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    Luigi Mangione Death Penalty Bid May Pit Prosecutors Against Each Other

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    State and federal prosecutors have both accused Mr. Mangione of killing a health insurance executive. Attorney General Pam Bondi is pushing aggressively for capital punishment.Luigi Mangione is being prosecuted for murder by two agencies: the Department of Justice, which answers to President Trump, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is led by the only prosecutor to convict President Trump.Mr. Trump and the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, are far from natural allies. And the high-profile case of Mr. Mangione, who is charged with killing a health care executive, could set their offices on a collision course.When Mr. Mangione was arrested in December, before President Trump took office, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said the state prosecution would occur first. But last week, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, signaled that the Justice Department might move quickly, saying that federal prosecutors would seek the death penalty for Mr. Mangione.“The president’s directive was very clear: We are to seek the death penalty when possible,” Ms. Bondi said in an interview with “Fox News Sunday.”Deliberations over whether to seek the federal death penalty can take a year or more in the Southern District and the Justice Department. Ms. Bondi’s swift announcement was all the more unusual given that Mr. Mangione has yet to be formally indicted in federal court.Mr. Mangione’s case has become an arena for Ms. Bondi to show her commitment to the president. Her decision “is more political theater than anything else,” said Cheryl Bader, a law professor at Fordham University.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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      Texas Prosecutors Will No Longer Pursue Death Penalty in El Paso Shooting

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      The gunman, who killed 23 people at a Walmart in 2019, was previously sentenced to 90 consecutive life terms after pleading guilty to federal hate crimes.Texas prosecutors will no longer seek the death penalty against the gunman who killed 23 people in a mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart six years ago, the local district attorney announced on Tuesday.The gunman, a self-described white nationalist, had previously been sentenced to 90 consecutive life terms after pleading guilty to federal hate crimes in the attack, one of the deadliest on Latinos in U.S. history. At the time, federal prosecutors also said they would not seek the death penalty.On Tuesday, the El Paso district attorney said his office had changed course after speaking with the families of the victims.“It was very clear as we met with the families, one by one, that there is a strong and overwhelming consensus that just wanted this case over with, that wanted finality in the court process,” said the district attorney, James Montoya, a Democrat.In exchange, the shooter, Patrick Crusius, is expected to plead guilty to capital murder and be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Mr. Montoya said. Mr. Crusius will also waive his right to any potential appeals as part of the plea agreement.Mr. Montoya is the fourth prosecutor to have been assigned to the state case. He promised during his campaign last year to seek the death penalty, and said on Tuesday that he still believed the shooter deserved it.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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      Arizona’s execution pitted experts against politicians. Experts lost | Austin Sarat

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      On Wednesday, 19 March, Arizona executed Aaron Gunches by lethal injection. As ABC News reports, he was put to death for “kidnapping and killing 40-year-old Ted Price by shooting him four times in the Arizona desert”.Gunches’s case was unusual in many ways, not least that he stopped his legal appeals and volunteered to be executed, then changed his mind before changing it again. His execution was scheduled to be carried out almost two years ago. It was put on hold when the Arizona governor, Katie Hobbs, commissioned an independent review of the state’s death penalty procedures after a series of botched executions.But over the last several months, she pushed hard to make sure Gunches died for his crime. She even fired the expert retired Judge David Duncan who she had chosen to do that review, before he could complete his report.Her decision to let Duncan go was shocking. At the time, she offered the following explanation: “Your review has, unfortunately, faced repeated challenges, and I no longer have confidence that I will receive a report from you that will accomplish the purpose and goals of the Executive Order that I issued nearly two years ago.”The governor also noted that the department of corrections, rehabilitation & reentry had conduct “a comprehensive review of prior executions and has made significant revisions to its policies and procedures”. But doubt about whether she could rely on a review conducted by the group which is in charge of the state’s executions in why she appointed Duncan in the first place.That is why I suspect that Hobbs tossed Duncan aside because she didn’t like the facts he was finding or the conclusions he seemed to be reaching.Facts are stubborn things, but, in our era, they can be tossed aside with little political cost and no regret. Why rely on expertise if it gets in the way of achieving a result you want to reach?Still, Hobbs’s unprecedented decision to “kill the messenger” was another low moment for a society increasing living by a line uttered by a newspaper editor in the classic movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”In the world of capital punishment, the “legend” to which politicians like Hobbs are attached is that it can make America a safer and more just place. They want us to believe that they embrace the death penalty to bring closure to family members of murder victims rather than to accrue political capital.Note what Arizona attorney general Kris Mayes said during a news conference following the execution: “An execution is the most serious action that the state takes, and I assure you that it is not taken lightly. Today, Arizona resumed the death penalty, and justice for Ted Price and his family was finally served.”After Gunches’s death, the sister of the man he murdered echoed that sentiment. Karen Price called the execution “the final chapter in a process that has spanned nearly 23 years”.Ted Price’s daughter added that Gunches’s death means that she will no longer have to revisit “the circumstances surrounding my father’s death” as she had to for over two decades of seemingly endless legal proceedings. “Today,” she said, “marks the end of that painful chapter, and I couldn’t be more grateful”.That chapter would not have ended if Governor Hobbs had been willing to listen to her own expert.Before being sacked, Judge Duncan prepared a draft of his report and wrote a letter to the governor’s office previewing his conclusions. He called lethal injection an unreliable method of execution and said: “Drug manufacturers don’t allow states to use the appropriate drugs.”Duncan had spent nearly two years reviewing Arizona’s use of lethal injections. As he explained, “Early on, I thought lethal injection would work. The more I learned about it I learned that that was a false hope.”Duncan told the governor that, in his view, using lethal injection was too risky. In his view, the best course would be for Arizona to adopt the firing squad because “it has the lowest botch rate.”That was not the news Hobbs hoped her expert would deliver, so she let Duncan go. It seems he just didn’t understand that she wanted him to ease the way toward a resumption of lethal injection executions rather than suggesting that the state should not execute anyone until it could adopt what he considered to be a better method.And Duncan was not the only one raising questions about Arizona’s resumption of lethal injection executions. Last January, law professor Corinna Lain, a leading expert on lethal injection, said: “The evidence is overwhelming that Arizona cannot lawfully carry out an execution by lethal injection at this time. Its pentobarbital protocol is sure or very likely to cause a tortuous death even in the best of circumstances.”She went on to say: “The circumstances here are far from optimal. The State is on the cusp of using an inexperienced, untrained team to inject likely expired drugs stored in unmarked mason jars that were produced by a company that does not make drugs for human consumption and that will be compounded by a pharmacy that the … (the state) itself has previously disavowed.”Disregarding expert knowledge is very much in fashion in many areas of American life, not just where the death penalty is concerned. The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols explains that “Trump allies make noises about expert failures … [and] demonize what its constituents believe was the medical establishment’s attempt to curtail civil rights during the coronavirus pandemic.” He argues that Elon Musk’s attack on civil servants is really an attack on the “very notion of apolitical expertise.”But, as Nichols explains, such doubt is not confined to Washington DC. It is found in the “homes of ordinary American families”. There, “knowledge of every kind is also under attack. Parents argue with their child’s doctor over the safety of vaccines. Famous athletes speculate that the world might actually be flat. College administrators ponder dropping algebra from the curriculum because students keep failing it.”So, it is not surprising that the attack on knowledge would infect decisions about how to end the lives of people condemned to death. Political leaders – including Democrats like Hobbs – know they can play into the burgeoning culture of disrespect for what experts have to say, so they dispense with Duncan and ignore Lain.The more publicly they display that disrespect, the more politically they can benefit.It wasn’t always this way when decisions had to be made about methods of execution. At the end of the 19th century, before New York decided to abandon hanging, the state convened a commission to consider and recommend alternatives.That commission sought out the best minds to help them make their decision. It chose the electric chair.The decision whether electrocution “would be by Alternating Current (AC) or Direct Current (DC)” was informed by a competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, both pioneers in the development of electricity.That was then. Today, as the Arizona example shows, such expertise does not govern the choice of execution methods.In the wake of the Gunches execution, Governor Hobbs and the “down with experts crowd” may feel vindicated because nothing seemed to have gone awry. But they should not rest easy, and neither should any of the 112 inmates on Arizona’s death row.Studies have shown that lethal injection has the worst track record of any method of execution used in the last century in this country. That is why it is only a matter of time before an execution in Arizona proves the folly of ignoring experts and the insights they offer. More

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      Even rightwingers are mocking the ‘Epstein files’ as a lot of redacted nothing

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      The Epstein files fiascoDrum roll, please: the “most transparent administration in American history” is declassifying shocking new information about Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. After years of speculation that powerful people have been concealing information related to the late financier and convicted sex offender, the Trump administration said earlier this week that it would release unseen details about the case.“Breaking news right now, you’re going to see some Epstein information being released by my office,” Pam Bondi, the attorney general, told Fox News on Wednesday night. “This will make you sick.”Apparently intent on treating this “new” Epstein information like an album drop rather than a horrific sex-trafficking case involving the abuse of young girls, the White House gave a bunch of influencers a first look at the information. On Thursday, Bondi’s team handed out big white binders labelled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “The Most Transparent Administration in History” to a group of 15 rightwing activists and self-styled “citizen journalists” visiting the White House. Grinning gleefully, these influencers proceeded to pose for the press with the binders like they were trophies from a school sports day.So what was in those binders? A whole lot of heavily redacted nothing, basically. A bunch of people at Bondi’s office appear to have hastily printed out Epstein’s contact book, which was published by the (now shuttered) website Gawker a decade ago, along with other information that has been in the public domain for years. They then shoved 200 pages of printouts into binders and gave them to a handpicked collection of useful idiots. Being as they’re the most transparent administration in American history, the justice department also made the information available on its website later that day – along with a note acknowledging that there wasn’t actually much to see. “The first phase of declassified files largely contains documents that have been previously leaked but never released in a formal capacity by the U.S. Government,” the note said.“This isn’t a news story, it’s a publicity stunt,” the Palm Beach lawyer Spencer Kuvin, who has worked on the case since 2005, representing nine victims, told the Miami Herald. He added that he feared that the Trump administration was using Epstein’s victims for political purposes. But then what do you expect from Trump – a guy who, in 2002 said of Epstein: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It’s even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do. And many of them are on the younger side.”In short, this whole big “reveal” was an embarrassing flop – so much so that it was mocked by people on the right. Even Laura Loomer, a white nationalist conspiracy theorist, thought the stunt was distasteful.“I hate to say it, but the American people can’t trust the validity of the Epstein files released today. It was released in an unprofessional manner with paid, partisan social media influencers to curate their binders for us,” Loomer tweeted on Thursday. She later added: “Sorry I won’t celebrate dancing like a school girl with a binder full of pedophile names.” When even Loomer thinks you’ve gone low, you’ve gone very low indeed.Ultimately, however, while nothing new may have been revealed in Bondi’s “Epstein files”, this grotesque stunt was very revealing. It was yet another reminder that there is nothing – not even the sex trafficking of minors – that Donald Trump and his associates won’t cynically turn into a self-serving photo opportunity. Or, I should add, an opportunity to “Rickroll” people: midday Thursday, while people were waiting for the documents to be published online, the House judiciary GOP account on X posted in all-caps: “#BREAKING: EPSTEIN FILES RELEASED.” This then redirected users to the YouTube music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. Classy.Also revealing was who the White House thought should get a first look at documents involving sex trafficking. Among the influencers assembled was Mike Cernovich. Who is he? Just a rightwing manosphere influencer who has said things like “rape via an alpha male is different from other forms of rape” and told men that women exist “for your sexual pleasure”.The reaction to the backlash over the Epstein files fiasco also shows how, when anything goes wrong, people in Trump’s orbit are quick to point fingers and turn on each other rather than take responsibility. Bondi, for example, responded to all the criticism by accusing the FBI of withholding information from her. Meanwhile, some of the conservative influencers who got the binders full of nothing accused the southern district of New York of hiding information.“These swamp creatures at SDNY deceived Bondi, Kash, and YOU,” the conservative media personality Liz Wheeler tweeted. “Be outraged that the binder is boring. You should be. Because the evil deep state LIED TO YOUR FACE.”Perhaps what is most revealing about this fiasco, however, is that it is a stark reminder of how justice still hasn’t been served when it comes to Epstein’s many victims. Apart from Ghislaine Maxwell, none of Epstein’s many enablers and associates have faced any real consequences. A lot of rich and powerful people have got away with disgraceful things. And that’s not a conspiracy theory; that’s just our legal system.Andrew Tate and brother land in US from Romania after travel ban liftedSpeaking of predators evading accountability, the Tate brothers, who are charged with human trafficking in Romania, landed in the US on Thursday. This comes after it was reported last week that the Trump administration had asked Romanian authorities to lift travel restrictions on the pair.View image in fullscreen‘Pro-lifers’ are demanding women face the death penaltySelf-described “abortion abolitionists” – who oppose all abortions without any exceptions and want to criminalize the procedure and ban IVF – used to be at the fringes of the anti-abortion movement. Now, people who believe that the death penalty should be considered for women who have abortions are slowly moving into the US mainstream. Mother Jones looks at how some of these abolitionist men have turned on women in the anti-abortion movement. “We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion, not feminist women,” one of those “TheoBros” recently wrote.At least six children die of hypothermia amid freezing conditions in GazaI haven’t heard any pro-lifers get upset about this.Jeff Bezos is sending Katy Perry to spaceLast year, Perry came out with Woman’s World, her first solo single in three years and, she said, “the first contribution I have given since becoming a mother and since feeling really connected to my feminine divine”. Unfortunately, her contribution was panned so mercilessly that Perry is now taking her feminine divine as far away from the world as possible: the singer will fly to space during Blue Origin’s next (all-female) crewed mission, the Jeff Bezos-owned space company has announced. Rumour has it that if you work at the Washington Post and have any opinions that have the temerity to clash with Bezos’s, then you’ll get shot into space, too.The pill hasn’t been improved in years – no wonder women are giving up on itMisinformation from wellness influencers along with a conservative backlash against birth control is causing more people to stop taking the pill. “But there’s another, underlying problem when it comes to contraception,” writes Martha Gill. “It needs to improve … It’s common for women to be using the same methods as their mothers – or even their grandmothers. Why aren’t contraceptives getting better?”The week in porktriarchyBig news for anyone with a small child: Peppa Pig’s mother (Mummy Pig) is having a new little piglet. Not sure how they can afford three children in this day and age but maybe Mummy Pig has been trading meme coins. While I’m sure Elon “have more babies” Musk is thrilled by the baby announcement, it is not clear how Cardi B feels. The rapper has been in a feud with Peppa since 2020, ever since her daughter started ruining her Uggs by jumping in muddy puddles. More

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      Sept. 11 Plea Deal Includes Lifetime Gag Order on C.I.A. Torture Secrets

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      The clause is included in a disputed plea agreement between a Pentagon official and the man accused of planning the attacks that killed 3,000 people.Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the prisoner at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who is accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, has agreed to never disclose secret aspects of his torture by the C.I.A. if he is allowed to plead guilty rather than face a death-penalty trial.The clause was included in the latest portions of his deal to be unsealed at a federal appeals court in Washington. A three-judge panel is considering whether former Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III lawfully withdrew from a plea agreement with Mr. Mohammed in the capital case against five men who are accused of conspiring in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000.The C.I.A. has never taken a public position on whether it supports the deal, and the agency declined to comment on Friday. But the latest disclosure makes clear that Mr. Mohammed would not be allowed to publicly identify people, places and other details from his time in the agency’s secret prisons overseas from 2003 to 2006.It has been publicly known for years that Mr. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times by the C.I.A. It has also been revealed that waterboarding was done by a three-person interrogation team led by Bruce Jessen and James E. Mitchell, two former contract psychologists for the agency. Details of Mr. Mohammed’s violent treatment, including rectal abuse, have emerged in court filings and leaks.But the agency has protected the names of other people who worked in the “black site” prisons, notably medical staff, guards and other intelligence agency employees. That includes the people who questioned Mr. Mohammed hundreds of times as he was shuttled between prisons in Afghanistan, Poland and other locations, which the C.I.A. has not acknowledged as former black sites.Now, a recently unredacted paragraph in Mr. Mohammed’s 20-page settlement says he agreed not to disclose “any form, in any manner, or by any means” information about his “capture, detention, confinement of himself or others” while in U.S. custody.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 Elections

      Florida Man Sentenced to Death for Killing 5 in Sebring Bank Shooting

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      The man, Zephen Xaver, 27, will have his case automatically appealed to the Florida Supreme Court.A Florida man who killed five women inside a bank in January 2019 by forcing them to lie down on the floor as he fatally shot each one was sentenced to death on Monday.The man, Zephen Xaver, 27, methodically carried out the killings in the lobby of a SunTrust Bank in Sebring, Fla. In text messages to an ex-girlfriend minutes before the killings he wrote that he “always wanted to kill people so I’m going to try it today and see how it goes,” according to court documents.Brian Haas, a Florida prosecutor, described Mr. Xaver’s actions as systematic. He said that Mr. Xaver had planned the slayings, from getting his driver’s license to obtain the firearm used in the shooting that day to entering the bank only after a male customer left it.Zephen XaverHighlands County Sheriff’s Office, via Associated PressIn an interview after the sentencing, Mr. Haas, who had sought the death penalty against Mr. Xaver, called the killings “horrific” and said that the State Attorney’s Office had “worked very hard to secure these sentences.“He did this because he wanted to find out what it felt like to kill someone, and he planned it,” said Mr. Haas, the state attorney for the 10th Judicial Circuit of Florida.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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      How Biden Should Spend His Final Weeks in Office

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      The days are dwindling to a precious few before President Biden relinquishes his tenancy at the White House to Donald Trump. Four years ago, in his inaugural address, Mr. Biden promised to “press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and possibility.” The peril remains, but so do the possibilities.Last week he announced that he was commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 others convicted of nonviolent crimes. Eleven days earlier, in a decision widely criticized, Mr. Biden pardoned his son Hunter, who was awaiting sentencing on gun possession and income tax charges.There is still much the president can do before he repairs to Delaware. He can spare federal death row prisoners from the fate some almost certainly will face when Mr. Trump returns. He can make the Equal Rights Amendment a reality after decades of efforts to enshrine it in the Constitution. He can safeguard magnificent landscapes that might otherwise be desecrated. He can protect undocumented immigrants facing deportation, alleviate crushing student debt facing millions of Americans and protect the reproductive rights of women. And more.New York Times Opinion contributors share what they hope President Biden will accomplish during his remaining time in office.Yes, time is running out for Mr. Biden’s presidency, but he can still repair, restore, heal and build, as he promised he would do on the January day four years ago when he took the oath of office. Here are a few suggestions:Commute the sentences of the 40 federal inmates on death rowBy Martin Luther King IIIBy commuting all federal death sentences to life, Mr. Biden would move America, meaningfully, in the direction of racial reconciliation and equal justice. In 2021 he became the first president to openly oppose capital punishment. Since his inauguration, the federal government has not carried out a single execution.If Mr. Biden does not exercise his constitutional authority to commute the sentences of everyone on federal death row, we will surely see another spate of deeply troubling executions as we did in the first Trump administration. A majority of those executed — 12 men and one woman — were people of color; at least one was convicted by an all-white jury and there was evidence of racial bias in a number of cases; several had presented evidence of intellectual disabilities or severe mental illnesses. The same problems were features in the cases of many of the 40 men on federal death row today, more than half of whom are people of color.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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      Pope Francis and advocates add to pleas for Biden to clear federal death row

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      Pope Francis has called for commutations for people on death row in the US, as religious leaders, civil rights groups and current and former prosecutors urge Joe Biden to take executive action on capital punishment.In his Sunday prayer, Pope Francis, who has been a vocal death penalty opponent, said: “It comes to my heart to ask all of you to pray for the prisoners in the United States who are on death row. Let’s pray that their sentence would be commuted [or] changed.”On Monday, advocates fighting against capital punishment released letters from hundreds of leaders asking the president to clear federal death row before Donald Trump returns to office, with pleas from Black pastors, Catholic leaders, former prison officials, leading civil rights groups and mental health advocates.Biden has been facing intensifying pressure to grant clemency to people with death sentences after he recently announced that he was using his executive authority to pardon his own son.Advocates expect the incoming administration to be deadly if Biden doesn’t take action. In the final year of Trump’s first term, the US government executed 13 people in rapid succession, killing more people in the federal system than under the previous 10 presidents combined. The rushed process claimed the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, prevented defendants from presenting new evidence, and involved execution methods that lawyers said were torturous.Some of Trump’s first-term executions happened despite objections from prosecutors and victims, and took place after the US supreme court quickly overruled lower-court decisions halting the proceedings.The Catholic Mobilizing Network, which represents 30,000 advocates, including bishops and dioceses, urged Biden, who is Catholic, to commute every federal death row sentence, writing: “We know that the federal death row, just as in the states, is marred by significant arbitrariness, including racial bias and the imposition on vulnerable individuals such as those with intellectual disability, brain damage, and serious mental illness. There is also a risk that innocent people will be put to death.”Biden has previously opposed capital punishment and issued a moratorium on executions when he became president, but he has not yet indicated whether he will commute sentences.There are 40 men currently on federal death row, and 38% of them are Black, although Black people comprise 14% of the US population. Nearly one in four of the men were 21 or younger at the time of the crime. And 43% of them come from only three states – Missouri, Texas and Virginia.In another letter released on Monday, 38 current and former district attorneys, attorneys general and former US prosecutors and justice department officials laid out the flaws in capital punishment.“We know that we have not always executed the worst of the worst, but often instead put to death the unluckiest of the unlucky – the impoverished, the poorly represented, and the most broken,” they wrote. “Time and again, we have executed people with long histories of debilitating mental illness, childhoods marred by unspeakable physical and mental abuse, and intellectual disabilities that have prevented them from leading independent adult lives. We have also likely executed the innocent.” The group also pointed to studies demonstrating that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to violence and does not reduce crime.A group of current prison officials, including some whom have overseen executions, pointed to the harms correctional staff face when carrying out capital punishment: “We have witnessed the depression, suicide, substance abuse, domestic turmoil, and other manifestations of trauma in our colleagues that study after study has documented among correctional staff who are impacted by executions, and on those close to them.”Families of murder victims also pleaded with Biden, writing that the death penalty “wastes many millions of dollars that could be better invested in programs that actually reduce crime and violence and that address the needs of families like ours”.Others now urging Biden to act include the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a coalition of Latino advocacy organizations and the Innocence Project.Trump intensified his pro-death penalty rhetoric during his campaign, calling for executions of “everyone who gets caught selling drugs”. And Trump allies, through the rightwing manifesto Project 2025, have called for the expansion of capital punishment and for the US to do “everything possible to obtain finality” for the 40 people on federal death row.In an interview before the election, Billie Allen, who is on federal death row and has long maintained his innocence, recounted to the Guardian what it was like to witness rapid executions under Trump’s first term: “I came in at 19. These are people I grew up with. I’m seeing them be carried out, never to return again, never to see them smile or hear them laughing.”He said he wished wished people recognized death row defendants were capable of change: “The majority of people here become better men for themselves, their family and friends and supporters.” More

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      After Biden Pardons His Son Hunter, Prison Inmates Hope They’re Next

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      President Biden has pardoned people convicted of some marijuana offenses, but advocates for prisoners say he has been slow to grant other requests.On Thanksgiving, Hunter Biden got the word from his father, President Biden, that he would be pardoned for tax and gun law violations, saving him from potentially spending a few years in federal prison.But Michael Montalvo, 78, a former cocaine ringleader who has spent nearly 40 years behind bars racking up course certifications, credits for good behavior and recommendations from his prison wardens, is still waiting to hear about his request for a pardon.So is Michelle West, who has spent more than 30 years in prison for her role in a drug conspiracy connected to a murder, while the gunman, who testified against her, has gone free. And Sara Gallegos, who is serving a 20-year sentence for being briefly involved in a drug ring after her husband was murdered when she was pregnant with her fourth child.“Everyone wants that chance,” said Lazara Serrano, who is waiting for her mother to win release from prison after more than 25 years, and who was stunned to hear that Hunter Biden’s criminal case was over. “For something just to be so sudden, and to happen right away, is crazy when there’s a line of people waiting.”Andrea James, who runs an organization that helps incarcerated women, said she did not begrudge Hunter Biden his pardon, but said she was hopeful that it would “move President Biden to consider other families who’ve endured what they have gone through for much longer periods of time.”Critics have complained that Mr. Biden has approved a smaller fraction of the requests for clemency that he has received than any other modern president. Of course, he still has time, and presidents have made a habit of waiting until the 11th hour to announce their clemency decisions.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