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    Bloody Sunday: restored photos show the violence that shocked a nation

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    Sixty years ago, on 7 March 1965, civil rights leaders and nonviolent activists attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery in a fight for African Americans’ rights to vote. But as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, they were met with unfounded brutal violence from Alabama state troopers. This day is commemorated as Bloody Sunday. Among the marchers was photojournalist “Spider” Martin who worked for the Birmingham News; he documented the violence firsthand, shocking the nation with his revealing images of the reality of voter suppression.Though the march occurred six decades ago, Doug McCraw, a native son of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and producer of the exhibit Selma Is Now, on display in Montgomery, Alabama, until 1 June, argues that the fight for civil and voting rights continues today. McCraw writes in his co-produced book, Selma Is Now: The March for Justice Continues, “sacrifices made by the marchers in March 1965 paved the way for the liberties we enjoy today, but the struggle for social justice continues.”View image in fullscreenAs a result of Donald Trump and his supporters spreading false claims of voter fraud after losing the 2020 presidential race, many Republican lawmakers implemented voting laws that disproportionately affect African Americans’ ability to vote in the years to come.The new voting laws included redrawing district lines giving Black voters less power at the polls and reducing the number of ballot drop boxes for mail-in ballots. Additionally, states such as Ohio and Idaho imposed stricter ID requirements for in-person and mail-in voting. These restrictions reflect the injustices that marchers risked their lives to challenge.Martin’s newly restored photos, on view at the exhibit Selma Is Now, show his work as the only news photographer to capture the moments that occurred on Bloody Sunday and the subsequent marches from Selma to Montgomery. During the 1960s, the public primarily witnessed major events like Bloody Sunday through images in newspapers and magazines. Martin’s photographs were so influential that they sparked nationwide protests, prompting President Lyndon B Johnson to order 2,000 national guard troops to escort the marchers from Selma to Montgomery on 20 March 1965, to prevent another Bloody Sunday.View image in fullscreenKaren Graffeo, a photographer, professor of art at the University of Montevallo, and director of photo restoration for Selma Is Now, points to the importance of the photos today: “The photographs are particularly alive considering recent challenges to human rights and the rise of self-aggrandizing politicians in a warring world.”The images provoked Andrea Young, daughter of the civil rights activist Andrew Young – who marched across the bridge on Bloody Sunday and later served as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, mayor of Atlanta, and US ambassador to the United Nations – to recall being nine years old when her parents brought her to the third and final march, 13 days after Bloody Sunday.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen“My parents believed so much in America that they brought their children,” Andrea notes. “See the hope emanating from the people in these photographs. The adults knew how ugly America could be, and they loved America enough to march in hope, to march in love, to march forward, letting their light shine.”Like Andrea’s parents, many African Americans faced disenfranchisement in the years leading up to Bloody Sunday. Jim Crow laws made it difficult for African Americans to vote; they faced poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation tactics that prevented Black people from voting, despite the passage of the 15th amendment granting them that right. Meanwhile, Black people were being lynched by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and on 15 September 1963, the KKK bombed a Black church in Birmingham, killing four young girls. By 7 March 1965, less than 1% of Black people were eligible to vote in some counties in Alabama.John Lewis, who became a US congressman, is quoted in Selma Is Now: The March for Justice Continues as saying in 2018 that Martin’s photographs told the story of a people denied the right to participate in democracy. His “images made it plain and clear that hundreds, thousands, millions of people could not participate in the democratic process simply because of the color of their skin”.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenDuring the encounter with police, at least 58 people were injured, including several who were hospitalized after being struck with clubs, whips, cattle prods and teargas. Among those injured was Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull from a police baton.In spite of these injustices, an estimated 600 civil rights activists set out to march from Selma to Montgomery to protest racial discrimination in voting rights. Chevara Orrin, the daughter of James Luther Bevel, asked Andrew Young what inspired him to keep marching. “I once asked Ambassador Andrew Young if the civil rights movement’s ‘foot soldiers’ ever experienced what we now call ‘Black fatigue’. He responded, ‘Child, we didn’t have the luxury of fatigue. We had to press on.’”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenMartin’s images illustrate the fatigue and determination of all those who marched. Dr Martin Luther King Jr noted the powerful impact of his pictures, telling him, “Spider, we could have marched, we could have protested forever, but if it weren’t for guys like you, it would have been for nothing. The whole world saw your pictures.” He credited Martin’s images with influencing the passing of the Voting Rights Act signed by President Johnson exactly five months after Bloody Sunday.Tracy Martin, the daughter of Spider Martin and co-producer of the book, Selma Is Now: The March for Justice Continues, recalls her father’s courage, and the current importance of his work. “Daddy faced beatings and death threats while capturing through his lens the most iconic images of a movement that changed a region and a nation,” she writes. “As his daughter, I have the privilege and responsibility to continue disseminating his work around the country as a reminder to us of just what was at stake in 1965.” More

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      Harper Lee’s Early Short Stories to Be Published for the First Time

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      Before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Lee had written short stories in which she explored some of its themes and characters.For years before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee wrote short stories with themes that she would later explore in that now-classic novel: small town gossip and politics, tender and tense relationships between fathers and daughters, race relations.She tried and failed to get them published. Scholars and biographers have long thought the stories were lost or destroyed.But Lee was a meticulous archivist. She stashed the typescripts of the stories, along with the rejection letters, in her New York City apartment, where her executor discovered them after her death in 2016.This fall, those stories will be published for the first time in a collection titled “The Land of Sweet Forever.” The book, out on Oct. 21 from Harper, includes eight previously unreleased stories and eight pieces of nonfiction that Lee published in various outlets between 1961 and 2006, including a profile of her friend, the writer Truman Capote, a cornbread recipe and a letter to Oprah Winfrey.Lee’s nephew, Edwin Conner, said that he and other members of her family were thrilled that the stories were preserved, and can now reach a wide audience. The estate decided to publish them in 2024, according to Harper.“She was not just our beloved aunt, but a great American writer, and we can never know too much about how she came to that pinnacle,” Conner said in a statement released by Harper.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alabama Grand Jury Calls for Police Force to Be Abolished After Indicting 5 Officers

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      The grand jury said that the Hanceville Police Department, which had eight officers as of last August, had been operating “as more of a criminal enterprise.”A grand jury in Alabama is calling for a small police department to be abolished after recently indicting its chief and four other officers as part of a sweeping corruption investigation, saying that the department had operated “as more of a criminal enterprise than a law enforcement agency.”The Hanceville Police Department, which serves a city of roughly 3,000 residents about 45 miles north of Birmingham, employed just eight officers as of last August, when the chief, Jason Marlin, was sworn in.On Wednesday, the chief’s mug shot was projected onto a screen at a news conference announcing the arrest of the chief and four officers on felony and misdemeanor charges. The wife of one of those officers was also indicted.Champ Crocker, the district attorney of Cullman County, said that corruption in the department had become so pervasive that it had compromised evidence in many cases and had created unsafe conditions at the local jail — and was even connected to the overdose last year of a 911 dispatcher at the department.“With these indictments, these officers find themselves on the opposite end of the laws they were sworn to uphold,” Mr. Crocker said. “Wearing a badge is a privilege and an honor, and that most law enforcement officers take seriously. A badge is not a license to corrupt the administration of justice.”During the half-hour news conference, the district attorney spoke in general terms about the nature of the misconduct the chief and the other officers are accused of. Court records offered some additional details about the accusations, which include the mishandling of evidence, use of performance-enhancing drugs and unauthorized access to a law enforcement database.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      US judge bars Alabama from purging thousands of voters before election

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      Alabama cannot remove thousands of people from its voter rolls on the eve of the presidential election, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.The US district judge Anna Manasco, an appointee of Donald Trump, issued a preliminary injunction halting an effort by Alabama’s top election official to try to remove more than 3,200 people from the voter rolls who it suspected of being non-citizens until at least after the presidential election.The office of Alabama’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, conceded in court filings this week that the list of non-citizens it had compiled was not accurate. At least 2,000 people of the more than 3,200 people were actually eligible to vote, the secretary of state’s chief of staff said in a sworn declaration. That means that almost two-thirds of the people on the list accused of being non-citizens were wrongly flagged. Civil rights groups and the Department of Justice had both sued Alabama, saying that the removals violated a federal law that prohibits systematically removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.“Alabama’s initial splashy announcement gave a total misimpression,” said Kate Huddleston, a lawyer at Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group that helped challenge the purge. “It’s clear now that 63% of those people on the list were wrongfully on the list and were had to take time out of their lives and had to deal with this problem.”Both the justice department and the groups challenging the program also said that the state was using unreliable methodology to flag non-citizens and that many eligible voters were being flagged for removal.Allen said in a statement he would abide by the court’s ruling.“I have a constitutional duty to ensure that only eligible American citizens are voting in our elections. State and federal laws are clear that only eligible American citizens can vote in our elections. Today’s order does not change that,” he said.The justice department also sued Virginia on Friday over a similar program that has also drawn scrutiny for being inaccurate.Both of the suits rely on a 1993 federal statute, the National Voter Registration Act, which creates a 90-day period ahead of any federal election in which states cannot systematically remove voters from their rolls. The buffer was designed to ensure that eligible voters would not be wrongly removed from the rolls at the last minute without any recourse.On 13 August, 84 days before the November election, Allen announced that the state had identified 3,251 people on the rolls who at some point in time had received a non-citizen number from the Department of Homeland Security. Even though he acknowledged some of those people may have become naturalized citizens, he instructed local election officials to require all of them to prove their citizenship to vote and referred them to the state attorney general for possible criminal investigation.Alabama and Virginia are both part of a handful of states that have loudly touted misleading efforts to remove suspected non-citizens from the voter rolls. Their announcement comes as Republicans nationwide have leaned into false claims about non-citizen voting to seed doubt about the outcome of the election.In addition to halting the removals, Manasco’s order also instructs Allen to oversee a mailing to flagged voters informing them that they can vote. The notice must also tell voters that they are not subject to criminal penalties for registering or voting.Manasco also ordered Allen to write to the attorney general and inform him that several of the voters sent for further investigation were wrongly included on the list and to identify those voters.“We know from talking with our plaintiffs and from talking with others in Alabama that this really created a chill for naturalized citizens who were intimidated and deterred from registering to vote and from voting,” Huddleston said. And it’s really important that all Americans have access to the ballot.” More

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      in US Politics

      How a Michael Portillo BBC film inspired a US push for nitrogen-gas executions

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      Shortly after Alabama last week carried out its second-ever execution using nitrogen gas, state officials took credit for pioneering what they see as a breakthrough approach to the death penalty – even though it has sparked outrage and revulsion among critics.But the idea to execute inmates in the US with nitrogen was actually set in motion by a rebellious and ultra-conservative lawmaker in Oklahoma, and surprisingly involves a former British Conservative MP turned television personality, Michael Portillo.Both promised such executions would be free of the complications that had plagued lethal injections and that sentenced prisoners would drift off painlessly to sleep – though witnesses to both executions have described a very different process.Nitrogen executions were first legislated in 2015 by Oklahoma, a US state boasts the highest execution rate per capita and a long history of death penalty innovation, having also been the first to introduce the lethal injection in 1977.The story of its most recent innovation in execution methods involves a documentary hosted by Portillo. After a career in British politics, where he was once seen as a darling of the Conservative right, Portillo reinvented himself as a television presenter. He later became famous for shows on the BBC such as Great British Railway Journeys.But in a bizarre collision of worlds, it was his film How to Kill a Human Being, broadcast by the BBC in 2008, that helped persuade the Republican representative Mike Christian and a high-school friend of his to pursue a bill writing nitrogen executions into law. So convinced were they by Portillo’s film and findings that they screened it at the Oklahoma capitol in September 2014.“I remember it being quite disturbing,” said Emily Virgin, a Democratic representative present at the time who voted against the nitrogen bill Christian later authored. In 2015, it passed 85 to 10 in the Oklahoma house and unanimously in the Senate.View image in fullscreenThe bill had been a while in the making. By 2014, states across the country were struggling to enforce capital punishment. Anti-death penalty advocates had successfully lobbied drug companies to stop supplying them with lethal injection drugs and many states were forced to improvise. Some attempted to get their drugs via illegal backchannels while others sought out substitute compounds, but both contributed to a string of botched and messy executions.In April 2014, things came to a head. Oklahoma’s supreme court issued a stay on the execution of death-row inmate Clayton Lockett over issues of secrecy around its lethal injection drugs. Incensed by the move, Christian, who was also a former state trooper, drafted a resolution to impeach the five justices who had supported the stay and was quoted in newspapers around the country for saying of Lockett’s execution: “I realize this may sound harsh but as a father and former lawman, I really don’t care if it’s by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, guillotine or being fed to the lions.”The stay was soon overturned by Oklahoma’s governor, and Lockett’s execution went ahead. The executioners tried for almost an hour to establish an intravenous line before inadvertently injecting the drugs into the tissue around his groin. Witnesses saw him writhing in a pool of blood and according to an inquiry by the Oklahoma department of public safety the execution took 41 minutes, during which his heart rate dropped to six beats per minute.Months later, Christian was back with another plan. He had gathered more than a dozen or so Oklahoma legislators and public officials for a judiciary committee meeting at the Oklahoma capitol to make the case for something new.“We knew there was a problem after the Lockett execution,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting. “In 1977 we became the first state to adopt lethal injection. My wishes are in 2015 we abolish, possibly, lethal injection and we go to this new innovative method, which is death by nitrogen hypoxia.” Then, on a television in the meeting room, he screened Portillo’s BBC documentary.At the start of the 50-minute film, Portillo sets out to discover the “perfect killing device” for carrying out humane executions. After touring labs and meeting with experts across the US and Europe, he finds that all the methods known to the west – including the firing squad, electric chair, cyanide chamber, and hanging – are flawed. But, he concludes: “I think hypoxia is the solution.”View image in fullscreenThe term hypoxia simply describes when the body’s cells receive insufficient oxygen to function and can be induced in many ways. In the film, Portillo attempts to experience hypoxia at a Dutch air force training facility, where he sits in an altitude chamber that simulates oxygen-thin air. Satisfied that the experience was painless, he seeks out a more practical way to starve somebody of oxygen and meets a veterinarian who tells him that if a human were forced to breathe just pure nitrogen they would lose consciousness “within 15 seconds” and die “within a minute”.“It turns out a canister of gas, a tube and a mask can be the perfect killing machine. It’s as simple as that,” says Portillo.On the day his film was screened for Oklahoma officials in 2014, some six years after it first aired in 2008, Christian brought along with him a part-time professor of political science at Oklahoma’s East Central University, Michael Copeland, who was also a high-school friend and had been involved in his election campaign.“People that aren’t familiar with the legislative process might think that state governments like Oklahoma have a bunch of experts on their payroll to advise them, but that’s not really what happens. Members can go out and they dispatch people that work at colleges,” said Copeland when asked about his involvement.He and some peers at the university produced a 14-page research paper which found that the use of nitrogen would not require the participation of a “licensed medical professional”, nor the “cooperation of the offender being executed”.“It’s such a simple procedure, it would be hard to do it wrong,” said Copeland when asked about the specifics of a nitrogen execution. “You won’t find one person who is for the death penalty in general but thinks that this method is somehow complicated, or you won’t be able to implement it correctly.”Another person present at the meeting was David Cincotta, legal counsel to the Oklahoma department of corrections at the time. “The details provided in the research that had been done were not close to what would be required to defend the method in court,” he said when asked about the material presented.Christian was part of a highly conservative rebel faction of Republicans in Oklahoma who were further to the right than the mainstream Republicans, according to Virgin. One of his friends in that group was Senator Randy Terrill, who in 2013 was sentenced to a year in prison for bribing a Democratic candidate to withdraw from a Senate election so that Christian could have her otherwise unwinnable seat. Their mutual friend Copeland testified in support of Terrill during his trial.Before that, the group pursued a controversial bill calling for the installation of a monument of the Ten Commandments outside the Oklahoma capitol. And when Christian ran in 2017 for the Oklahoma county sheriff’s office, documents emerged indicating that in 1999 he was reprimanded for toasting to the death of a judge who had ruled against a lawsuit seeking to have the Confederate flag returned to the state capitol. The group that brought the suit was an Oklahoma division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.View image in fullscreenWhen asked why Oklahoma passed its nitrogen bill in 2015 but never followed through on developing and finalizing a protocol, Copeland said: “Nobody wants to be the first. You don’t want to be the one who gets blamed if something goes wrong.”But just a few states over in Alabama, Republican senator Trip Pittman caught wind of the Oklahoma bill and figured nitrogen might cure the execution woes they were facing in his own state, so he authored his own. “Misery loves company,” he said. “Oklahoma had passed the bill and they had done the research.”Fortunately for Pittman, a dogged attorney in the Alabama attorney general’s office by the name of Lauren Simpson was ready to step up, and wasn’t scared to do the legal work necessary to get nitrogen executions over the line. But she didn’t come out unscathed. In a rare and humiliating move, in 2021 she was fined for misleading the courts over whether Alabama’s death row inmates were properly briefed on how and when they could choose between lethal injection and nitrogen. Simpson declined to comment on her involvement, citing a lack of permission from her office.The Alabama protocol she had a hand in developing sees a firefighter-style gas mask attached to the prisoner’s face, which is then filled with a stream of pure nitrogen, thus depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die.The smoothness of Alabama’s two nitrogen-gas executions has been widely disputed by their few witnesses. While the state has claimed they were “textbook,” others have described them as more violent than some botched lethal injections.“Despite misinformation campaigns by political activists, out-of-state lawyers, and biased media, the State proved once again that nitrogen hypoxia is both humane and effective,” said Alabama’s attorney general Steve Marshall, minutes after the second execution last week.Yet in both nitrogen executions almost all witnesses spoke of jerking against restraints and gasps for air over several minutes. A prison official involved in the first execution, carried out in January, later acknowledged in a sworn statement that it took “longer than I had expected.”In a statement to the Guardian, Copeland disputed that Alabama’s executions had gone wrong, saying: “There was some movement during the procedure, which could be interpreted as either conscious struggling or the involuntary movements typically exhibited by people who are dying.”“The death penalty is never going to be something pleasant,” he said. “Nobody wants to die.” More

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      in Elections

      Trump Says He’s in Danger. So Why Did He Seek Out the Embrace of 100,000 Fans?

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      After two assassination attempts, the former president seems to be relishing the dangers of his job. Some at the Georgia-Alabama football game wondered if his appearance was wise.Chicken tenders and cynicism were flying through the air.It was Saturday night in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and former President Donald J. Trump was in the bowels of Bryant-Denny Stadium at the University of Alabama, surrounded by screaming football fans. He began hurling boxes of chicken at them. His aides filmed his every movement, uploading the footage to social media.One popular pro-Trump influencer reposted a video of Mr. Trump traipsing through the concourse, writing: “There have been two assassination attempts on this man in the past three months and he walks into a stadium full of 100,000 people like a boss. Next week he’s returning to the site where he was shot. Total badass.”It was a perfect encapsulation of the ways in which Mr. Trump and those around him have plied the plots against his life for political benefit.The shooting in Butler, Pa., which left two men dead, including the gunman, was a terrifying event that was rewatched endlessly in the era of social media streaming. And it was shocking how close a second would-be assassin got to the former president weeks later at his golf club in Florida. These near misses have rattled the country and stirred memories of dark chapters in American political history.Mr. Trump plans to return to Butler for a rally on Oct. 5, and he relives these attempts on his life at nearly every campaign stop. Lately he has taken to saying that he has one of the most dangerous professions in the world, more dangerous than racecar driving or bull riding. He has bragged about the mortal danger in which he finds himself (“they only go after consequential presidents”); used it as evidence of divine intervention (“God has now spared my life — it must have been God, thank you — not once, but twice”) and as inspiration for set design (he decorated the stage at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee with images of his bloodied face).There has been a new assassination threat against him from Iran, as retaliation for ordering the killing of the Iranian general Qassim Suleimani in early 2020, and some recent campaign events have been scaled back, modified or canceled altogether. “I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before,” he wrote on Truth Social last week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Fans Want to Watch Football. Trump and Walz Will Be There, Too.

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      Donald Trump and Tim Walz are attending college games on Saturday that will draw plenty of viewers in the swing states of Michigan and Georgia.For college football fans, they are temples of the sport: the University of Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium and the Big House at the University of Michigan.But to the presidential campaigns, they are this Saturday’s soundstages: ready-made stops for former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic nominee for vice president, to try to prove their Everyman mettle to any battleground-state voters who might be in the stands or watching from afar.“College football in the fall is the only place where you can find 100,000 potential voters in one location and you don’t have to pay for it,” said Angi Horn, a Republican strategist and Alabama football loyalist.“To pay for the amount of coverage and publicity and a crowd like that would cost millions,” she added. “They’re getting it for free — and you get to see a really good football game.”Mr. Trump is headed to Tuscaloosa, Ala., where the second-ranked Georgia Bulldogs, the gridiron pride of the neighboring swing state, will meet the No. 4 Alabama Crimson Tide. Mr. Walz is scheduled to visit Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, trawling for votes in one of the country’s biggest battlegrounds as the 12th-ranked Michigan Wolverines, last season’s national champions, host Minnesota’s Golden Gophers.Mr. Trump and Mr. Walz cannot reliably assume they will be Saturday’s star attractions as the campaigns encroach on a sport that is a cultural mainstay and surpasses Washington for ancient feuds and partisan obsessives. But their visits have been designed to invite a crush of local news coverage and social media posts and, their allies hope, cameos during national broadcasts that will soak up viewers in Michigan and Georgia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      US Department of Justice sues Alabama for purging people from voter rolls

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      The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on Friday against Alabama and its top election official, accusing the state of illegally purging people from voter rolls too close to the November election.Federal officials said the purge violates the “quiet period provision” of the National Voter Registration Act that prohibits the systemic removal of names from voter rolls 90 days before a federal election.Alabama’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, in August announced an initiative “to remove noncitizens registered to vote in Alabama”. More than 3,000 people who had been previously issued noncitizen identification numbers will have their voter registration status made inactive and flagged for possible removal from the voter rolls. The justice department said both native-born and naturalized US citizens, who are eligible to vote, received the letters saying their voting status was being made inactive.“The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights in our democracy,” assistant attorney general Kristen Clarke, who heads the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “As election day approaches, it is critical that Alabama redress voter confusion resulting from its list maintenance mailings sent in violation of federal law.”The lawsuit asks for injunctive relief that would restore the ability of affected eligible voters to vote on 5 November.“I was elected secretary of state by the people of Alabama, and it is my constitutional duty to ensure that only American citizens vote in our elections,” Allen said in a statement issued on Friday night. He said he could not comment on pending litigation.Allen in August acknowledged the possibility that some of the people identified had become naturalized citizens since receiving their noncitizen number. He said they would need to update their information on a state voter registration form and would be able to vote after it was verified.The Campaign Legal Center, the Fair Elections Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center earlier this month filed a lawsuit also challenging the voter roll purge. They said the state purge targets naturalized citizens who once had noncitizen identification numbers before gaining citizenship.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe plaintiffs in that lawsuit include two US citizens who received letters telling them they were being moved to inactive voter registration status because of the purge. One is a Dutch-born man who became a US citizen in 2022. The other is a US-born citizen. More

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      America Does Not Need the Death Penalty

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      Capital punishment is not a front-burner political issue this year. In fact, the Democratic Party dropped the subject from its 2024 platform, eight years after becoming the first major party to formally call for abolishing the death penalty. But in 2020, President Biden’s campaign platform included a pledge to “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.” Once elected, he became the country’s first sitting president openly opposed to capital punishment.It would be an appropriate and humane finale to his presidency for Mr. Biden to fulfill that pledge and try to eliminate the death penalty for federal crimes. Such an effort would also remind the nation that this practice is immoral, unconstitutional and useless as a deterrent to crime.For more than two decades now, most barometers of how Americans view capital punishment — the number of new death sentences, the number of executions and the level of public support — have tracked a steady decline. There were 85 executions in 2000 but only 24 last year and 13 so far this year, all carried out in only seven states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah.While a majority of Americans, about 55 percent over the past several years, remain in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers, half no longer believe it is used fairly. The Gallup Crime Survey, which has been testing opinions on this subject of fairness since 2000, found in last October’s sampling that for the first time, more Americans believed the death penalty was applied unfairly (50 percent) than fairly (47 percent).“I regret deeply that we followed the easiest path.”This editorial board has long argued that the death penalty should be outlawed, as it is in Western Europe and many other parts of the world. Studies have consistently shown, for decades, that the ultimate penalty is applied arbitrarily, and disproportionately to Black people and people with mental problems. A death sentence condemns prisoners to many years of waiting, often in solitary confinement, before they are killed, and executions have often gone awry, arguably violating the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More