Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
At the end of each day, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I receive an email aggregating every media article which includes the words ‘death penalty.’ The articles hail from all over the place - Thailand to Texas, China to California - and include the fascinating, the brilliant, the poorly written and the downright bizarre. Obviously not many people who aren’t me would want a daily brief full of several hundred emails about the death penalty. So, I’ve done the hard work for you and here is a round-up of some of the best and/or most interesting articles ...
US officials now admit that the CIA relies on proxy detention in lieu of the Bush-era secret prison regime. Congressmen are wringing their hands, but for the wrong reasons.
I am stunned to find myself agreeing with even a syllable uttered by Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss (R), but apparently neither of us are big fans of proxy detention. Here’s Saxby in the LA Times :
"It is a shame that our administration has made the decision to defer to others to pursue the detention and interrogation of our enemies," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, ranking Republican on the Senate ...
Famous for dismissing, out of hand, capital cases that demonstrate even the most blatant miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court of the United States has granted three stays of execution in the last few weeks.
What is the message coming from on high?
On March 21st the Supreme Court of the United States (this being the USA they of course have an acronym: SCOTUS, like POTUS) granted a stay of execution to Cory Maples, currently on death row in Alabama, and agreed to hear his appeal. The blue-chip law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, that was defending Maples, had failed to notify ...
AP recently reported on how people are still being held by the US military in secret prisons across Afghanistan.
Although Barack Obama ordered the closure of CIA ‘black sites’ over two years ago, the US continues to run a network of highly secret prisons in Afghanistan in order to interrogate detainees.
Reprieve’s secret prisons team is actively investigating detention sites in Afghanistan, Europe, Africa and beyond.
I have recently joined Reprieve as its new Chair and I’m writing to thank you for supporting us over the years and helping us to shine the light of law into the darkest prisons.
Thanks to Reprieve, 66 men are now at home with their families instead of languishing without charge in Guantánamo Bay, while over 300 prisoners have been spared execution in the United States and elsewhere around the world. That’s a remarkable track record – and a tribute to every person who works here. We won’t give up bringing daylight into prison cells.
Reprieve is ...
“But, how do they justify that?” This was the question posed by a rather stricken law student after she had watched Love Lived on Death Row, about capital punishment in the USA.
I attended the screening at the request of Abolition UK, a volunteer campaign group. Love Lived was a deeply moving film which showed in the most tragic of ways exactly how the death penalty does nothing other than cause pain to innocent family members and friends of a person sentenced to death. Love Lived told the story of the Syriani family in North Carolina.
In 1990 Elias Syriani ...
Watch Maya Foa explain the vital decision Reprieve expects manufacturer Lundbeck to make so no death row prisoner in the US is executed with an european drug.
Sometime in early 2002, the higher-ups at Guantánamo Bay decided to bring SERE instructors in to train interrogators stationed there. The aim was to teach them methods that could ‘break’ the detainees.
What is SERE? It’s an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training. It was started by the US Airforce in the 1950s in order to train soldiers to maintain ‘honour’ if and when they were captured by “Communist enemies”. It quickly spread to the Army and the Navy as well. Soldiers maintain their honour in captivity by ensuring they tell the enemy nothing more than name ...
Despite the lead prosecutor on Daniel Cook’s case now saying that he would not have sought the death penalty had he known about the abuse and mental illness in his past, Daniel is scheduled to be killed on April 5th using experimental drugs.
On April 5th, 23 excruciating years after he was sentenced to death, Daniel Cook is due to be killed. He will eat his last meal, he will be strapped to a gurney and then, when the time comes, he will be pumped full of enough drugs to slowly and painfully put him to death.
Sadly ...
Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman needed a really good lawyer. Prosecutors claimed to have a mountain of physical evidence and powerful eyewitness testimony against him in a murder case. And they were seeking the death penalty.
Cellmates at the Nashville jail where Abdur'Rahman was being held told him there was only one lawyer to call: Lionel Barrett.
Barrett, they said, never turned down a client in need, no matter how controversial the case was, how bad the facts were and how impossible the defense seemed.
"I never said no," Barrett confirms. "I took cases no one else would. Everyone deserves representation ...
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