Journalist – Historian – Speaker
I am just finishing edits on my sixth piece on the death penalty in the last two years for Pacific Standard. Here’s what I’ve written: First the Supreme Court established a better standard for determining whether someone was intellectually disabled (and thus protected from execution) by overturning the “Lennie” standard. Because Texas asked juries to …
Arkansas is set to execute Jack Greene this Thursday. He is mentally ill, with intense delusions and a long history of self-harm and violent ideation. He committed murder, but there’s reasonable debate about the extent to which he understands reality. The prison director decided he wasn’t sufficiently mentally ill to be spared due to disability. …
When I talk about the immediate relevance of the humanities and its skills to contemporary life (which I do), I always like to bring up Of Mice and Men. In Texas, people who are intellectually disabled are considered eligible for the death penalty only of they meet the “The Lennie Standard.” Now that’s being reconsidered. …