Search Results for: morales california

Barring the unlikely success of last-minute litigation, today, at 6 p.m. CST, Kenneth Eugene Smith is scheduled to become the first person in history to be executed by forced nitrogen gas inhalation. In Smith’s final minutes, personnel at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama will strap an industrial-grade mask to his face. Secured [...]

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“For by wise counsel, thou shalt make thy war.” Proverbs 24:6 Though one might think otherwise, there is no Palestinian state at present, nor has there ever been such a state in the past. Still, once the current Gaza War comes to an end – and whatever the tangible correlates of any war termination agreements [...]

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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 [...]

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It is Thanksgiving Day. The aroma of turkey; of dressing; candied sweet potatoes; green bean casserole; cranberry sauce; freshly baked yeast rolls; giblet gravy, and of pies emanating from the kitchen fills our nostrils. Home is the place to be today. But have you ever given thought to the law of the gobbler? This Day in [...]

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“The man who laughs has simply not yet heard the horrible news.”          Berthold Brecht An Existential Task Until the end of his presidency –  and even after his open complicity in subverting the United States Constitution on January 6, 2021 – Donald J. Trump held effectively unchecked nuclear command authority. Now, after multiple criminal [...]

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With the stroke of his pen, California Governor Gavin Newsom could have a significant impact on the death penalty across the US. Though Newsom lacks the power to end capital punishment in California, he could take executive action to commute the sentences of the roughly 700 condemned awaiting execution in in the state—a death row figure [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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In jurisprudential matters, whether national or international, precedent remains vitally important. When former (and possibly future) US President Donald J. Trump issued illegal pardons to selected American officials for established crimes against international law, the consequences reverberated in other countries. Now, with still-mounting Russian crimes against Ukraine –  crimes of war; crimes against peace; and crimes [...]

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