By The Editors
A study released last month by the Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative shows that Alabama is unique even among the other 33 states which have capital punishment laws. It is the only state whose statute enables judges to easily overrule jury decisions in capital cases imposing a sentence of death or life without the possibility of parole. As a result, Alabama judges have overwhelmingly chosen to discard jurors’ sentences of life and impose a death sentence.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has unanimously declared that Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence is unconstitutional. In today’s decision, the Court of Appeals reaffirmed its 2008 finding that Mr. Abu-Jamal’s sentencing jury was misled about the process for considering evidence supporting a life sentence.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
The Supreme Court figured it had done the right thing when it decided a decade ago that defendants accused of capital crimes could only be sentenced to death by a jury, not a judge. Did the seven justices in the majority know that death-by-jury is tainted with racism at its core? Or maybe they didn’t care.

By The Editors
The movement to abolish the death penalty recorded a significant advance this week when Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing capital punishment.

On January 28, 2011, Mumia Abu-Jamal retained the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) to represent him in the ongoing appeal of his capital murder conviction and death sentence.

By The Editors
In the late 1990s there were 159 inmates on death row in the state of Illinois. Then came one of the most dramatic developments in the history of criminal justice in the United States.

By Jin Hee Lee, Vincent Southerland and Christina Swarns
Dissenting opinions — offered not by liberal advocates but by moderate, if not conservative, law-and-order judges — stand as a strong rebuke to the presumed effectiveness of the death penalty system. And they also confirm longstanding concerns about how abuses of power, under-resourced defense counsel, and racial bias undermine both the accuracy and judiciousness of death penalty convictions.

By Matt Kelley
An exhaustive report published this week in the New Yorker shows that Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004, was innocent.