Penalty Information Center.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The new <a href="http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/" target="_blank">DPIC report</a> showed that not only have executions slowed or even halted in the vast majority of states, but juries and judges are sentencing fewer people to death.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"This year, death sentences will be lower than at any other time in the modern history of the American death penalty," says Robert Dunham, executive director of the DPIC and lead author of the study. "That, I think, is a big story."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">After the US death penalty was reinstated 40 years ago, the number of death sentences and executions began steadily rising.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In 1977, 137 death sentences were handed down.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The trend peaked in the 1990s, with 98 executions in 1999 and 315 new death sentences in 1996.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Then the downward trend began.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In 2016, only 30 new death sentences were handed down, and 20 executions took place.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That was the fewest number of executions since 1991.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of the five states that put inmates to death in 2016, Georgia led the way with nine executions, followed by Texas with seven, Alabama with two, and both Florida and Missouri executed one person.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">New death sentences are down 37% from 2015, according to the report, and fewer death sentences were imposed in 2016 "than in any other year since the Supreme Court declared US death penalty statutes unconstitutional in... 1972".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mr Dunham points out that the low number of new death sentences was notable as well.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Georgia, for example, sentenced no-one to death in 2016.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Texas had four new death sentences, which is very low for the state," he said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Dallas and Harris counties, which is where Houston and Dallas are, imposed no new death sentences for only the second time since the 1980s."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The halt of executions in some states can be explained by the difficulty procuring legally acceptable <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36292193" target="_blank">drugs needed for lethal injections in the US</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Many pharmaceutical companies refuse to provide them, and the European Union banned the export of the drugs to the US in 2011.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some states have resorted to clandestine deals with compounding pharmacies or different drug cocktails, and a series of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-27215508" target="_blank">botched executions</a> in recent years has raised legal and ethical concerns about these practices.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0FjVeBIOCT0IeRv_uebT-eiYv2P42FwBBXWfUeMy8YSLHLDLtBOUhkvPcYTzYfr0Q5ahR_lMvra7hNAhbOPm07AeUS2T6PRe2daWyfcH-CncI6zEWwATiHc7_ZsHeTBeizEplZ9fOpbLS/s1600/break.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0FjVeBIOCT0IeRv_uebT-eiYv2P42FwBBXWfUeMy8YSLHLDLtBOUhkvPcYTzYfr0Q5ahR_lMvra7hNAhbOPm07AeUS2T6PRe2daWyfcH-CncI6zEWwATiHc7_ZsHeTBeizEplZ9fOpbLS/s400/break.gif" width="400" /></a></div>Legal challenges that can take decades to resolve and exonerations around the country have also slowed executions.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So far there have been 156 men and women exonerated from death row in the US.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Lawyers cost an awful lot more than prison guards, and there is just enough ambivalence for state killing as a criminal punishment to make the due process standard higher than for other kinds of punishment," says Frank Zimring, a death penalty expert and professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"The combination of high expense and low assurance has sort of taken the enthusiasm out."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">According to various polls, American opinions are roughly split when it comes to the death penalty.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/29/support-for-death-penalty-lowest-in-more-than-four-decades/" target="_blank">Pew Research Center poll</a> shows approval for the death penalty has declined from a high of 80% in the 1990s to only 49% in favour now.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, Robert Blecker, a death penalty supporter and professor at New York Law School, says that the majority of Americans still favour the use of capital punishment.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"[Approval may be] down from an all-time high of 80%, but it's also up from the 1968 low," he says.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"California supported it, Oklahoma put it in its constitution, and Nebraska reversed its own legislature.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"How much clearer evidence could you possibly want as to where American public opinion is?"</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">During this year's election season, three US states had items related to capital punishment on their ballots, and in all three states, death penalty proponents won big on election night.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nebraskans voted to bring their death penalty back after legislators <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-32910693" target="_blank">banned the practice</a> in 2015.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Californians voted to speed up their executions rather than abolish them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In Oklahoma, voters approved new constitutional language to protect the use of capital punishment.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mr Zimring concedes that the general public may not necessarily approve of the precipitous decline in the use of capital punishment.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But he points out that when other nations abolished their death penalty it took some time for the general public to concur.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"When you study the western European decline of the death penalty, it turns out that public support for hanging people persists for almost 20 years after moral leadership abolishes the death penalty," he says.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"It takes a long time for public passions to catch up with the moral leadership of elites."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Although this year's figures continue to bolster the narrative that the American criminal justice system is increasingly turning away from the death penalty, the end of capital punishment may still be a long way off.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"The end game is going to be long and expensive and in a deep way, unnecessary," says Mr Zimring.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"That's billions of dollars and many too many executions in the American future."</div><br />Source: <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38371479" target="_blank">BBC News</a>, Jessica Lussenhop, December 21, 2016<br /><br /><br /><h2>The Strange Case of the American Death Penalty</h2><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKwTmZcrR1QcpiLUbkxn6Jp_cHISVJuD2c8si4LKlVMC2Q_LQ79SVx2JJsdWv3QutacI-AciHorJQrt7FeW5EhT8Zw4CPG8Sq0_FEcBQLCQNXsUK_9gvhjg3aZSXbE7Kr7XXeaijeJF4dK/s1600/k5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKwTmZcrR1QcpiLUbkxn6Jp_cHISVJuD2c8si4LKlVMC2Q_LQ79SVx2JJsdWv3QutacI-AciHorJQrt7FeW5EhT8Zw4CPG8Sq0_FEcBQLCQNXsUK_9gvhjg3aZSXbE7Kr7XXeaijeJF4dK/s400/k5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>It’s a paradoxical moment in the history of the death penalty in the United States. The number of executions has dwindled to just a few, but the voters, even in the most liberal states, seem to want the punishment to remain on the books. That’s the message of the <a href="http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/" target="_blank">annual report</a> from the Death Penalty Information Center, which produces the most comprehensive analysis of the subject each year.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The headline on the report—“Another Record Decline in Death Penalty Use”—notes that the remarkable fall in the number of executions and death sentences is part of a longer trend, one that continued this year. The numbers were the lowest in the modern era of the American death penalty, after a period, between 1972 and 1976, when the Supreme Court put a stop to executions. There were just twenty executions in the United States in 2016, down from a peak of ninety-eight, in 1999. Even more remarkable, just thirty people were sentenced to death this year, compared with three hundred and fifteen in 1996. Indeed, as the report further notes, “Fewer new death sentences were imposed in the past decade than in the decade preceding the Supreme Court’s invalidation of capital punishment in 1972.” The reduction in death sentences means that the decline in executions is likely to continue as well, because the pipeline of new cases is not as full.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Despite these numbers, death-penalty abolitionists also received a host of bad news this year. In 2015, after a long political struggle, the Nebraska state legislature (which is unicameral) repealed the death penalty. But supporters of capital punishment put the issue on the ballot in the 2016 election, and more than sixty per cent of the voters supported its restoration. Voters in California were asked to address two contradictory initiatives concerning the death penalty. One would have ended executions in the state once and for all; the other sought to remove some of the legal barriers that have prevented executions from proceeding quickly, or really at all, in the state. The abolition initiative failed, with fifty-three per cent of the voters opposed, and the law for expediting the death penalty passed, with slightly more than fifty-one per cent of the vote. (It’s not clear what, if any, practical difference passage of the initiative will mean. The legal standoffs in California are likely to continue. There are <a href="http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/state_by_state" target="_blank">seven hundred and forty-one</a> people on death row in the state, but there hasn’t been an execution there since 2006.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The debate over the death penalty seems to have taken on some of the characteristics of the Presidential race this year, as a contest between populists and élitists. Judges play the part of the élites in this particular debate, and the judiciary, as a whole, has shown ever-greater hostility toward approving executions. This year, the Supreme Court ruled for prisoners in several high-profile death-penalty decisions, holding that racial bias infected jury selection, in Foster v. Chatman, a case from Georgia, and rejecting Florida’s system of allowing judges to impose the death penalty even when jurors support life in prison, in Hurst v. Florida. (The Florida legislature sought to correct the defects identified by the Supreme Court in the Hurst case, only to have the Florida Supreme Court overrule the new law as well.) Delaware’s Supreme Court also nullified its state’s death-penalty law this year.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqOe-7Oh76c4SgqTgbQPvj9WuZvXdUNsVzT21T8yBzDqmoborj19YG7Orkhyphenhyphen0OskknQx8gVCBIh7VhTeBimD1pCwnaIPnruBRS4-MtZ-ySFncOH6CFrCpLMuzLVQgxXEINFTxNf9eu3Fg/s1600/right+trick.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqOe-7Oh76c4SgqTgbQPvj9WuZvXdUNsVzT21T8yBzDqmoborj19YG7Orkhyphenhyphen0OskknQx8gVCBIh7VhTeBimD1pCwnaIPnruBRS4-MtZ-ySFncOH6CFrCpLMuzLVQgxXEINFTxNf9eu3Fg/s400/right+trick.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>But, as the election results in California and Nebraska illustrate, the voters—the populists—continue to back the death penalty, as does the President-elect. (Donald Trump notoriously called for the execution of the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/donald-trump-and-the-central-park-five" target="_blank">Central Park Five</a>, fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds who were charged with a high-profile rape and beating, in 1989. Even though the five were later exonerated, Trump, during this year’s campaign, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/opinion/why-trump-doubled-down-on-the-central-park-five.html" target="_blank">reiterated his belief in their guilt</a>.) The Death Penalty Information Center report notes that public-opinion polls show some decline in support for the death penalty, but the opposition has never achieved close to a majority. And, notwithstanding ambiguous poll numbers, politicians from Trump to Barack Obama understand that support for the death penalty, at least in some form, is less politically risky than opposition to it. (Obama, for example, has supported executions for “extraordinarily heinous crimes.”) Trump’s victory, and those of other Republicans, can only reinforce that view.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Many factors have led to the decline in the death penalty in recent years: less crime over all, with less fear among the public as a result; DNA exonerations leading jurors to pause before imposing death; the reluctance of pharmaceutical companies to provide lethal-injection drugs and the resulting search (still under way) for a drug protocol that passes constitutional muster; the length and expense of the appeals mandated by the Supreme Court. All those reasons for the decline remain, but so, too, does the United States remain a country that has had the death penalty in effect for virtually all of its history. That’s not likely to change, either. The death penalty may keep shrinking, but it will probably never entirely go away.</div><br />Source: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-strange-case-of-the-american-death-penalty" target="_blank">The New Yorker</a>, Jeffrey Toobin, December 21, 2016<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">⚑ | Report an error, an omission; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: <a href="mailto:deathpenaltynews@gmail.com">deathpenaltynews@gmail.com</a>.</div><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4" style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; border: 0px solid rgb(255, 204, 0); color: black; text-align: center; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr>   <td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/WebDPN/" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL4sspwgGptzvuHVklum5TwxKppRN-lIC5TN8RLZFq_B4ZOtBrX1ssXPNKQ6XpSyQFRJRtVQN45HMkpt3VX0JtOW0TovwxZAurG-AV6gh98IAXo7Ip6QlpkZr9WrM3_m943Mwy-gGxBAY/s1600/Find+us+Facebook.jpg" /></a></div></td>   <td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://twitter.com/WebDPN" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiULIPEaT_P6oIauxAZd17XRRxljesDLS7iIjdQXT7Xct99uHeohx4IYmiAB6S044gTjMDGSy50sL2vDzOyPZ-3vJj9zwcYQ2rgzJh9v1-QDiunKAQtLLLqJ83s38qN3HABxGIC8GsIOD0/s1600/Find+us+twitter.jpg" /></a><span id="goog_1427852018"></span><span id="goog_1427852019"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a></div></td>  </tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><b>Opposed to Capital Punishment? 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US capital punishment fall to 40-year low in 2016

Fewer death sentences were handed down in the US this year than at any time in the last four decades, a study finds. Only 30 such penalties ...

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