Most people in the USA have been very willing to allow a great deal of state violence so long as they do not need to witness or experience it regularly. MAGA has used this to push the limit of how much violence the USA will tolerate. There is no reason to think the escalation will stop.

I've been thinking and talking and writing about the death penalty for my whole adult life and the past week+ has been truly surreal and exhausting, not only because of the onslaught of horrors but because there seems to be so little historical memory of what this system is and always has been.

she’s dreaming about greeting her friends aka everyone she has ever met

the DOJ is moving ~400 people detained pretrial (not convicted of anything!) from a jail outside Atlanta (where their cases will be heard) 200 miles away to the infamous Irwin Detention Center where detained migrants were given nonconsensual hysterectomies. It was shut down, and then reopened by ICE

God, grant me the courage to change the things I can and incredible new powers to change the things I can't.

what if most people we are punishing for violence and other forms of survival were actually hurt first???

the prosecutor in the execution that was just stayed is really saying the quiet part out loud about what the common threads of landing on death row are -- these things are exactly what the Survivor Justice Act are meant to respond to!

wow wow wow — the execution of Stacey Humphreys has been STAYED in Georgia because a judge ruled that he was due a hearing under the Survivor Justice Act, which allows the abuse a person has suffered to be considered in their sentencing. Mr Humphrey was horribly abused as a kid.

omg i can't wait!!!!

There has been an increase in executions nationally, last year saw about double the number we saw the year before

the US is set to execute three people in a 24 hour period starting tomorrow. Texas, Georgia, and Alabama are all planning to kill people in their death chambers tomorrow and Thursday. increases in state killings should concern all of us and are a harbinger of worse to come

idk I just feel like on the one hand I get that the government is doing so much bad stuff right now, it’s hard for this to float to the top, but on the other hand we should ALWAYS CARE about who the state is executing & how they got the death sentence! bc that mission will drift!

Just because the injustice happens to someone you think deserves it does not mean that's the only person it can or will happen to.

Humphreys killed two women; it was an awful crime. he has never denied it. but we’re living through a time when state power is fast expanding and the mechanisms that are meant to check it are failing. the government being able to kill someone after a compromised process is scary for everyone!

Georgia is set to execute a man named Stacey Humphreys in 3 days. 11 of his jurors voted for life without parole; the one holdout altered the foreperson’s note to the judge to hide the deadlock (!!) - because under Georgia law, a deadlock in a capital case automatically means a life sentence.

Thanks for this thread Hannah. I wrote about his case in Dec in the context of the clemency issues and mentioned some of the juror misconduct, but eventually lost the thread. (One challenge is how fast GA executions happen once a date is set, within weeks, which makes in-depth coverage even harder.)