title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: During the middle of the 20th century, a period of mass incarceration occurred in the United States. The United States became the country with the highest incarceration rate which caused the prison population to become heavily Black by the 1990s whereas it was mainly only white in previous years. White people accounted for 51% of the prison population while Black people accounted for 47% of the entire prison population during the 1990s. Even though Black people made up of around half the jail inhabitants, they only were 12.1% of the United States population and white citizens made up 80.3% of the total population during that time. The prison population had increased from 196,441 people in 1970 to 1.6 million by 2008. This discrepancy of races in the prison population related to the overall demographics of the United States has to do with the inconsistency of police arrests on citizens. Moving into 2015, Black people still made up only 12.1% of the total population but made up 18% of people who were stopped by police on the road. This led to the increase of disproportionate demographics in local jails and prison systems. By 2018, 592 Black people were in local jails per every 100,000 people and 2,271 Black men were incarcerated in federal prisons per 100,000 people. On the other hand, white people were incarcerated at a rate of 187 per 100,000 people in local jails and white men, at the federal level, were incarcerated at a rate of 392 per 100,000 people. This dramatic increase in Black arrests caused America's prison population to boom was which was all due to this long lasting period of mass incarceration.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Mass incarceration had been increasing and there are many factors sustaining its rise. From over-policing to disproportionately long prison sentences, Black people have been targeted in mass incarceration and as a result, more susceptible to capital punishment.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: With the United States' operation based on the U.S. Constitution, federalism allows the state government to share powers with the federal government. Under the various capacities, different court cases are heard in the national and state court systems. A defendant can be inflicted with the death penalty if they are found condemned of capital offenses, like first-degree murder, murder with special circumstances, treason, or genocide. Because capital offenses are criminal cases, the state court systems are responsible to hear the majority of them. The Supreme Court and state courts' discretion in keeping the death penalty option are separate for the most part, if not appealed to the Supreme Court. According to the Legal Information Institute, “ it is not necessary that the actual punishment imposed was the death penalty, but rather a capital office is classified as such if the permissible punishment prescribed by the legislature for the offense is the death penalty.” After "Roper v. Simmons" in 2005, the federal court deemed if the defendant was under 18 years old at the time of the crime, they can not be sentenced to death because it violates the 8th Amendment.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Before the "Roper v. Simmons" ruling, 14-year-old black teenager George Stinney Jr. was the youngest person in the United States to be sentenced to death on June 16, 1944. Stinney was initially found responsible for the bludgeoning of two white girls to death. He died by electrocution. Although his case and death happened during the span of about 80 days in 1944, his convictions were annulled 70 years later in 2014.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: His exoneration was on the grounds that his 6th amendment rights were violated. After close examination it was found there was faulty interrogation that included coercion, absence of counsel, and absence of parental guidance. With Stinney’s treatment, the prosecutor relied heavily on an unsigned, off-the-record confession. Impartial evidence was absent for Stinney’s defense like witness testimonies from his family members that were with him during the time of the crime and community members. The culprit who is suspected of committing the crime against the two girls comes from a white affluent family, where the father happens to have served as the jury’s manager for Stinney’s case.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The systemic issue of biased investigation conduct is also seen in the Exonerated Five case. The Exonerated Five are made up of four black boys, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise. They are formerly known as the Central Park Five and the Jogger Case. The boys received mixed convictions for assault, robbery, riot, rape, sexual abuse, and attempted murder of a white woman in 1990.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The boys faced intense, un-recorded interrogations for at least seven hours in the absence of legal counsel with video confessions following, beside Salaam. Wise additionally had no parent present during questioning and confessing. The five boys later pleaded not guilty and recanted their statements because they were produced under intimidation. Despite no DNA evidence linking any of the boys to the crime scene, they were sentenced to 5 to 15 years. After 12 years, the sole perpetrator Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime while providing a DNA match to the only DNA selection found at the scene. Their false confessions were recognized for inconsistencies and their convictions were vacated in December 2002. They later sued the state and the city for reparations and received about $44 million in a settlement.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: During the 1990 trial, former president Donald Trump (a real-estate character at the time) bought full-page ads voicing his reaction to the Central Park case. In the ad, Donald Trump says the following:


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The boys were ranging from the ages of 14–16 years when the ad was released. In an archival interview with Larry King, Trump feels his belief is a common feeling because he received 15,000 letters of praise following the ad. In retrospect, Salaam reflects in an 2021 interview with "PBS MetroFocus", saying:


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: “I look at what Donald Trump as being the nails that sealed us in the coffin. And then what happened after that, they published our names, our addresses, and phone numbers in the New York City newspapers. When you think about Donald Trump’s ad, it was a whisper into society to have someone come to our homes to drag us from our beds, and to do to us what they had done to Emmett Till.”


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Because the boys were minors, their identities were supposed to remain confidential. Salaam shares that his family received an insurgence of death threats following Trump's advertisement, culminating in a climate of aggressive hate. A Central Park Five representative comments that Trump's ad influenced public opinion, possibly further tainting the impartiality of potential jurors "who [already], had a natural affinity for the victim."


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: As of 2019, Donald Trump has refused to apologize and retract his statements despite the exoneration of the men.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Lena Baker was a Black woman who was wrongfully convicted of the murder of her abuser in 1945. In Georgia, Baker served as a maid for a handicapped white man; she faced regular sexual and physical abuse from him. Despite the town terrorizing Baker to leave the relationship, her abuser would equally threaten her with violence if she ever left. Weeks before his death, he started holding Baker prisoner in his gristmill for numerous days. Baker was able to escape the mill, but when she came back, her abuser threatened her with an iron bar. After a struggle, Baker took ahold of his pistol and shot the man in self-defense.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The all-white, all-male jury did not empathize with Baker’s case of self-defense as a survivor of his slave-like conditions, including sexual and physical abuse. In less than a day, the jury found Baker guilty of capital murder, which happened to result in a mandatory death sentence in Georgia at the time. After failed appeals, reviews, and the abandonment of her legal representation, Lena Baker was executed by electrocution in 1945. About 60 years following Baker’s death, her family, with the help of the Prison and Jail Project, requested a posthumous pardon. Their efforts succeeded in 2005 when Baker was granted a full and unconditional pardon from the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles because there was a lack of evidence to demonstrate Baker’s intent to kill. If the justice system had been careful with the evidence, they would have noted Baker’s conviction did not qualify as capital murder and should have resulted in a sentence other than the death penalty.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: As of May 20, 2021, the Death Penalty Information Center reports that there are 51 women on death row. 17 women have been executed since 1976, compared to 1,516 men during the same time period.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Since 1608, 15,391 lawful executions are confirmed to have been carried out in jurisdictions of, or now of, the United States, of these, 575, or 3.6%, were women. Women account for death sentences, people on death row, and people whose executions are actually carried out. While always comparatively rare, women are significantly less likely to be executed in the modern era than in the past. Of the 16 women executed on the state level, most took place in either Texas (6), Oklahoma (3) or Florida (2) and were demographically, 25% (4) African-American, with the rest (12) being white of any ethnicity. Historically, the states that have executed the most women are California, Texas and Florida, though unlike Texas and Florida, California has not executed a woman in the post-Furman era. The racial breakdown of women sentenced to death is 61% white, 21% black, 13% Latina, 3% Asian, and 2% American Indian.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: All 27 states with the death penalty for murder provide lethal injection as the primary method of execution. Vermont's remaining death penalty statute for treason provides electrocution as the method of execution.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Some states allow other methods than lethal injection, but only as secondary methods to be used merely at the request of the prisoner, or if lethal injection is unavailable due to an inability to procure the necessary drugs or due to court challenges to lethal injection's constitutionality.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Several states continue to use the historical three-drug protocol: firstly an anesthetic, secondly pancuronium bromide, a paralytic, and finally potassium chloride to stop the heart. Eight states have used a single-drug protocol, inflicting only an overdose of a single anesthetic to the prisoner.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: While some state statutes specify the drugs required, a majority do not, giving more flexibility to prison officers.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Pressures from anti-death penalty activists and shareholders have made it difficult for correctional services to get the chemicals. Hospira, the only U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental, stopped making the drug in 2011. In 2016, it was reported that more than 20 U.S. and European drug manufacturers including Pfizer (the owner of Hospira) had taken steps to prevent their drugs from being used for lethal injections.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Since then, some states have used other anesthetics, such as pentobarbital, etomidate, or fast-acting benzodiazepines or sedatives like midazolam. Many states have since bought lethal injection drugs from foreign furnishers, and most states have made it a criminal offense to reveal the identities of furnishers or execution team members. In November 2015, California adopted regulations allowing the state to use its own public compounding pharmacies to make the chemicals.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In 2009, Ohio approved the use of an intramuscular injection of 500 mg of hydromorphone (a 333-fold lethal overdose for an opioid-naive person) and a supratherapeutic dose of midazolam as a backup means of carrying out executions when a suitable vein cannot be found for intravenous injection.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Lethal injection was held to be a constitutional method of execution by the U.S. Supreme Court in three cases: "Baze v. Rees" (2008), "Glossip v. Gross" (2015), and "Bucklew v. Precythe" (2019).


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In the following states, death row inmates with an execution warrant may always choose to be executed by:


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In four states an alternate method (firing squad in Utah, lethal gas in Arizona, and electrocution in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee) is offered only to inmates sentenced to death for crimes committed prior to a specified date (usually when the state switched from the earlier method to lethal injection). The alternate method will be use for all inmates if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In five states, an alternate method is used only if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional (electrocution in Arkansas; nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, or firing squad in Mississippi and Oklahoma; firing squad in Utah; lethal gas in Wyoming).


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In Alabama, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, "any constitutional method" is possible if all the other methods are declared unconstitutional.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In the state that abolished death penalty or where its statute was declared unconstitutional, people sentenced to death for a crime before the date of the abolition may retroactively be subjected to death penalty. Those states' methods are:


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: When an offender chooses to be executed by a means different from the state's default method, which is always lethal injection, he/she loses the right to challenge its constitutionality in court. See "Stewart v. LaGrand", 526 U.S. 115 (1999).


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The most recent executions by methods other than injection are as follows (all chosen by the inmate):


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Depending on the state, the following alternative methods are statutorily provided in case lethal injection is either found unconstitutional by a court or unavailable for practical reasons:


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Several states including Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah, have added back-up methods recently (or have expanded their application fields) in reaction to the shortage of lethal injection drugs.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Oklahoma and Mississippi are the only states allowing more than two methods of execution in their statutes, providing lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution and firing squad to be used in that order if all earlier methods are unavailable. The nitrogen option was added by the Oklahoma Legislature in 2015 and has never been used in a judicial execution. After struggling for years to design a nitrogen execution protocol and to obtain a proper device for it, Oklahoma announced in February 2020 it abandoned the project after finding a new reliable source of lethal injection drugs.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Some states such as Florida have a larger provision dealing with execution methods unavailability, requiring their state departments of corrections to use "any constitutional method" if both lethal injection and electrocution are found unconstitutional. This was designed to make unnecessary any further legislative intervention in that event, but the provision applies only to legal (not practical) infeasibility.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The method of execution of federal prisoners for offenses under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 is that of the state in which the conviction took place. If the state has no death penalty, the judge must choose a state with the death penalty for carrying out the execution.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The federal government has a facility (at U.S. Penitentiary Terre Haute) and regulations only for executions by lethal injection, but the United States Code allows U.S. Marshals to use state facilities and employees for federal executions.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The last public execution in the U.S. was that of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Kentucky, on August 14, 1936.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: It was the last execution in the nation at which the general public was permitted to attend without any legally imposed restrictions. "Public execution" is a legal phrase, defined by the laws of various states, and carried out pursuant to a court order. Similar to "public record" or "public meeting", it means that anyone who wants to attend the execution may do so.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Around 1890, a political movement developed in the United States to mandate private executions. Several states enacted laws which required executions to be conducted within a "wall" or "enclosure", or to "exclude public view". Most state laws currently use such explicit wording to prohibit public executions, while others do so only implicitly by enumerating the only authorized witnesses.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: All states allow news reporters to be execution witnesses for information of the general public, except Wyoming which allows only witnesses authorized by the condemned.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Several states also allow victims' families and relatives selected by the prisoner to watch executions. An hour or two before the execution, the condemned is offered religious services and to choose their last meal (except in Texas which abolished it in 2011).


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The execution of Timothy McVeigh on June 11, 2001, was witnessed by over 200 people, most by closed-circuit television. Most were survivors, or relatives of victims of, the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, for which McVeigh had been sentenced to death.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Gallup, Inc. has monitored support for the death penalty in the United States since 1937 by asking "Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?" Gallup surveys documented a sharp increase in support for capital punishment between 1966 and 1994. However, perhaps as the result of DNA exonerations of death row inmates reported in the national media in the late 1990s, support began to wane, falling from 80% in 1994 to 56% in 2019. Moreover, approval varies substantially depending on the characteristics of the target and the alternatives posed, with much lower support for putting juveniles and the mentally ill to death (26% and 19%, respectively, in 2002). Given the fact that attitudes toward capital punishment are often responsive to events, to characteristics of the target and to alternatives, many believe that the conventional wisdom—that death penalty attitudes are impervious to change—is flawed. Accordingly, any analysis of death penalty attitudes must account for the responsiveness of such attitudes, as well as their reputed resistance to change.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Pew Research polls have demonstrated declining American support for the death penalty: 80% in 1974, 78% in 1996, 55% in 2014, and 49% in 2016. The 2014 poll showed significant differences by race: 63% of whites, 40% of Hispanics and 36% of blacks, respectively, supported the death penalty in that year. However, in 2018, Pew's polls showed public support for the death penalty had increased to 54% from 49%. Since 2016, opinions among Republicans and Democrats have changed little, but the share of independents favoring the death penalty has increased by eight percentage points (from 44% to 52%).


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: A 2010 poll by Lake Research Partners found that 61% of voters would choose a penalty other than the death sentence for murder. When persons surveyed are given a choice between the death penalty and life without parole for persons convicted of capital crimes, support for execution has traditionally been significantly lower than in polling that asks only if a person does or does not support the death penalty. In Gallup's 2019 survey, support for the sentence of life without parole surpassed that for the death penalty by a margin of 60% to 36%.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: A 2014 study found that the belief that the death penalty helps victims' families to heal may be wrong; more often than finding closure, victims' families felt anger and wanted revenge, with potential side effects of depression, PTSD and a decreased satisfaction with life. Furthermore, the researchers found that a sense of compassion or remorse expressed from the perpetrator to the victim's family had a statistically significant positive effect on the family's ability to find closure.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In November 2009, another Gallup poll found that 77% of Americans believed that the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, should receive the death penalty if convicted, 12 points higher than the rate of general support for the death penalty upon Gallup's most recent poll at the time. A similar result was found in 2001 when respondents were polled about the execution of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Capital punishment is a controversial issue, with many prominent organizations and individuals participating in the debate. Amnesty International and other groups oppose capital punishment on moral grounds.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The United States is one of the four developed countries that still practice capital punishment, along with Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Religious groups are widely split on the issue of capital punishment. The Fiqh Council of North America, a group of highly influential Muslim scholars in the United States, has issued a fatwa calling for a moratorium on capital punishment in the United States until various preconditions in the legal system are met.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Reform Judaism has formally opposed the death penalty since 1959, when the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism) resolved "that in the light of modern scientific knowledge and concepts of humanity, the resort to or continuation of capital punishment either by a state or by the national government is no longer morally justifiable." The resolution goes on to say that the death penalty "lies as a stain upon civilization and our religious conscience." In 1979, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional arm of the Reform rabbinate, resolved that, "both in concept and in practice, Jewish tradition found capital punishment repugnant" and there is no persuasive evidence "that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime."


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In October 2009, the American Law Institute voted to disavow the framework for capital punishment that it had created in 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, "in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment". A study commissioned by the institute had said that experience had proved that the goal of individualized decisions about who should be executed and the goal of systemic fairness for minorities and others could not be reconciled. , 159 prisoners have been exonerated due to evidence of their innocence.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Advocates of the death penalty say that it deters crime, is a good tool for prosecutors in plea bargaining, improves the community by eliminating recidivism by executed criminals, provides "closure" to surviving victims or loved ones, and is a just penalty. Some advocates against the death penalty argue that "most of the rest of the world gave up on human sacrifice a long time ago."


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The murder rate is highest in the South (6.5 per 100,000 in 2016), where 80% of executions are carried out, and lowest in the Northeast (3.5 per 100,000), with less than 1% of executions. A report by the US National Research Council in 2012 stated that studies claiming a deterrent effect are "fundamentally flawed" and should not be used for policy decisions. According to a survey of the former and present presidents of the country's top academic criminological societies, 88% of these experts rejected the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Data shows that the application of the death penalty is strongly influenced by racial bias. Furthermore, some opponents argue that it is applied in an arbitrary manner by a criminal justice system that has been shown to be biased through the systemic influence of socio-economic, geographic, and gender factors. Another argument in the capital punishment debate is the cost.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Opponents to the death penalty note that the lethal injection, the most common method of carrying out the death penalty, can oftentimes cause executed individuals to remain conscious for several minutes after administering the injection, causing them to feel severe pain in their veins. The "three drug cocktail" consists of midazolam, a sedative, vecuronium bromide, a paralytic, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. Opponents note that the midazolam in particular may mask the executed individual's pain and suffering. Opponents argue that this causes unnecessary pain and suffering on the executed individual and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Additionally, in 2021–22, states such as South Carolina have experienced a shortage of the drugs used to make the lethal cocktail and some inmates have had to choose between death by electric chair or death by firing squad (aiming for the heart). Critics note that these other methods are more likely to induce pain in the inmate during execution and that these methods of execution have a high risk of being botched.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: One of the main arguments against the use of capital punishment in the United States is that there has been a long history of botched executions. University of Colorado Boulder Professor Michael L. Radelet described a "botched execution" as an execution that causes the prisoner to suffer for a long period of time before they die. This has led to the argument that capital punishment is per se cruel and unusual punishment. The following is a short list of examples of botched executions that have occurred in the United States.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, in his book "Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty", found that from 1890 to 2010, 276 executions were botched out of a total of 8,776, or 3.15%, with lethal injections having the highest rate. Sarat writes that between 1980 and 2010 the rate of botched executions was higher than ever: 8.53 percent. Death penalty experts found that 36.8% of all executions attempted or completed in 2022 (all lethal injections) were botched.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In states with the death penalty, the governor usually has the discretionary power to commute a death sentence or to stay its execution. In some states the governor is required to receive an advisory or binding recommendation from a separate board. In a few states like Georgia, the board decides alone on clemency. At the federal level, the power of clemency belongs to the President of the United States.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: The largest number of clemencies was granted in January 2003 in Illinois when outgoing Governor George Ryan, who had already imposed a moratorium on executions, pardoned four death-row inmates and commuted the sentences of the remaining 167 to life in prison without the possibility of parole. When Governor Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois in March 2011, he commuted the sentences of the fifteen inmates on death row to life imprisonment.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Previous post-"Furman" mass clemencies took place in 1986 in New Mexico, when Governor Toney Anaya commuted all death sentences because of his personal opposition to the death penalty. In 1991, outgoing Ohio Governor Dick Celeste commuted the sentences of eight prisoners, among them all four women on the state's death row. And during his two terms (1979–1987) as Florida's governor, Bob Graham, although a strong death penalty supporter who had overseen the first post-"Furman" involuntary execution as well as 15 others, agreed to commute the sentences of six people on the grounds of doubts about guilt or disproportionality.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: On December 14, 2022, outgoing Oregon governor Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of all 17 inmates on Oregon's death row to life imprisonment without parole, citing the death penalty's status as "an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction [...] and never has been administered fairly and equitably" and calling it "wasteful of taxpayer dollars" while questioning its ability to function as a deterrence to crime. Governor Brown also ordered the dismantling of Oregon's lethal injection chamber and death row. Prior, Oregon had an ongoing official moratorium set by prior governor John Kitzhaber in 2011 and had not carried out any executions since that of Douglas Franklin Wright in 1997; furthermore, in 2019, the Oregon State Senate amended the state's death penalty statutes to significantly reduce the number of crimes that warranted the death penalty, thereby invalidating many of the state's active death sentences. In 2021, David Ray Bartol's death sentence was overturned on the grounds of it being a "disproportionate punishment" in violation of Oregon's state constitution, which death penalty experts and abolitionist advocates said would provide the rationale for the eventual overturning of every other death sentence in Oregon. Brown is the third Oregon governor to commute every standing death sentence in the state, after Governor Robert D. Holmes, who commuted every death sentence passed during his tenure from 1957 to 1959, and Governor Mark Hatfield, who commuted every death sentence in the state after Oregon temporarily abolished the death penalty in accordance with a statewide vote in 1964.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: All executions were suspended through the country between September 2007 and April 2008. At that time, the United States Supreme Court was examining the constitutionality of lethal injection in "Baze v. Rees". This was the longest period with no executions in the United States since 1982. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld this method in a 7–2 ruling.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In addition to the states that have no valid death penalty statute, the following 17 states and 3 jurisdictions either have an official moratorium on executions or have had no executions for more than ten years as of 2022:


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: Since 1976, four states have only executed condemned prisoners who voluntarily waived any further appeals: Pennsylvania has executed three inmates, Oregon two, Connecticut one, and New Mexico one. In the last state, Governor Toney Anaya commuted the sentences of all five condemned prisoners on death row in late 1986.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In California, United States District Judge Jeremy Fogel suspended all executions in the state on December 15, 2006, ruling that the implementation used in California was unconstitutional but that it could be fixed. California Governor Gavin Newsom declared an indefinite moratorium on March 13, 2019.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: On November 25, 2009, the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed a decision by the Franklin County Circuit Court suspending executions until the state adopts regulations for carrying out the penalty by lethal injection.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: In November 2011, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber announced a moratorium on executions in Oregon, canceling a planned execution and ordering a review of the death penalty system in the state.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: On February 13, 2015, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf announced a moratorium on the death penalty. Wolf will issue a reprieve for every execution until a commission on capital punishment, which was established in 2011 by the Pennsylvania State Senate, produces a recommendation. The state had not executed anyone since Gary M. Heidnik in 1999.


title: Capital punishment in the United States

text: On July 25, 2019, U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced that the federal government would resume executions using pentobarbital, rather than the three-drug cocktail previously used. Five convicted death row inmates were scheduled to be executed in December 2019 and January 2020. On November 20, 2019, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued a preliminary injunction preventing the resumption of federal executions. Plaintiffs in the case argued that the use of pentobarbital may violate the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994. The stay was lifted in June 2020 and four executions were rescheduled for July and August 2020. On July 14, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee was executed. He became the first convict executed by the federal government since 2003. Overall, thirteen federal prisoners were executed during the presidency of Donald Trump between July 2020 and January 2021. The last convict executed was Dustin Higgs on January 16, 2021. On July 1, 2021, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland halted all federal executions pending review of the changes made under the Trump administration.


title: Jamiroquai

text: Jamiroquai () are an English funk and acid jazz band from London. Formed in 1992, they are fronted by vocalist Jay Kay, and were prominent in the London-based funk and acid jazz movement of the 1990s. They built on their acid jazz sound in their early releases and later drew from rock, disco, electronic and Latin music genres. Lyrically, the group has addressed social and environmental justice. Kay has remained as the only original member through several line-up changes.


title: Jamiroquai

text: The band made their debut under Acid Jazz Records but subsequently found mainstream success under Sony. While under this label, three of their albums have charted at number one in the UK, including "Emergency on Planet Earth" (1993), "Synkronized" (1999) and "A Funk Odyssey" (2001). The band's 1998 single, "Deeper Underground", was also number one in their native country.


title: Jamiroquai

text: As of 2017, Jamiroquai had sold more than 26 million albums worldwide. Their third album, "Travelling Without Moving" (1996), received a Guinness World Record as the best-selling funk album in history. The music video for its lead single, "Virtual Insanity", also contributed to the band's success. The song was named Video of the Year at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards and earned the band a Grammy Award in 1998.


title: Jamiroquai

text: Jay Kay was sending songs to record companies, including a hip-hop single released in 1986 under the label StreetSounds. During this time, Kay was influenced by Native American and First Nation peoples and their philosophies; this led to the creation of "When You Gonna Learn", a song covering social issues. After he had it recorded, Kay fought with his producer, who took out half of the lyrics and produced the song based on what was charting at the time. With the track restored to his preference, the experience helped Kay realise he "wanted a proper live band with a proper live sound". The band would be named "Jamiroquai", a portmanteau of the words "jam" and the name of a Native American confederacy, the Iroquois. He was signed to Acid Jazz Records in 1991 after he sent a demo tape of himself covering a song by the Brand New Heavies. Kay gradually gathered band members, including Wallis Buchanan, who played the didgeridoo. Kay's manager scouted keyboardist Toby Smith, who joined the group as Kay's songwriting partner. In 1992, Jamiroquai began their career by performing in the British club scene. They released "When You Gonna Learn" as their debut single, charting outside the UK Top 50 on its initial release. In the following year, Stuart Zender became the band's bassist by audition.


title: Jamiroquai

text: After the success of "When You Gonna Learn", the band were offered major-label contracts. Kay signed a one-million-dollar, eight-album record deal with Sony Soho. He was the only member under contract, but he would share his royalties with his band members in accordance to their contributions as musicians. Their label for US releases would be under the Work Group. The band released their debut album, "Emergency on Planet Earth", where it entered the UK albums chart at number 1. Kevin L. Carter of "The Philadelphia Inquirer" commented that the album "is full of upbeat, multi-hued pop tunes based heavily in acid jazz, '70s fusion, funk and soul, reggae and world music". With it, the band would continue to build upon their acid-jazz sounds in the following years. The album's ecologically charged concept gave Kay press coverage, although Mark Jenkins of "The Washington Post" found the record's sloganeering "as crude as the music is slick".


title: Jamiroquai

text: The band's original drummer, Nick van Gelder, failed to return from holiday and was replaced by Derrick McKenzie, who recorded with the group in one take for his audition. They issued their second album, "The Return of the Space Cowboy", in 1994, and it ranked at number 2 in the UK chart. During its recording, Kay was in a creative block, worsened by his increasing drug use at the time; which resulted in its complex songwriting. However, the record was said to have "capture[ed] this first phase of Jamiroquai at their very best", according to Daryl Easlea of BBC Music. Josef Woodard from "Entertainment Weekly" wrote that its "syncopated grooves and horn-lined riffs" were "played by humans, not samplers".


title: Jamiroquai

text: Released in 1996, "Travelling Without Moving" reached number 24 in the "Billboard" 200 and number 2 in the UK albums chart. With 8 million copies sold worldwide, it has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the best-selling funk album in history since 2001. The album's lead single, "Virtual Insanity", gained popularity for its music video, which was heavily played on MTV. Containing symphonic and jungle elements, Kay aimed for a more accessible sound. Ted Kessler of "NME" saw "Travelling Without Moving" as an improvement from previous albums, while critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine commented that it did not have "uniform consistenc[ies]" in comparison.


title: Jamiroquai

text: While the group were preparing their fourth album, "Synkronized" (1999), Zender left Jamiroquai due to internal conflicts with Kay. While Zender had not been involved in the album's songwriting, the group chose to scrap his recorded tracks to avoid lawsuits, and Nick Fyffe was recruited for new sessions. This resulted in what was thought to be both a "tighter, more angry collection of songs" for "Synkronized", and a change of musical direction from "creating propulsive collections of looooong tunes, [and] speaking out against injustice". Some of the album's tracks, including "Canned Heat", display a hi-NRG and house style, while slower tempos on others were said to "ease the pressure for [Kay's] more romantic musings". The album reached number 1 in the UK albums chart and number 28 in the US "Billboard" 200. A year prior to "Synkronized", "Deeper Underground" was released as a single for the "" soundtrack and reached number one in the UK singles chart.


title: Jamiroquai

text: The group issued their follow-up, "A Funk Odyssey", a disco record exploring Latin music influences, in 2001. It introduced guitarist Rob Harris, whose playing in the album "melts seductively into a mix that occasionally incorporates lavish orchestration", according to Jim Abbot of "Orlando Sentinel". "Slant Magazine"'s Sal Cinquemani claimed: "Like its predecessors, "Odyssey" mixes self-samplage with Jamiroquai’s now-signature robo-funk." The album topped the chart in the UK. In the US, under Epic Records, it reached number 44 in the US "Billboard 200". It was the last album to feature Smith, who left the band in the following year to spend more time with his family.


title: Jamiroquai

text: Their sixth album, "Dynamite", was released in 2005 and reached number 3 in the UK; Rashod D. Ollison of "The Baltimore Sun" said the album "boasts a harder digital edge ... With heavier beats, manipulated guitar lines and odd digital textures, "Dynamite" is less organic than Jamiroquai's other efforts". Its tracks "Feels Just Like It Should" and "Love Blind" were characterised as "[having] a fatter, dirtier sound than usual". In 2006, Kay's contract with Sony ended, which led to the issue of the band's greatest hits collection, "". It charted at number one in the UK after its first week of release. The following year, Jamiroquai performed at the Gig in the Sky, a concert held on a private Boeing 757 in association with Sony Ericsson. The band thus currently hold the Guinness World Record for "fastest concert", performed on the aircraft whilst travelling at 1,017 km/h (632 mph).


title: Jamiroquai

text: "Rock Dust Light Star" was released in 2010 under Mercury Records, where it charted at number 7 in the UK. Kay considered the album as "a real band record" that "capture[s] the flow of our live performances". Critics have seen this as a return to their organic funk and soul style, as it forgoes "the electro textures that followed the band into the new millennium", according to Luke Winkie of "MusicOMH". It also has a sound Thomas H. Green of "The Telegraph" described as "Californian Seventies funk rock".


title: Jamiroquai

text: Jamiroquai released their 2017 album, "Automaton", through Virgin EMI. It was their eighth studio album and the first in seven years, reaching number 4 in the UK. It was produced by Kay and band keyboardist Matt Johnson, and it "carefully balance[s] their signature sound with… EDM, soul and trap sounds", according to Ryan Patrick of "Exclaim!". Craig Jenkins of "Vulture" writes: "Arrangements that used to spill out over horn, flute, didgeridoo, and string accompaniments now lean closer to French house". By 2018, the group's line-up consisted of Kay, Harris, McKenzie, Johnson, Paul Turner on bass guitar, and percussionist Sola Akingbola.


title: Jamiroquai

text: In mid-2021, on the rear side of a vinyl sleeve of a previously unreleased single from the 2000 movie "Titan A.E.", "Everybody's Going To The Moon", Kay wrote a message to fans paying tribute to the late Toby Smith (as Smith had collaborated on the song) and confirming the band were working on a new studio album.


title: Jamiroquai

text: Jamiroquai's music is generally termed acid jazz, funk, disco, soul, house, and R&B. Their sound has been described by J. D. Considine as having an "anything-goes attitude, an approach that leaves the band open to anything". Tom Moon wrote that the band "embrac[es] old-school funk, Philly-soul strings, the crisp keyboard sounds of the '70s and even hints of jazz fusion", blending these with "agitated, aggressive dance rhythms to create an easygoing feel that looks both backward and forward". Ben Sisario facetiously commented that Jay Kay and Toby Smith as songwriters, "studied "Innervisions"-era [Stevie] Wonder carefully, and just about everything the group has recorded sounds like it could in fact have been played by [Wonder] himself."


title: Jamiroquai

text: Kay is the primary songwriter of Jamiroquai. When composing, he sings melodies and beats for band members to transcribe to their instrumentation. The band relies on analog sounds, such as running keyboards through vintage effects pedals "to get the warmth and the clarity of those instruments". Parry Gettelman of the "Orlando Sentinel" described Kay's vocals as "not identifiably male or female, black or white". Other writers said Toby Smith's keyboard arrangements were "psychedelic and soulful", and compared Stuart Zender's bass playing to the work of Marcus Miller. Wallis Buchanan on didgeridoo was met with either praise or annoyance from critics.


title: Jamiroquai

text: Kay was influenced by Roy Ayers, Herbie Hancock, Lou Donaldson, Grant Green, Sly Stone, Gil Scott-Heron, and hip-hop and its culture. He was introduced to much of these influences in the mid-1980s by British club DJs. "I'd been into Stevie and all that… Then I got into the JBs, Maceo Parker and the Meters, that more raw, funky thing. I'd never really heard so many instruments in one go … I decided around that time to try to make music built around those loose, open grooves." A 2003 compilation titled "" under Azuli Records, also contains a selection of some of the band's late 1970s R&B, disco and quiet storm influences. Kay and the group have been compared to Stevie Wonder, with some critics accusing the band of copying black artists. In response, Kay said "we never tried to hide our influences". The band references them as Kay maintained Jamiroquai's own sound: "it's about the style of music you aim for, not the exact sound. If you just sample Barry White or Sly Stone, that's one thing; to get their spirit is different."


title: Jamiroquai

text: Jamiroquai's lyrics have touched on socially charged themes. With "Emergency on Planet Earth" (1993), it revolves around environmental awareness and speaks out against war. "The Return of the Space Cowboy" (1994) contains themes of homelessness, Native American rights, youth protests, and slavery. "Virtual Insanity" from "Travelling Without Moving" (1996) is about the prevalence of technology and the replication and simulation of life. The lyrics of "Automaton" (2017) allude to dystopian films and compromised relationships within a digital landscape.


title: Jamiroquai

text: However, critics wrote that the band had focused more on "boy–girl seductions" and "having fun" rather than social justice, and that Kay's interest in sports cars contradicts his earlier beliefs. Kay was reluctant to release "Travelling Without Moving" (1996), as it adopted a motorcar concept, but he added: "just because I love to drive a fast car, that doesn't mean I believe in [destroying the environment.]" He also stated in separate interviews he was tired of being "[a] troubadour of social conscious[ness]", and "after a while you realise that people won't boogie and dance to [politics]."


title: Jamiroquai

text: While critics said the group tended towards 1970s funk and soul archetypes in their performances, Kay's presence received praise, with critics noting his strong vocals and energetic dance moves on stage. Robert Hilburn said Kay "establish[es] a rapport with the audience" and has a "disarming sense of humor". Helen Brown of "The Telegraph" was more critical, writing of a 2011 concert that there was no "deeply personal emotion" in its set list or in Kay's vocals, and "much of the material is exhilarating in the moment, forgettable thereafter".


title: Jamiroquai

text: With their visual style being described as "sci-fi and futuristic", Jamiroquai's music video of "Virtual Insanity" made them "icons of the music-video format", according to Spencer Kornhaber from "The Atlantic". It was directed by Jonathan Glazer, and depicted Kay "perform[ing] in a room where the floors, walls and furniture all moved simultaneously."


title: Jamiroquai

text: Kay has worn elaborate headgear, some he designed himself. He said that the headgear is part of his stage persona and give him a spiritual power described by the Iroquois as "orenda". The illuminating helmet that appears in the music video for "Automaton" was designed by Moritz Waldemeyer for Kay to control its lights and movements and to portray him as an endangered species. Kay also wore Native American head-dresses, which was met with criticism by "Indian Country Today", commenting he had worn sacred regalia of the First Nations.


title: Jamiroquai

text: As a prominent component of the London-based funk and acid-jazz movement of the 1990s, writer Kenneth Prouty said: "few acid jazz groups have reached the level of visibility in the pop music mainstream as London-born Jamiroquai". The success of the 1996 single "Virtual Insanity" led to the climax of "1970s soul and funk that early acid jazz artists had initiated". The band were also credited for popularising the didgeridoo. Artists who mention the group as an influence include Chance the Rapper, SZA, Kamaal Williams, the Internet, Calvin Harris, and Tyler, the Creator. According to Tony Farsides of "The Guardian", "Jamiroquai's musical prowess goes largely ignored. Whilst the band have received plaudits from American heavyweights such as Quincy Jones and Maurice White of Earth, Wind And Fire, Jamiroquai fight to be taken seriously in the UK." Writing for the same newspaper, Ian Gittins said the group "have long been shunned by music's tastemakers for a perceived naffness, and have shown their utter disregard for this critical snobbery by getting bigger and bigger". Sisario gave a negative review of the band's discography in "The Rolling Stone Album Guide" in 2004, finding much of their material to be identical.


title: Jamiroquai

text: Jamiroquai were the third best-selling UK act of the 1990s, after the Spice Girls and Oasis. As of April 2017, they have sold more than 26 million albums worldwide. Despite finding popularity in the UK with high-charting albums, the band could not maintain their relevance in the United States. "Travelling Without Moving" was their most successful release in the country, but they have since lost commercial momentum. The band's studio albums became less frequently released. Kay said in 2013: "I will only put out an album now when I am inspired to do so".


title: Jamiroquai

text: During the course of their career, Jamiroquai have received 15 Brit Award nominations. In 1999, the band won an Ivor Novello Award for an Outstanding Song Collection. Front-man Kay was given a BMI Presidents Award "in recognition of his profound influence on songwriting within the music industry." Jamiroquai received a nomination for Best Pop Album at the 1998 Grammy Awards and won Best Performance by a Duo Or Group for "Virtual Insanity". The band were also nominated for Best Short Form Music Video for "Feels Just Like It Should" at the 2005 Grammy Awards. For their "Virtual Insanity" music video, Jamiroquai had three nominations at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards and won Breakthrough Video and Video of the Year.


title: Chad Smith

text: Chad Gaylord Smith (born October 25, 1961) is an American musician who has been the drummer of the rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers since 1988. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. Smith is also the drummer of the hard rock supergroup Chickenfoot, formed in 2008, and of the all-instrumental outfit Chad Smith's Bombastic Meatbats, formed in 2007. He worked with the Chicks on "Taking the Long Way", an album that won five Grammy Awards in 2007.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith has recorded with Glenn Hughes, Johnny Cash, John Fogerty, Geezer Butler, Jennifer Nettles, Kid Rock, Jake Bugg, the Avett Brothers, Joe Satriani, Post Malone, Eddie Vedder, Lana Del Rey and Halsey. In 2010, joined by Dick Van Dyke and Leslie Bixler, he released "Rhythm Train", a children's album which featured Smith singing and playing various instruments. In 2020, Smith co-wrote and performed as part of the backing band on Ozzy Osbourne's album, "Ordinary Man", and again in 2022 on "Patient Number 9".


title: Chad Smith

text: "Spin" magazine placed Smith at #10 on their list of the "100 Greatest Drummers of Alternative Music" in May 2013. Readers of UK-based "Rhythm" magazine ranked Smith and Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist Flea the fourth-greatest rhythm section of all time in their June 2013 issue. Smith is also known for his charity work especially with young musicians. He has been a lobbyist in support of music education in U.S. public schools. Smith is also the host of the PBS concert series "Landmarks Live in Concert", which began in January 2017.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, the third child of Joan and Curtis Smith. He spent most of his childhood in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he graduated from Lahser High School in 1980. He started to play drums at age seven and grew up listening mainly to bands such as Rush, the Rolling Stones, Humble Pie, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, the Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Kiss.


title: Chad Smith

text: Chad did not receive formal drum lessons, and gained drumming experience by playing in school bands. He ran away from home when he was 15, but returned home after a summer.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith spent his early years in various rock bands, starting in high school with a band called Paradise, where they won the battle of the bands in Birmingham, Michigan, in 1977. That first band included members, Jay Yang (bass), Scott Porter (lead guitar) and Tom Auch (roadie). Future bands included Pharroh and Michigan-based band Toby Redd. Pharroh's percussionist Larry Fratangelo, who also worked with Parliament-Funkadelic, introduced Smith to R&B and funk music and taught him how to play funk. Smith said, "I think up until then, I was a drummer. Once I studied with Larry, I turned into a musician." Funk drummers like David Garibaldi, Jabo Starks, Clyde Stubblefield, and Greg Errico caught his attention and influenced his style a lot. Later, Smith decided to move to California to pursue his musical aspirations.


title: Chad Smith

text: In 1988, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were looking for a replacement for their drummer D.H. Peligro, who had recently been fired. Already into the process of working on their fourth studio album and hiring new guitarist John Frusciante the band held open auditions for a new drummer. Smith was one of the last drummers to audition for the band and the band felt that on looks alone, Smith would be the wrong fit as he looked more hair-metal than punk. Nonetheless, the band was blown away by his audition. Singer Anthony Kiedis admired Smith and found his persistence impressive.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith joined the Chili Peppers in December 1988 and within a few months was recording his first album with the band, "Mother's Milk". Smith reflected on joining the band in a 2012 interview by saying “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, cool, they have a record deal. Great! I'd love to be in a band that has a record deal. We started playing, and right away we just hit it off musically. I was like, ‘Man, this is a blast! These guys are great!’ ... We were just doing what we do. We just jammed, which is what we still do today. It's very similar.”


title: Chad Smith

text: After a successful worldwide tour in support of "Mother's Milk" the band released their debut for Warners, 1991's "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" which was hugely successful upon its release peaking at number three on the "Billboard" charts, and went on to sell 13 million copies worldwide. It went on to be nominated and win several awards and is listed on many critics lists of the best albums of the year. Shortly into the tour for the album, Frusciante quit the band in 1992 and was replaced by Arik Marshall for the remainder of the tour. Marshall was fired following the tour and briefly replaced by Jesse Tobias who was let go in favor of Dave Navarro in 1994. With Navarro, the band would release 1995's "One Hot Minute". Navarro too would end up being fired in 1998 following the tour to support the album and replaced with a returning John Frusciante. With Frusciante back, the band released 1999's "Californication", their biggest selling album to date. That album was followed by 2002's "By the Way" and 2006's "Stadium Arcadium", the band's first number one album in the United States. Frusciante again quit the band in 2009 and was replaced by Josh Klinghoffer later that year. With Klinghoffer, the band released their tenth studio album (and Smith's seventh with the band), "I'm with You" in 2011.


title: Chad Smith

text: In April 2012, the Chili Peppers were inducted by Chris Rock into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Smith and the Chili Peppers wrapped up "I'm With You World Tour" in April 2013. The Chili Peppers launched another lengthy tour in May 2013 and it kept them on the road until June 2014. During this time, the band appeared alongside Bruno Mars at the halftime for the Super Bowl in February 2014. Smith confirmed that the Chili Peppers would begin work on their eleventh studio album that same month. Production eventually began in January 2015 with Danger Mouse replacing Rick Rubin as the band's producer. A month later, bassist Flea was injured during a skiing accident delaying production until August 2015. "The Getaway " was released on June 17, 2016.


title: Chad Smith

text: In December 2019, the band announced that John Frusciante would be returning to replace Josh Klinghoffer. Smith said that the band would be focused on making new music and hope to have a new album out in 2020, however due to the COVID-19 pandemic, recording of the album was delayed. On May 25, 2021, Smith said that the band is currently near completion on their twelfth studio album and will tour in 2022. On October 7, 2021, the Chili Peppers announced the dates for their 2022 world tour which will begin in June and conclude in September. The tour includes the band's first ever headlining stadium shows in the United States and will be in support of their fourthcoming album, "Unlimited Love", which was released on April 1, 2022.


title: Chad Smith

text: In 2007, Smith, along with fellow Glenn Hughes alumni, guitarist Jeff Kollman and keyboardist Ed Roth, formed an all-instrumental band inspired by their shared love of 1970s funk and fusion. Still unnamed at the time, the group, rounded out by bassist Kevin Chown, debuted at the 2008 NAMM show in Anaheim, California. The band has released two studio albums and a double live disc as Chad Smith's Bombastic Meatbats since its inception.


title: Chad Smith

text: Following a lengthy world tour in support of "Stadium Arcadium", the Chili Peppers decided to take a break in 2008. During this break, Smith joined the hard rock supergroup Chickenfoot, whose other members are Sammy Hagar, Joe Satriani and Michael Anthony. The group has released two studio albums, a live album and a box set to date with Smith. Due to touring commitments with the Chili Peppers in 2011, Smith was unable to tour with Chickenfoot and was replaced by Kenny Aronoff. In 2012, Smith rejoined Chickenfoot for a four-song encore and the band briefly reunited for only two shows on May 7, and May 8, 2016, at Harrah's Showroom at South Lake Tahoe.


title: Chad Smith

text: During the show, the band debuted a new song titled "Divine Termination." In June 2016, Smith discussed the future of Chickenfoot touring and recording new music saying that "everyone has different things going on. We really enjoy playing together, but with my schedule I don't see us playing too much. I would love to make some new music with those guys, but we'd have to be in the same room at the same time. I just don't know. It's up in the air. I love playing with those guys, though. It's a real treat.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith released 2010's "Rhythm Train", a critically acclaimed children's album which he recorded with Dick Van Dyke and Leslie Bixler.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith released an app in March 2012, which is free mobile application for iPhone, iPad and Android devices and features his "Drummer GPS". The GPS section of the app spotlights drummers Smith has been influenced by and those he regards as some of the best modern drummers. In May 2013, he launched "In Conversation with Chad Smith", his own podcast through MusicRadar where he interviews other musical artists.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith joined Sammy Hagar in the studio to work on music for his twelfth studio album. They were joined by guitarist Neal Schon from (Journey (band)) and bassist Michael Anthony and according to Hagar it was the rebirth of his 1980s band HSAS, which featured Schon and two other members.


title: Chad Smith

text: In 2013, Smith joined jazz musician Jon Batiste and bassist/producer Bill Laswell to create a unique musical group to score a film that had yet to be written and will never be made. The album, "The Process", was released on November 4, 2014.


title: Chad Smith

text: Starting on January 20, 2017, Smith began hosting "Landmarks Live in Concert", an eight-episode concert series on PBS in which Smith will sit down and discuss music with various artists. The first two episodes featured Alicia Keys and Brad Paisley.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith performs drums on the Lorne Balfe composed score for "The Lego Batman Movie". The soundtrack for the animated film was released on February 3, 2017.


title: Chad Smith

text: On May 28, 2018, Smith along with co-host and Yahoo Entertainment music editor Lyndsey Parker, began their own music radio talk show on SiriusXM titled VOLUME West which airs every Monday. The duo will talk music with artists, industry leaders, friends and they will also interview their guests about their favorite songs, albums, and artists.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith performs drums on the Post Malone song "Take What You Want" from his third album "Hollywood's Bleeding". The song also features Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne and rapper Travis Scott. That collaboration with Post Malone led to the creation of Osbourne's 2020 album, "Ordinary Man", which Smith co-wrote along with Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan and producer Andrew Watt. Smith also performed drums on every track. On December 17, 2020, it was announced that the next studio album by Ozzy Osbourne was halfway done and would again feature Smith along with Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo and drummer Taylor Hawkins from Foo Fighters.


title: Chad Smith

text: On January 1, 2021, Post Malone during his Bud Light Seltzer Sessions New Year's Eve 2021 livestream show was joined by Smith, Slash from Guns N' Roses, Chris Chaney from Jane’s Addiction and producer/guitarist Andrew Watt for a performance of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" and "Rooster" by Alice In Chains. Smith contributed to the charity tribute album "The Metallica Blacklist", released in September 2021, backing Miley Cyrus on her cover of the Metallica song "Nothing Else Matters".


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith performs drums on Ozzy Osbourne's 2022 album, "Patient Number 9". Smith also co-wrote two of the songs on the album.


title: Chad Smith

text: He cites Buddy Rich, John Bonham, Ian Paice, Mitch Mitchell, Bill Ward, Keith Moon, Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Ginger Baker, Roger Taylor and Topper Headon as influences on his drumming.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith is an active supporter of a number of non-profit organizations including Surfer's Healing, SeriousFun Network, MusiCares, Silverlake Conservatory of Music, Guitar Mash NY, Camp Korey and Little Kids Rock which he discussed in an interview with Making Music Magazine.


title: Chad Smith

text: In April 2013, Smith was asked by NAMM, the National Association of Music Merchants, to represent the music community by going to Washington, D.C. as a lobbyist in support of music education in US public schools. While in DC, Smith had the opportunity to meet with congressional leaders and share his experience as a student who learned his craft entirely within the public school system. Smith has since been invited back to lobby in April 2014 in support of public school music education.


title: Chad Smith

text: In 2014, Smith joined Bystander Revolution a group that speaks out against bullying in schools and tries to find solutions. Smith released a few videos discussing his own childhood being bullied along with his son's recent experiences with bullies.


title: Chad Smith

text: On May 21, 2014, Smith appeared along with other celebrities in Washington, D.C. at a White House talent show held by Michelle Obama which was organized to raise awareness for Turnaround Arts, a program enacted under the guidance of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities (PCAH) to increase performance and achievement at some of the lowest-ranked schools in the country through arts education. Students from eight schools around the country participated in the show which featured musical theatre, spoken word and interpretative dance. President Barack Obama made a surprise appearance at the event. Smith adopted a school in Greenfield, California also lobbied Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner for increased funding for arts education and that it is a personal issue for him. Smith said "I didn't give a shit about science, math or English when I was in school and music was the only reason I wanted to go. It got me interested in other subjects and I would've never graduated without it. If kids can connect with some sort of art in some way, it will enrich their lives in ways they probably can't fully comprehend at the time." Earlier in the week, Smith was joined by former New York Yankee and musician, Bernie Williams at Savoy Elementary School in Washington, D.C. where together they taught a music class. "These are schools where the kids look down at their feet and have no hope and don't feel like they mean anything. They have no self-worth. They need something. This is not a photo-op and just throwing some money. You really roll your sleeves up and immerse yourself in the school." Smith said.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith appeared at Sammy Hagar and James Hetfield's 2nd annual "Acoustic-4-A-Cure" benefit concert in San Francisco, California on May 15, 2015. The benefit was held to raise money and awareness for the Pediatric Cancer Program at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. Smith was joined onstage by Pat Monahan of the band Train and comedian Adam Sandler for a performance of Aerosmith's "Dream On" and Led Zeppelin's "Ramble On".


title: Chad Smith

text: The following day on May 16, 2015, Smith was honored by national nonprofit, "Little Kids Rock" at its annual Family Jam benefit at Facebook's Menlo Park campus for his work to help expand public schoolchildren's access to music education with the "Livin' The Dream Award". In a statement on receiving the award Smith said "It is such an honor for me to be recognized by an amazing charity like "Little Kids Rock" for supporting their work to keep music education thriving in our schools. Music has made such a tremendous impact in my life and I am blessed to be able to give that gift back to the next generation of music makers!"


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith along with his Chili Peppers bandmates announced in September 2015 that they would be supporting Bernie Sanders in his campaign for the 2016 presidential election. In February 2016, the Chili Peppers performed on behalf of Sanders at his "Feel the Bern" campaign fundraiser.


title: Chad Smith

text: On April 29, 2016, Chad Smith and Will Ferrell hosted the "Red Hot Benefit Comedy + Music Show & Quinceanera". The benefit featured a performance by the Chili Peppers along with comedy acts selected by Ferrell and Funny or Die. A portion of the proceeds went to Ferrell's Cancer for College and Smith's Silverlake Conservatory of Music.


title: Chad Smith

text: On February 12, 2018, Smith again teamed with Will Ferrell for his One Classy Night event at the Moore Theater in Seattle to help raise money for Cancer for College. Smith along with Ferrell, Mike McCready and Brandi Carlile performed songs by Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, R.E.M. and were joined by Eddie Vedder for a cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus". The event raised $300,000 in college scholarship money for students who have survived cancer, and has raised 2.3 million to date.


title: Chad Smith

text: On October 6, 2018, Smith and Will Ferrell hosted "Will Ferrell's Best Night of Your Life", a one night charity event in Los Angeles at the Greek Theater. The event, produced by Funny or Die, will benefit Cancer for College and feature many big-name celebrities. Smith also will assemble an MVP musical line up dubbed Chad Smith's Super Mega Funktastic Jam Rock All Stars which will feature his Chili Peppers bandmate Josh Klinghoffer, Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, Stefan Lessard of Dave Matthews Band, Brad Paisley and Chris Martin of Coldplay.


title: Chad Smith

text: On January 13, 2019, Smith along with the Chili Peppers performed at a benefit for victims of the recent deadly Woolsey Fire. "It was cool. It was fun. It was a good vibe, and we really appreciate all the people that came down and paid a lot of money — it wasn't a cheap ticket. But all the proceeds are going to the people that suffered from the fires and the families and everything that is involved in that. Smith said that the fires even put the band's recording of their twelfth album on hold saying "the house we were working in, there was no damage, it didn't burn down, but we couldn't get back in there. So that halted our [progress]. Myself and Anthony both live in Point Dume. Seventy houses in our neighborhood burned down. Ours was spared, luckily."


title: Chad Smith

text: In January 2020, Smith opened his first art exhibit, stating "The way that I want to interpret my feelings about playing the drums and playing music - I'm trying to put this in a different medium. [...] I love to express myself in any sort of creative way that I can, and doing this is another way to kind of take chances and take a risk, and I like to do that. I think it's important for any artist to do that- to keep trying new things. It's not your normal medium, you know. It's not like Bob Ross with an afro in front of the thing and painting,” Smith said.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith has been married twice. Smith was married to Maria St John from 1996 to 1997 with whom Smith had a daughter, Manon (born 1997).


title: Chad Smith

text: He also has two other children, Justin Smith (born 1998) and singer-songwriter Ava Maybee Cardoso Smith (born 2001) through other relationships.


title: Chad Smith

text: In 2004, Smith married his second wife, architect Nancy Mack, with whom he has three sons, born 2005, 2009 and 2012. The family lives in Malibu, California.


title: Chad Smith

text: At a beach concert in 1990, Smith and his bandmate Michael "Flea" Balzary picked a 20-year old young woman, groped her, threw her into the sand, tried to take off her bathing suit, and then Balzary yelled at her to perform a sex act. As a result, the men were ordered to apologize, pay a fine, and donate to a rape crisis center.


title: Chad Smith

text: Like some of his bandmates in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smith has struggled with substance abuse. He struggled with alcoholism and cocaine use for many years. He checked into a drug rehabilitation in 2008.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith is also an avid fan of his hometown Michigan sports teams, including the NHL's Detroit Red Wings.


title: Chad Smith

text: Following the Red Hot Chili Peppers May 14, 2017, performance in Columbus, Ohio, Smith sang the University of Michigan fight song "The Victors". Smith's singing of the fight song made national news as the University of Michigan and Ohio State are longtime sports rivals. At shows in Ohio, Smith's drumset has sometimes featured the Michigan Wolverines logo.


title: Chad Smith

text: Smith is widely known for his strong resemblance to actor and comedian Will Ferrell, who is almost six years younger, which he has acknowledged by wearing shirts reading "I Am Not Will Ferrell" in live performances. Smith said that the two first met during the premiere of the film "The Ladies Man" (2000). He said, "I'm looking at Will and thinking, 'People really think I look like him? I don't fucking look like that. He looks me up and down and says, 'You're very handsome,' and walks away. Totally deadpan. I was like, 'You're funny. You're funny. Both Smith and Ferrell have utilized the resemblance for various appearances together, including their own events for charity and a 2014 appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon", in which the duo faced off in a drum battle, which segued into a musical number by the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing a cover of Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper", as a reference to the "Saturday Night Live" "More Cowbell" skit, in which both Ferrell and Fallon starred.


title: Chad Smith

text: While scuba diving on vacation near Wakaya Island on November 12, 1992, following the Red Hot Chili Peppers' tour of Australia, Smith was attacked by an approximately three-meter hammerhead shark. He was diving offshore when the shark began circling him. Smith attempted to keep still as the shark approached, then fended it off when it attempted to bite him. Afterwards, the shark swam away. The shark removed a "small chunk of skin" from his left arm.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology which was the main communist movement throughout the 20th century. Developed by the Bolsheviks, it was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, its satellite states in the Eastern Bloc, and various countries in the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World during the Cold War, as well as the Communist International after Bolshevisation. Today, Marxism–Leninism is the ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam (all one-party 'socialist republics'), as well as many other communist parties, while the state ideology of North Korea is derived from Marxism–Leninism. Marxist–Leninist states are commonly referred to as "communist states" by Western academics.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism. A vanguard party, organized through "democratic centralism", would seize power on behalf of the proletariat and establish a one-party socialist state, called the dictatorship of the proletariat. The state would control the means of production, suppress opposition, counter-revolution and the bourgeoisie, and promote Soviet collectivism, to pave the way for an eventual communist society that would be classless and stateless. Marxist-Leninists oppose liberal democracy, anarchism, fascism and imperialism.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Marxism–Leninism was developed from Bolshevism by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s based on his understanding and synthesis of orthodox Marxism and Leninism. After the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Marxism–Leninism became a distinct movement in the Soviet Union when Stalin and his supporters gained control of the party. It rejected the common notion among Western Marxists of world revolution as a prerequisite for building socialism, in favour of the concept of socialism in one country. According to its supporters, the gradual transition from capitalism to socialism was signified by the introduction of the first five-year plan and the 1936 Soviet Constitution. By the late 1920s, Stalin established ideological orthodoxy in the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the Soviet Union, and the Communist International to establish universal Marxist–Leninist praxis. The formulation of the Soviet version of dialectical and historical materialism in the 1930s by Stalin and his associates, such as in Stalin's text "Dialectical and Historical Materialism", became the official Soviet interpretation of Marxism, and was taken as example by Marxist-Leninists in other countries; according to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, this text became the foundation of the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism. In 1938, Stalin's official textbook "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)" popularised the term "Marxism-Leninism".


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: The internationalism of Marxism–Leninism was expressed in supporting revolutions in other countries, initially through the Communist International and then through the concept of socialist-leaning countries after de-Stalinisation. The establishment of other Communist states after World War II resulted in Sovietisation, and these states tended to follow the Soviet Marxist–Leninist model of five-year plans and rapid industrialisation, political centralisation, and repression. During the Cold War, Marxism–Leninism was a driving force in international relations. With the death of Stalin and the ensuing de-Stalinisation, Marxism–Leninism underwent several revisions and adaptations such as Guevarism, Ho Chi Minh Thought, Hoxhaism, Maoism, socialism with Chinese characteristics, and Titoism. This also caused several splits between Marxist–Leninist states, resulting in the Tito–Stalin split, the Sino-Soviet split, and the Sino-Albanian split. The socio-economic nature of Marxist–Leninist states, especially that of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, has been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production. The Eastern Bloc, including Marxist–Leninist states in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Third World socialist regimes, have been variously described as "bureaucratic-authoritarian systems", and China's socio-economic structure has been referred to as "nationalistic state capitalism".


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Criticism of Marxism–Leninism largely overlaps with criticism of communist party rule and mainly focuses on the actions and policies of Marxist–Leninist leaders, most notably Stalin and Mao Zedong. Marxist–Leninist states have been marked by a high degree of centralised control by the state and communist party, political repression, state atheism, collectivisation and use of labour camps, as well as free universal education and healthcare, low unemployment and lower prices for certain goods. Historians such as Silvio Pons and Robert Service stated that the repression and totalitarianism came from Marxist–Leninist ideology. Historians such as Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick have offered other explanations and criticise the focus on the upper levels of society and use of concepts such as totalitarianism which have obscured the reality of the system. While the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally Communist state led to communism's widespread association with Marxism–Leninism and the Soviet model, some academics say that Marxism–Leninism in practice was a form of state capitalism.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: In the establishment of the Soviet Union in the former Russian Empire, Bolshevism was the ideological basis. As the only legal vanguard party, it decided almost all policies, which the communist party represented as correct. Because Leninism was the revolutionary means to achieving socialism in the praxis of government, the relationship between ideology and decision-making inclined to pragmatism and most policy decisions were taken in light of the continual and permanent development of Marxism–Leninism, with ideological adaptation to material conditions. The Bolshevik Party lost in the 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election, obtaining 23.3% of the vote, to the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which obtained 37.6%. On 6 January 1918, the Draft Decree on the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was issued by the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets, a committee dominated by Lenin, who had previously supported multi-party free elections. After the Bolshevik defeat, Lenin started referring to the assembly as a "deceptive form of bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism." This would lead to the development of vanguardism in which an hierarchical party–elite controlled society.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Within five years of the death of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin completed his rise to power and was the leader of the Soviet Union who theorised and applied the socialist theories of Lenin and Karl Marx as political expediencies used to realise his plans for the Soviet Union and for world socialism. "Concerning Questions of Leninism" (1926) represented Marxism–Leninism as a separate communist ideology and featured a global hierarchy of communist parties and revolutionary vanguard parties in each country of the world. With that, Stalin's application of Marxism–Leninism to the situation of the Soviet Union became Stalinism, the official state ideology until his death in 1953. In Marxist political discourse, Stalinism, denoting and connoting the theory and praxis of Stalin, has two usages, namely praise of Stalin by Marxist–Leninists who believe Stalin successfully developed Lenin's legacy, and criticism of Stalin by Marxist–Leninists and other Marxists who repudiate Stalin's political purges, social-class repressions and bureaucratic terrorism.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: As the Left Opposition to Stalin within the Soviet party and government, Leon Trotsky and Trotskyists argued that Marxist–Leninist ideology contradicted Marxism and Leninism in theory, therefore Stalin's ideology was not useful for the implementation of socialism in Russia. Moreover, Trotskyists within the party identified their anti-Stalinist communist ideology as Bolshevik–Leninism and supported the permanent revolution to differentiate themselves from Stalin's justification and implementation of socialism in one country.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union claimed to be the sole heir and successor to Stalin concerning the correct interpretation of Marxism–Leninism and ideological leader of world communism. In that vein, Mao Zedong Thought, Mao Zedong's updating and adaptation of Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions in which revolutionary praxis is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary, represents urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. The claim that Mao had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions evolved into the idea that he had updated it in a fundamental way applying to the world as a whole. Consequently, Mao Zedong Thought became the official state ideology of the People's Republic of China as well as the ideological basis of communist parties around the world which sympathised with China. In the late 1970s, the Peruvian communist party Shining Path developed and synthesised Mao Zedong Thought into Marxism–Leninism–Maoism, a contemporary variety of Marxism–Leninism that is a supposed higher level of Marxism–Leninism that can be applied universally.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Following the Sino-Albanian split of the 1970s, a small portion of Marxist–Leninists began to downplay or repudiate the role of Mao in the Marxist–Leninist international movement in favour of the Albanian Labour Party and stricter adherence to Stalin. The Sino-Albanian split was caused by Albania's rejection of China's of Sino–American rapprochement, specifically the 1972 Mao–Nixon meeting which the anti-revisionist Albanian Labour Party perceived as an ideological betrayal of Mao's own Three Worlds Theory that excluded such political rapprochement with the West. To the Albanian Marxist–Leninists, the Chinese dealings with the United States indicated Mao's lessened, practical commitments to ideological orthodoxy and proletarian internationalism. In response to Mao's apparently unorthodox deviations, Enver Hoxha, head of the Albanian Labour Party, theorised anti-revisionist Marxism–Leninism, referred to as Hoxhaism, which retained orthodox Marxism–Leninism when compared to the ideology of the post-Stalin Soviet Union.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: In North Korea, Marxism–Leninism was superseded by "Juche" in the 1970s and was made official in 1992 and 2009, when constitutional references to Marxism–Leninism were dropped and replaced with "Juche". In 2009, the constitution was quietly amended so that not only did it remove all Marxist–Leninist references present in the first draft but also dropped all references to communism. "Juche" has been described by Michael Seth as a version of "Korean ultranationalism", which eventually developed after losing its original Marxist–Leninist elements. According to "North Korea: A Country Study" by Robert L. Worden, Marxism–Leninism was abandoned immediately after the start of de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union and has been totally replaced by "Juche" since at least 1974. Daniel Schwekendiek wrote that what made North Korean Marxism–Leninism distinct from that of China and the Soviet Union was that it incorporated national feelings and macro-historical elements in the socialist ideology, opting for its "own style of socialism." The major Korean elements are the emphasis on traditional Confucianism and the memory of the traumatic experience of Korea under Japanese rule as well as a focus on autobiographical features of Kim Il-sung as a guerrilla hero.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: In the other four existing Marxist–Leninist socialist states, namely China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, the ruling parties hold Marxism–Leninism as their official ideology, although they give it different interpretations in terms of practical policy. Marxism–Leninism is also the ideology of anti-revisionist, Hoxhaist, Maoist, and neo-Stalinist communist parties worldwide. The anti-revisionists criticise some rule of the communist states by claiming that they were state capitalist countries ruled by "revisionists". Although the periods and countries vary among different ideologies and parties, they generally accept that the Soviet Union was socialist during Stalin's time, Maoists believe that China became state capitalist after Mao's death, and Hoxhaists believe that China was always state capitalist, and uphold the Albania as the only socialist state after the Soviet Union under Stalin.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Communist ideologies and ideas have acquired a new meaning since the Russian Revolution, as they became equivalent to the ideas of Marxism–Leninism, namely the interpretation of Marxism by Vladimir Lenin and his successors. Endorsing the final objective, namely the creation of a community-owning means of production and providing each of its participants with consumption "according to their needs", Marxism–Leninism puts forward the recognition of the class struggle as a dominating principle of a social change and development. In addition, workers (the proletariat) were to carry out the mission of reconstruction of the society. Conducting a socialist revolution led by what its proponents termed the "vanguard of the proletariat", defined as the communist party organised hierarchically through democratic centralism, was hailed to be a historical necessity by Marxist–Leninists. Moreover, the introduction of the proletarian dictatorship was advocated and classes deemed hostile were to be repressed. In the 1920s, it was first defined and formulated by Joseph Stalin based on his understanding of orthodox Marxism and Leninism.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Communist party referred to its own ideology as "Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism". "Marxism–Leninism–Maoism" became the name for the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party and of other Communist parties, which broke off from national Communist parties, after the Sino–Soviet split, especially when the split was finalised by 1963. The Italian Communist Party was mainly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, who gave a more democratic implication than Lenin's for why workers remained passive. A key difference between Maoism and other forms of Marxism–Leninism is that peasants should be the bulwark of the revolutionary energy, which is led by the working class. Three common Maoist values are revolutionary populism, pragmatism, and dialectics.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: "Marxism–Leninism" is an empty term that depends on the approach and basis of ruling Communist parties, and is dynamic and open to re-definitions, being both fixed and not fixed in meaning. As a term, "Marxism–Leninism" is misleading because Marx and Lenin never sanctioned or supported the creation of an "-ism" after them, and is reveling because, being popularized after Lenin's death by Stalin, it contained three clear doctrinal and institutionalized principles that became a model for later Soviet-type regimes; its global influence, having at its height covered at least one-third of the world's population, has made "Marxist–Leninist" a convenient label for the Communist bloc as a dynamic ideological order.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Historiography of Marxist–Leninist states is polarised. According to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, historiography is characterised by a split between traditionalists and revisionists. "Traditionalists", who characterise themselves as objective reporters of an alleged totalitarian nature of communism and Marxist–Leninist states, are criticised by their opponents as being anti-communist, even "fascist", in their eagerness on continuing to focus on the issues of the Cold War. Alternative characterisations for traditionalists include "anti-communist", "conservative", "Draperite" (after Theodore Draper), "orthodox", and "right-wing"; Norman Markowitz, a prominent "revisionist", referred to them as "reactionaries", "right-wing romantics", "romantics", and "triumphalist" who belong to the "HUAC school of CPUSA scholarship." According to Haynes and Klehr, "revisionists" are more numerous and dominate academic institutions and learned journals. A suggested alternative formulation is "new historians of American communism", but that has not caught on because these historians describe themselves as unbiased and scholarly and contrast their work to the work of anti-communist traditionalists whom they would term biased and unscholarly. Academic Sovietology after World War II and during the Cold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of the Soviet Union, stressing the absolute nature of Stalin's power. The "revisionist school" beginning in the 1960s focused on relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level. Matt Lenoe described the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong. They tended to be interested in social history and to argue that the Communist Party leadership had had to adjust to social forces." These "revisionist school" historians challenged the "totalitarian model", as outlined by political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich, which stated that the Soviet Union and other Marxist–Leninist states were totalitarian systems, with the personality cult, and almost unlimited powers of the "great leader", such as Stalin. It was considered to be outdated by the 1980s and for the post-Stalinist era.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Some academics, such as Stéphane Courtois ("The Black Book of Communism"), Steven Rosefielde ("Red Holocaust"), and Rudolph Rummel ("Death by Government"), wrote of mass, excess deaths under Marxist–Leninist regimes. These authors defined the political repression by communists as a "Communist democide", "Communist genocide", "Red Holocaust", or followed the "victims of Communism" narrative. Some of them compared Communism to Nazism and described deaths under Marxist–Leninist regimes (civil wars, deportations, famines, repressions, and wars) as being a direct consequence of Marxism–Leninism. Some of these works, in particular "The Black Book of Communism" and its 93 or 100 millions figure, are cited by political groups and Members of the European Parliament. Without denying the tragedy of the events, other scholars criticise the interpretation that sees communism as the main culprit as presenting a biased or exaggerated anti-communist narrative. Some academics propose a more nuanced analysis of Marxist–Leninist rule, stating that anti-communist narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and censorship in Marxist–Leninist states and drawn comparisons with what they see as atrocities that were perpetrated by capitalist countries, particularly during the Cold War. These academics include Mark Aarons, Noam Chomsky, Jodi Dean, Kristen Ghodsee, Seumas Milne, and Michael Parenti. Ghodsee, Nathan J. Robinson, and Scott Sehon wrote about the merits of taking an anti anti-communist position that does not deny the atrocities but make a distinction between anti-authoritarian communist and other socialist currents, both of which have been victims of repression.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Although Marxism–Leninism was created after Vladimir Lenin's death during the regime of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, continuing to be the official state ideology after de-Stalinisation and of other Marxist–Leninist states, the basis for elements of Marxism–Leninism predate this. The philosophy of Marxism–Leninism originated as the pro-active, political praxis of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in realising political change in Tsarist Russia. Lenin's leadership transformed the Bolsheviks into the party's political vanguard which was composed of professional revolutionaries who practised democratic centralism to elect leaders and officers as well as to determine policy through free discussion, then decisively realised through united action. The vanguardism of proactive, pragmatic commitment to achieving revolution was the Bolsheviks' advantage in out-manoeuvring the liberal and conservative political parties who advocated social democracy without a practical plan of action for the Russian society they wished to govern. Leninism allowed the Bolshevik party to assume command of the October Revolution in 1917.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Twelve years before the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks had failed to assume control of the February Revolution of 1905 (22 January 1905 – 16 June 1907) because the centres of revolutionary action were too far apart for proper political coordination. To generate revolutionary momentum from the Tsarist army killings on Bloody Sunday (22 January 1905), the Bolsheviks encouraged workers to use political violence in order to compel the bourgeois social classes (the nobility, the gentry and the bourgeoisie) to join the proletarian revolution to overthrow the absolute monarchy of the Tsar of Russia. Most importantly, the experience of this revolution caused Lenin to conceive of the means of sponsoring socialist revolution through agitation, propaganda and a well-organised, disciplined and small political party.


title: Marxism–Leninism

text: Despite secret-police persecution by the Okhrana (Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order), émigré Bolsheviks returned to Russia to agitate, organise and lead, but then they returned to exile when peoples' revolutionary fervour failed in 1907. The failure of the February Revolution exiled Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists such as the Black Guards from Russia. Membership in both the Bolshevik and Menshevik ranks diminished from 1907 to 1908 while the number of people taking part in strikes in 1907 was 26% of the figure during the year of the Revolution of 1905, dropping to 6% in 1908 and 2% in 1910. The 1908–1917 period was one of disillusionment in the Bolshevik party over Lenin's leadership, with members opposing him for scandals involving his expropriations and methods of raising money for the party. This political defeat was aggravated by Tsar Nicholas II's political reformations of Imperial Russian government. In practise, the formalities of political participation (the electoral plurality of a multi-party system with the State Duma and the Russian Constitution of 1906) were the Tsar's piecemeal and cosmetic concessions to social progress because public office remained available only to the aristocracy, the gentry and the bourgeoisie. These reforms resolved neither the illiteracy, the poverty, nor malnutrition of the proletarian majority of Imperial Russia.