Donate to PADP

This weekend we are making a funding push for Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (PADP). Starting Friday September 6 we will be posting online encouraging people to donate to PADP throughout the weekend.

In case you missed what we’ve been up to at PADP over the past year, check out this article, An Effort to Fund Art Instead of Death Row, at The Philadelphia Inquirer, or these articles at two.one.five Magazine and NewsWorks as we followed the Terrance Williams trial when he narrowly escaped Pennsylvania’s death chamber. We collected hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition for Terrance and we played an active role in the successful bids for clemency of Robert Gattis in Delaware and Hubert Michael here in PA.

We remain on the front line of the death penalty issue in Pennsylvania but we need your support. All donations are completely tax deductible. Please consider making a donation if you are able and spread the word.

We will be posting the donation link to social media all weekend :  http://padp.org/donate/

We could really use your support please #FundPADP and help us stop the Death Penalty in Pennsylvania.

Follow us on Twitter : @PADP_org

Like us on Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/padp.org

Execute Art Not People Petition

I hope you have all seen the coverage of Execute Art Not People at The Inquirer and at 215Magazine – and I would like to thank Amnesty International , The Leeway Foundation, Arts America, and The City of Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program for all of their support in getting out the word about the event.
 
Most of all thank you to everyone that made it out! There were tornadoes and thunderstorms and we still had a packed house. It is everyone that comes to events, has conversations about the issue, and support our work with their volunteer efforts and donations that truly create such momentum in a movement and this is a very exciting time for us – but we also still have much to do!
 
We are still getting signatures for our petition online- over the weekend we obtained nearly 500 signatures and we have a week to get at least 1,000 to send to Governor Corbett and members of the PA Senate here is a link to our online petition- http://www.change.org/petitions/execute-art-not-people – the online petition has far less signatures than the paper petition so we need help to step up this campaign. Please share and post this petition.
 
For some photos of our volunteers collecting signatures this weekend check out our tumblr page at www.executeartnotpeople.tumblr.com
 
Our June meeting is next Tuesday June 12 at The Ethical Society of Philadelphia 1906 Rittenhouse Square.
 
Thank you all again for your continued support

SR6 is going to the Senate!

I am so happy to tell you that SR6 is being reported as amended (an addition was made to include the Penn State University Justice Center as they are already study the death penalty in PA) to the Senate for a vote and you all deserve a great round of congratulations. Each one of our targeted Senators, Farnese, Hughes, and Stack, voted for the study- you can see the official vote count here: PA Senate Vote on SR6
 
There is much more to do and we have worked so hard already, so let us enjoy this victory. I look forward to seeing you all on December 13th so we may celebrate together.

Pennsylvania May Decide to Study Death Penalty

 

Tomorrow, Tuesday December 5, the judiciary committee will be voting on SR6, a resolution to study the death penalty in Pennsylvania as a way to conclusively determine its effectiveness, introduced by the chair of that committee, Senator Stewart Greenleaf. The resolution calls for a bipartisan task force to be formed of four Senators and an advisory committee of 30 people in varying fields that would be involved in capital punishment, from law enforcement to non-profit organizations.

 

The resolution itself lists some interesting information about the death penalty in Pennsylvania. Amongst the most thought provoking were mentions of the American Bar Associations identification of ‘several areas’ where Pennsylvania’s system for determination of capital punishment is faulty. While the ABA ‘neither supports nor opposes the death penalty’, they have urged Pennsylvania to temporarily halt executions until the process can be ‘made fair an accurate’.

 

With the recent moratorium placed on the death penalty in Oregon by Governor John Fitzhaber, after inmate Gary Haugen volunteered to forego any further appeals and even went so far as to tell The Statesman’s Journal that he planned to challenge the temporary reprieve, issues with the death penalty in America are in the spotlight. Haugen states his reasoning for this action in the interview, the same reasoning as during his refusal of further appeals, calling the floundering on whether or not to execute him (he’s prepared for his execution twice now) “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Pennsylvania’s death row has a similar situation, also mentioned in the resolution, where three death sentences have been carried out since its reinstatement in 1978 but there have been 352 people sentenced to death in the state in that time. Not mentioned in the resolution, 6 people have been exonerated from death row, twice as many as have been executed, in PA during the same time period.

to read SR6 visit : http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billinfo/billinfo.cfm?syear=2011&sind=0&body=S&type=R&BN=0006

for more information about the American Bar Association’s findings on PA’s death penalty visit : http://www.abanow.org/2007/10/study-pennsylvania-needs-death-penalty-reforms/?audio