Because Dead Men Tell No Tales

There’s a lot of talk in American culture about second chances. Whether people are giving NFL Hall of Famer (and former admitted cocaine addict) Lawrence Taylor a job shilling for diet products, allowing noted criminal Tom DeLay to dance around on some show, or turning a convicted international thug liar into a talking head and [...]

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Max Payne

Alabama is going to be famous in the fall for a death row case in front of the United States Supreme Court involving a man named Holly Wood. Now, we get the news that state officials are planning to execute a guy named Max Payne.
Seriously.
For those of you who don’t know, that’s also the name [...]

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Huh? Evidence? What Evidence?

It’s funny to listen to the Sotomayor confirmation hearings with all of the absurd quibbling over tiny little details about jurisprudence and caselaw. Senators like to show that they (roughly) understand general legal concepts and they compile sets of questions about legal footnotes and dicta and so on and so on.
This academic and very public [...]

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Wood v. Allen

I grew up in a small town in south Alabama. A case involving our town is going to be heard at the United States Supreme Court. It should be big news. I don’t expect our tiny newspaper to cover the case (or really even mention it) since inept local lawyering in a major death penalty [...]

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Judged Unworthy

It was late at night on May 21, 1990 in Abbeville, Alabama – southeast of Brundidge and close to basically nowhere. Willie McNair and his friend Olin Grimsley had been smoking crack. This made them want to smoke some more, as crack usually does, but they had no more money. So Olin and Willie went [...]

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Death Penalty Update

Indulge me a moment while I pick some low hanging fruit. Sure, it’s easy to pick out absurd bullshit that is being considered by the Alabama Legislature here in our glorious 2009 session. We have bills about ferrets and bills about manatees. We have bills about cock fighting and bills about what day school should [...]

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Progress on Death Penalty Abolition

As readers of this blog know, I write a good bit about capital punishment issues, particularly here in Alabama. It’s an issue I care a lot about and frankly, in that awful moralizing way, think that others should care more about too. The fact that the government takes lives in the names of its citizens [...]

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