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Dear friends:
Community is essential, especially in the work we do of transforming the criminal justice system. It's generational work and without a community no single person can hope to prevail.
I've been on this journey for a long time now, forty years, and I've always had people alongside me as my teachers, my sisters, my colleagues, my friends. And each year I come to you, my community of care, those who have been awakened to the awful stain that is the death penalty and who want to see its end.
I come to you and ask you to donate to our work here at the Ministry Against the Death Penalty. And you better believe that your donations make a difference! The money you give on Giving Tuesday helps us:
- Maintain an online community where we turn a bright spotlight on broad injustices and executions.
- Create resilience so we can weather change, whether it be Covid curtailing in-person events or a billionaire destabilizing one of our most useful organizing tools.
- Buy the technology we need in order to provide online education to students and organizations across the country.
- Design new material to engage young people.
- Donate copies of Dead Man Walking to schools and universities.
- Assist incarcerated people with basic expenses.
We appreciate every donation, no matter how large or small. And I appreciate you for caring about justice and the dignity of all beings.
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A quick update
We'll bring you more detailed information in our December newsletter, but we wanted to let you know what has been happening recently. On the whole, November has been a very tough month.
- Oklahoma executed Richard Fairchild on his birthday, November 17th.
- On the same day, Alabama halted the execution of Kenneth Smith after officials spent an hour attempting unsuccessfully to set an IV line.
- The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals denied both of Richard Glossip's appeals. Richard now faces yet another execution date, February 16th.
- Missouri will put Kevin Johnson to death on Giving Tuesday.
- John Hanson will be the next person Oklahoma kills, if the attorney-general prevails in having him extradited from Louisiana. Much more about Mr. Hanson in our next newsletter.
- In a rush to kill a terminally ill man before his late-stage bladder cancer takes his life, Idaho has issued a death warrant for Gerald Pizzuto, despite outstanding legal claims. The state does not have the chemicals needed to perform the execution. And, as Pizzuto's attorneys have pointed out, to schedule this execution during the holiday season imposes a terrible burden on the corrections officers tasked with performing it.
And one (at least temporarily) bright spot:
- In the wake of repeated botched executions and failed execution attempts, Alabama's governor, Kay Ivey, has called a halt to all executions until a "top-to-bottom review" of the state's execution protocols is carried out. This should only be seen as a temporary hiatus as the state is eager to resume executions, but it gives us some hope of change.
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Upcoming executions
November
29 MO Kevin Johnson
December
14 MS Thomas Loden, Jr.
15 OK John Hanson
15 ID Gerald Pizzuto
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