Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

To com­mem­o­rate the 20^th anniver­sary of the United States Supreme Court deci­sion that end­ed the juve­nile death penal­ty, DPI will release a report exam­in­ing the lega­cy of this deci­sion and its impli­ca­tions for emerg­ing adults. This arti­cle exam­ines one area of focus in the report: recent state courts deci­sions that have extend­ed legal pro­tec­tions to emerg­ing adults ages 18 to 20. In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court empha­sized that​“youth matters”…

Adam Luck (pic­tured), the for­mer Chairman of Oklahoma’s Board of Pardons and Parole and for­mer mem­ber of the Oklahoma Board of Corrections, is now speak­ing out against the death penal­ty in Oklahoma. Explaining his change of heart, Mr. Luck cites to his first-hand expe­ri­ence with flaws in Oklahoma’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem, includ­ing botched exe­cu­tions, and his deep Christian faith.​“Having the unique expe­ri­ence of vot­ing on the life of anoth­er human being forced me to…

On March 4, 2025, the Georgia House of Representatives, in a 172 – 0 vote, unan­i­mous­ly passed HB 123, which would pro­vide pre­tri­al hear­ings for cap­i­tal defen­dants to raise intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty claims and would low­er the stan­dard of proof for those claims from ​“beyond a rea­son­able doubt” to a ​“pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence,” in line with oth­er the oth­er 26 states that still retain the death penal­ty. The bill was orig­i­nal­ly intro­duced by Republican Representative Bill Werkheiser dur­ing Georgia’s…

On February 28, 2025, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey com­mut­ed the death sen­tence of Robin​‘Rocky’ Dion Myers to Life Without Parole (LWOP). Myers was con­vict­ed in the 1991 mur­der of Ludie Mae Tucker in Decatur, Alabama. His jury rec­om­mend­ed that he be sen­tenced to LWOP, but the judge in his case over­rode the jury’s rec­om­men­da­tion and hand­ed down a death sen­tence. The prac­tice of judi­cial over­ride was abol­ished in Alabama in 2017. In her state­ment, Gov. Ivey repeated her…

In the February 2025 episode of 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context, DPI Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with three experts on California’s Racial Justice Act (RJA). Natasha Minsker, an attor­ney and con­sul­tant, for­mer­ly of the ACLU, speaks on the his­to­ry of the RJA and the impe­tus for its pas­sage. Genevie Gold, research and writ­ing fel­low at the Office of the State Public Defender (OSPD), describes the process that an RJA claim fol­lows through the legal sys­tem, and…