Call or email Committee Members today to voice your opposition to Senate Bill 553. S. 553 will undermine public trust and confidence by making execution information a Government secret. Exercise of Government Power Must be Transparent S. 553 would make the entire process of obtaining lethal injection drugs a state secret, even the amount of money the Department… Read More →
News
A Jury of Your Peers? Not Always in South Carolina
In November of 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments in Foster v. Chatman, a Georgia death penalty case where prosecutors struck all four African Americans from the jury pool. As a result, Timothy Tyrone Foster, an African American man accused of killing a white woman, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to… Read More →
South Carolina Mirrors Nation in Decline of Death Penalty
America’s use of the death penalty declined significantly in 2015, according to a recent report from the Death Penalty Information Center. As of Dec. 15, 49 new death sentences have been imposed this year — the lowest annual number since the 1970s — and 28 executions have been carried out, the lowest number since 1991. The… Read More →
Close the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Recently, South Carolina schools were thrust into the national spotlight when a video depicting an encounter between a Richland County Sherriff’s Deputy and a 16-year-old African-American student went viral. The deputy, Ben Fields, has been widely criticized for using excessive force given that the student’s “offense” was using a cellphone in class. Others, however, believed… Read More →
New director of Death Penalty Resource and Defense Center aims to focus on justice
The first mission for the new leader of Columbia’s Death Penalty Resource and Defense Center is to make people aware of what her organization does and does not do. “It’s not about abolition of the death penalty or anything like that,” said Mandy Medlock, the center’s newly hired and first ever executive director. “It’s about… Read More →