Search Results for: Mississippi

A federal judge in Louisiana struck down Louisiana state House and Senate districting maps Thursday for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and diluting Black voter power in the gulf state. Federal District Judge Shelly Dick ordered the the maps redrawn but did not give a quota for the number of majority [...]

Alabama’s experimental use of gas to torture to death Kenneth Smith on January 25th — like all executions by lethal injection — has perpetuated a horrific Nazi legacy in the United States and is a traumatizing affront to many in the Jewish community. The fact that this torment was blindly carried out just ahead of [...]

Alabama inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith was executed Thursday night by nitrogen hypoxia after the US Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, declined to intervene in the state’s second attempt to execute an inmate who had previously survived a botched lethal injection. The court’s three liberal justices expressed their willingness to hear Smith’s claims of cruel [...]

I am an ordained Jewish cantor, a former Jewish prison chaplain, a third-generation Holocaust survivor, and co-founder of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty. I write these words on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and on the morning after Alabama executed Kenneth Eugene Smith with nitrogen gas — the first execution of this [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case challenging a Mississippi felon voter disenfranchisement law. Several voters who were previously convicted of felonies challenged the law on the basis of it being an unconstitutional example of cruel and unusual punishment under the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. The [...]

The US government has again desecrated the memory of the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the latest example of the Biden administration having broken its promise to work to end the death penalty, it announced its intention to seek a federal death sentence against Peyton Gendron, the 19-year-old who horrifically murdered 10 [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW)  released its 2024 World Report on Thursday detailing the state of global human rights. The report’s central theme was that “transactional diplomacy” undermined global human rights institutions and enabled autocrats to worsen violations. HRW Executive Director Tiran Hassan described “transactional diplomacy” as when “governments disregard the benefits of long-term relationships built [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied an injunction Thursday against a Mississippi law that created a state-run court district in the state’s capital of Jackson. The court held that the plaintiffs in the case had failed to show standing to maintain a case for a preliminary injunction. The NAACP originally appealed [...]

A federal judge ruled Sunday that Mississippi officials can create the planned state-run court in Jackson, the state capital, where the majority of residents are Black, despite objections from the NAACP. The decision is part of a more significant legal battle over Mississippi’s expansion of state power in Jackson, which the NAACP has sued against. [...]

A federal appeals court on Monday temporarily blocked Mississippi officials from creating a state-run court in part of the majority-Black capital city of Jackson. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted an administrative stay to the NAACP and other plaintiffs to block enforcement of Mississippi House Bill 1020 (HB 1020), which establishes the new court, [...]