I’m copy-pasting it from my email.
Amazing news! We were in the middle of of a zoom press conference about the Gas Suffocation aspect of the planned execution of Sonny Burton in Alabama on Thursday when a reporter put into the chat:
“Did you see that Governor Ivey just commuted Burton’s sentence?”
And with that, the news was broken. Governor Ivey heard YOUR messages, received YOUR petitions, read the articles YOU sent, heard YOU ringing her phone off the hook, heard us tolling our bell outside her house…. and she acted. Amen! THANK YOU!
Once again, this proves, sometimes, our united efforts work!
Congratulations to Sonny and his legal team, his family, and to all who had a hand in creating this moment!
Governor Ivey has declared that “All Life is Precious,” which is why we made sure to bring along our 4×10 foot banner to the 24-hour vigil we helped coordinate in front of her house a few weeks ago. The banner could not be missed from any street-facing window of the Governor’s mansion. We know with certainty that the Governor was there…. NOW we know that she heard our message!
The other good news is that now we don’t have to drive all the way to Alabama. In fact, we had planned to go to Texas fiirst to toll the bell outside the prison in Huntsville at the execution of Cedrick Ricks on Wednesday, which is still on. Without our planned return through Alabama, making such a long drive makes less sense.
As you know, everything we do to support local activists working to halt executions is another expense. It’s not just the costs of being on the road that we must cover, but also the overhead…
- The four full time staff and our media consultant who do the behind-the-scenes work.
- The costs of the tools and services we use to communicate our message to the world.
- The price of existing as an organization that shows up to oppose every execution.
- (snip-donation request. You can get there from the page of any of these links.)
Thank you. Yours in the Struggle,
–abe
PS: New execution dates are being set regularly. Click here to oppose every upcoming execution.
Scottie's Playtime 
So, the lives of the victims of the murderers, are, precious enough???
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A life is a life. I would like to think that we have moved beyond ‘an eye for an eye”, at least at some level. And to me if I were given a choice between life imprisonment and death by what is basically slow death, I’d take life in prison. The scary part of that is, what if they never did? More than one ‘murderer’ has been discovered to be innocent and the true murderer is free.
It’s the doubt. Just because 12 jurors declare a person guilty doesn’t mean he or she is. It’s always that bit of doubt.
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Well, I guess the basest explanation could be, what separates the rest of us from murderers (presuming they truly are murderers) if we kill them? What’s the difference, really?
You may be surprised at how many victims’s families join us in trying to commute these death sentences. Even when the family wants the execution, they report coming away feeling a continued lack of “closure”, and worry about what they just witnessed. And their family member is still dead.
My reasons, though, include what Judy writes; people get convicted all the time who are not guilty. Others are so mentally disadvantaged that there’s no way they know what they’re doing, all the time. We don’t have mental illness treatment for anyone, much less the profoundly ill, or the developmentally disabled. There have been at least 4, that I can recall, executions of people who could only sign their names if they copied it from another sheet. One man was eating his last meal, and mentioned it was so good, he hoped he could get that meal again sometime soon after he got back from his execution appointment. We didn’t get that one stopped; I was thankful the injection worked and the guy died without struggle.
There are a lot of details about the procedure, as well, that are unsettling once people are aware of them. I’ve always been totally against execution on the basis of judge not, lest I be judged, but the margin for human error up and down the entire line is large, especially considering how difficult it is for a low-income defendant to get a decent defense. It’s just safer for all if we keep them in prison when they’re convicted.
I do feel-and this will be shocking-I do feel that if we’re going to execute convicts, it should be done in daylight, and publicly so that people know what we’re doing in our names. No one ought to be forced to observe, but executions shouldn’t just happen in the twilight when only a few people realize that all of us in a given state just killed a person.
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one other thing: what right do we have to murder (and that’s the word) someone because they were found guilty of some kind of horrendous crime? We gussy it up and call it “execution” but it’s still taking another person’s life. And the truly horrible thing: what if the killer wasn’t? Or it was self defense, but the only victim is the one who was trying kill HIM? There’s just too damn much waffle room in any of it.
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Absolutely! Thanks, Judy!
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