SDADP
Student Day Against the Death Penalty
Each year on March 1 NLG students all over the country come together to celebrate Student Day Against the Death Penalty. By hosting events and planning actions, students raise awareness of the unjust capital punishment system in the United States.
Past events have included:
- Letter writing campaigns
- Panel discussions
- Film screenings
- Collecting petition signatures
- Hosting speakers like death row honorees or public defenders
- Distributing posters, flyers, black ribbons, or buttons
Background
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Those of us who have long expressed moral indignation at our nation’s capital punishment laws have recently been joined by individuals and groups who are attacking the death penalty on theoretical, financial, and practical fronts. Some recent developments include:
- In what the New York Times dubbed a “tectonic shift in legal theory,” the American Law Institute, a group that established the theoretical framework for modern capital punishment in the early 1960s, abandoned its prior reasoning and cast doubt on whether legal procedures for a death sentence “are likely ever to meet basic concerns of fairness in procedure and outcome.”
- New Mexico became the second state (after New Jersey in 2007) to abolish the death penalty since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment. Fifteen states now ban the death penalty.
- Fewer death sentences were issued in 2009 than in 2008. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, “around the country, death sentences have declined 60% since 2000, and executions have declined almost as much.”
While these developments represent the tremendous momentum that is gathering behind abolition, the bleak reality is that 3,297 people are still on death row. The situation is gradually improving, but the need for action has never been more urgent.
