The winter newsletter is now available, featuring:
Please click here to see our Winter 2018 newsletter and subscribe by joining our email list.
Special performance of “29 Years For 13 Seconds: The Injustices of Justice”, sponsored by Interfaith CommUNITY Spiritual Center and Death Penalty Alternatives of Arizona.
At 16 years old, Vance “Duke” Webster witnessed two friends commit a crime. When refused to “snitch” he was sentenced to life in prison. A one-act play based on a true story, “29 Years For 13 Seconds” is less about Webster’s time in prison and more about how women, religion and social services have created wild waves that he rides without the slightest hint of resentment. Don’t believe it? Come check it out. One night only, 7 p.m., Friday, January 19, 2018, 952 E. Baseline Rd, #102, Mesa, AZ.
NOTE: A suggested love offering of $10 will be collected the night of the show. You may also pre-purchase tickets
From the Death Penalty Information Center:
Several months after Arizona settled a lawsuit over the conditions of confinement on the state’s death row, the state has ended the practice of automatically housing condemned prisoners in solitary confinement, and prisoners and prison officials alike are praising the changes.
Carson McWilliams
Carson McWilliams (pictured right), Division Director for Offender Operations in the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC), told the Arizona Republic that the new incarceration conditions provide an “atmosphere where [prisoners] can socialize,” resulting in “reduce[d] anxiety” that, in turn, “adds to safety control” of the prison. And, prison officials say, it has reduced institutional costs.
Prior to the lawsuit, death row had meant 23-hour-per-day confinement in a concrete cell the size of a parking space, shuttered by a steel door with a perforated slot through which the prisoners would receive their meals, and with a bench bed and a sink attached to an uncovered toilet. Prisoners had no contact visits with families or lawyers, were handcuffed behind the back and subjected to body-cavity searches whenever they left their cells, and were restricted to showering or exercising three times a week. They also were denied prison jobs and educational opportunities. About the solitary conditions, McWilliams remarked, “The more you’re restricted inside a cell, the more likely you are to have depression, to have anxiety, to have other types of mental problems that could lead to some type of problem inside the system, whether its self harm, or suicide, or aggression towards a staff member or towards another inmate.”
One death-row prisoner who was interviewed by the paper said, “It’s hard to explain the deprivation. . . . It weighs on your mind.” McWilliams said it now requires fewer officers to manage death row because officers no longer have to deliver individual meals or individually escort each of the 120 prisoners. Kevin Curran, who has been a prison warden at various facilities run by the ADC, said that he “feels safer among the death-row men than among the career criminals and gangsters in the general population.” Under the new conditions, prisoners are able to socialize with each other in activities such as playing basketball, volleyball, or board games, and can eat meals together. One ADC corrections officer told the Arizona Republic that he was “apprehensive” at first about the changes, but the transition has been “very good” with only a “few minor incidents,” which were “a lot less” than he expected.
(M. Kiefer, Arizona death row comes out of solitary, giving convicts more human contact, socialization, Arizona Republic, Dec. 19, 2017.)
10 reasons to end the use of the death penalty
Details at http://www.worldcoalition.org/worldday.html
Former Chief Justice Stanley Feldman
Hon. Stanley Feldman: Arizona death penalty beyond repair
Former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Stanley Feldman is the featured speaker at the quarterly meeting of Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona. The program, which will feature dignitaries including the Hon. Ron Barber and Rep. David Bradley (D-Tucson), will begin at 11:30 a.m., Saturday, April 8, at Monterey Court, 505 W. Miracle Mile.
Feldman served as an Arizona Supreme Court justice for 21 years, from 1982–2002, including a five-year term as chief justice (1992–1996). As chief justice, he was active in the National Center for State Courts and the Conference of Chief Justices. He retired from the court in 2002 and still practices law at the firm he helped form in 1968, Miller, Pitt, Feldman & McAnally.
Feldman has said the capital punishment system is broken beyond repair. Feldman, who sits on the Advisory Board of Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona, would rather see offenders sentenced to life instead of death.
Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery
A Harvard Law School report identifies Maricopa County as an outlier in its use of the death penalty. As the Phoenix New Times reports:
“Too Broken to Fix: Part I: An In-Depth Look at America’s Outlier Death Penalty Counties,” by the school’s Fair Punishment Project, identifies Maricopa as one of 16 “outliers” among the nation’s 3,143 counties or “county equivalents,” for having sentenced five or more defendants to death during the period 2010-2015.
You can read the full news article by clicking here, or you can read the report itself by following this link (PDF).
ABC 15 offered a comparison of Arizona to other states with the death penalty and asks why Arizona has one of the largest death-row populations? The article also offers statistical information on the death penalty.
For more information, click here to see the full story. (The link will take you off the Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona website.)
The Arizona Department of Corrections has removed the controversial midazolam from its lethal-injection protocol. And because it doesn’t have the other drugs in the protocol for carrying out executions, the Department can’t conduct any executions in the near future.
As a result, the death penalty in Arizona is on hold for the “foreseeable future.”
For the entire news article on this development, please click here to go to the Arizona Republic website.
Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona’s Winter 2016 newsletter is now available. You can access it by clicking here.
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We are so grateful for your participation in #GivingTuesday! It’s a great start into our year end fund raising effort – we hope to secure donations of $50,000 in December to launch us into the most active and ambitious year of our history.
We began an initiative and are collecting signatures to remove the death penalty from Arizona Revised Statutes replacing it with life in prison without the possibility of parole. As you can imagine securing 175,000 signatures – the amount we estimate necessary to have the required number of valid signatures – demands both work and substantial funding. Volunteers are requested to assist in gathering signature, but we realize volunteers alone won’t be able to obtain all the signatures so we will employ paid petition gatherers. We will also need money to hire an executive director and a field organizer to manage the campaign. When we are successful, the initiative will be placed on the ballot and Arizona can join Nebraska, Maryland, Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey & New York (7 states which have recently stopped executions) and the other 16 states which don’t execute! 23 states do not kill!
While gathering the necessary signatures is a huge task, it is certainly not all that is required. Getting the initiative on the ballot is just the start and will mean little if it is not passed by the voters. The number of citizens favoring executions is at the lowest point in years. While it still hovers around 60%, the number drops below 50% when those polled are offered the option of life without the possibility of parole. It will be our task therefore not only to gather the signatures, but also to educate the public and explain why state executions are bad public policy and how they don’t serve society.
Those who advocate state sponsored killing claim it is a deterrent – there is no proof that this is true, in fact see the opposite – states which execute have a higher capital crime rate… violence begets violence. Some claim it is a closure for the victims friends and family members, yet many will acknowledge that there is no “closure” and peace comes with forgiveness, not with vengeance. Only 2% of the nations 3,143 counties account for the majority of the executions in our nation, unfortunately Maricopa and Pima counties are ranked among the leaders. Let us not forget the costs – not only financial (estimated to be 4 to 7 times more expensive than life incarceration) but also emotional as the pain that survivors experience in our broken system is heart-wrenching. Lastly, we risk killing the innocent – studies show an estimated 4% of the prisoners on death row are innocent and sadly we have killed innocent people.
As a youngster Mom always told me I would be known by the company I kept. As long as we practice state killing we are keeping company with China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Have these nations not been identified as “The Axis of Evil”?
Please join with us – you have an opportunity to make a real difference in our society as you donate your time, talent and resources.
Many thanks,
Bob Hungerford, President