Death penalty receives another blow, this time in Pennsylvania

Galleries - Capital Punishmentsource: Above The Law 
published: 5 January 2016

The death penalty has come under fire recently in state courts. Now a recent case out of Pennsylvania highlights a possible role for state executives in hastening the death penalty’s demise.

Remember how last summer the Connecticut Supreme Court issued an opinion ending the death penalty in Connecticut? The court held that the death penalty violates the Connecticut constitution’s cruel and unusual punishment provision — the state analog of the Eighth Amendment — because the practice of killing convicts “fails to comport with contemporary standards of decency” and “is devoid of any legitimate penological justifications.”

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As protesters keep vigil, police admit accidentally killing activist

Drawing Gunsource: Washington Post
published: 27 December 2015

Bettie Jones was known as a community activist who spent her free time speaking out on issues such as police brutality that affected black Chicagoans on the far West Side, where she lived all her life, and who often attended vigils for people killed in street violence.

But on Sunday, dozens of people kept vigil for her.

Jones, 55, and Quintonio LeGrier, her 19-year-old upstairs neighbor, both were killed by police early Saturday morning. Police said Jones “was accidentally struck and tragically killed” by bullets fired by a police officer responding to a call of a domestic disturbance at her building’s address.

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Toni Emma Speck death: Cell death woman ‘needed urgent help’

Toni Emma Speck
Toni Emma Speck

source: BBC News
published: 27 November 2015

A nurse called to the cell of a woman who later collapsed and died should have realised she needed urgent treatment, an inquest jury has ruled.

Toni Emma Speck, 31, of Huntington, was detained under the Mental Health Act at Fulford Road police station in York on 2 June 2011. She later suffered a cardiac arrest and died in hospital. Her family criticised systematic failings in her care and said she could have lived had she been hospitalised.

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