Criminal Justice & Death Penalty

• A Man of Letters -- Joseph Giarratano on Death Row
  Students at American University honor a man who hasn't been seen in public since 1978, when Virginia sent him to death row on a conviction that won't hold up.
  624 words · 2 min read
• Dear Joe -- Waiting for Justice in Virginia
  In February 1991, McCarthy traveled to Richmond to say goodbye to a friend and watch him die — then a governor's commutation came hours before the chair.
  836 words · 3 min read
• Eddie Ellis and the Second Chance
  Two years out of a fifteen-year stretch that took him through six prisons including a Colorado supermax, Eddie Ellis is trying to prove that second chances work.
  743 words · 2 min read
• Modern Slavery in the Global Economy
  A Cameroonian teenager enslaved as a housekeeper in suburban Maryland — modern slaveholders don't carry whips, but the exploitation is the same.
  837 words · 3 min read
• Schieber- NCR
  When the U.S. bishops finally opposed the death penalty in the 1980s, unanimity was absent — and the moral argument still had to be made, one diocese at a time.
  754 words · 3 min read
• The Case Against the Death Penalty in Virginia
  Virginia's electric chair, built by Thomas Jefferson in 1800, and the friend McCarthy went to watch die in it — a case against state killing made personal.
  836 words · 3 min read
• Vicki Schieber and the Case Against Execution
  Most abolitionists are armchair opinionators; Vicki Schieber, whose daughter was murdered, opposes execution from a place the rest of us cannot reach.
  765 words · 3 min read
• Virginia’s 21-Day Rule and the Case of Joseph Giarratano
  Four men freed from Virginia’s death row since 1972, and the rule that nearly killed them: twenty-one days to present new evidence, then the door shuts forever.
  1,766 words · 7 min read