Press Releases
about Capital Punishment

In our series on how Biden can use the lame duck period to secure civil liberties and civil rights, we examine how Biden can combat President-elect Trump’s plans to greatly expand the death penalty and execute every person on the federal row.

Every person accused of a crime is entitled to a jury of their peers that represents a fair cross section of their community. But that is never the reality for Black and brown people facing the death penalty. A process called death qualification excludes people from capital juries if they do not believe in the death penalty. Death qualification rigs juries to be whiter and more likely to convict. It discriminates against Black prospective jurors, women, and people of individual faiths that oppose capital punishment.   Our fight against death qualification is just one piece of our upcoming challenge to Kansas’ use of the death penalty. The ACLU, together with the law firms Hogan Lovells and Ali & Lockwood, Democracy Forward, and the Kansas State Board of Indigents’ Defense Services’ Death Penalty Defense Unit is putting the death penalty on trial in Kansas in a series of hearings beginning in October.

In Galloway v. Mississippi, the ACLU represents a man on Mississippi’s death row whose trial attorneys relied on a mere twenty-two-page presentation in support of a life sentence, without first conducting the background investigation that would have enabled them to make informed decisions about what evidence to present. A constitutionally adequate investigation would have uncovered voluminous mitigating evidence that could have caused the jury to decide for life instead of death. The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected Mr. Galloway’s claim by speculating that trial counsel had an alternative “strategy” that precluded their doing a full presentation of the abuse he suffered as a child and his mental disabilities—even though Mr. Galloway’s lawyers asserted no such strategic judgment.