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Interview with Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty

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Notes

  1. My choice of the phrase, “criminal legal” reform, rather than “criminal justice” reform, is deliberate. For more on why the term “criminal justice” is a “misnomer” for advocates, see Bryant (2021).

  2. There is no longer a death row facility at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama.

  3. PHADP’s Executive Director Esther Brown also sends updates about PHADP and capital punishment in her “Weekly Notes” to the organization’s email list and posts them to the Facebook page.

  4. Derived from Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), a Batson challenge is an objection during jury selection that the other party has used a preemptory challenge to strike a potential juror from the pool based on race, ethnicity, or sex. A successful Batson challenge may result in a new trial.

  5. For example, when Alabama approved a new execution method in 2018, death row residents were not properly notified by the state. Instead, they were informed by the Federal Defenders of the Middle District days before the deadline to “opt in” to nitrogen hypoxia rather than remaining under the default method, lethal injection. Many residents struggled to communicate with their attorneys in time to make an informed decision. For more on this event, see PHADP’s website (phadp.org) and PHADP and Owens-Murphy (2021).

  6. Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women (Wetumpka, Alabama) is where women on Alabama’s death row are “housed”.

  7. The Supreme Court’s verdict in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972) marked the beginning of a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty that would end with Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976). RL is describing here the legal and historical shift to what scholars call the “modern era” of capital punishment.

  8. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (July 1983), “by the end of 1982, 37 states and the Federal government provided for the death penalty. … For the first time since the Furman ruling, no state’s death penalty law had been overturned.”

  9. The authority of a judge to override a jury’s recommendation of life imprisonment was abolished by Alabama in 2017 by SB 16, but it was not made retroactive. Many people currently on death row were sentenced to die via judicial override prior to 2017 and SB 16.

  10. The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) does not allow non-ADOC staff to be present in the execution chamber; only Christian chaplains are on staff. Ray was African American and Muslim and his request for his imam’s presence was denied.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jennifer Pate and Derek Malone at UNA’s Collier Library for supporting this exhibition in conjunction with the university’s OneBook initiative that invited all incoming first-year students to read Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.

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  1. University of North Alabama, Florence, USA

    Katie Owens-Murphy

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Correspondence to Katie Owens-Murphy.

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Owens-Murphy, K. Interview with Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty. Crit Crim 31, 259–274 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09669-2

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