Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Leaders in the Tennessee African-American com­mu­ni­ty are urg­ing Governor Bill Lee and the state and fed­er­al courts to halt the exe­cu­tion of a Black death-row pris­on­er who may be both inno­cent and intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled and who has been denied access to the courts to…

Two for­mer death-row pris­on­ers whose sen­tences were com­mut­ed by gov­er­nors in Illinois and Ohio more than a decade ago have been…

Eight years after his exon­er­a­tion from death row, an Ohio tri­al court judge has declared that Joe D’Ambrosio (pic­tured) was​“wrong­ful­ly impris­oned.” The August 31, 2020 rul­ing by Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Michael Russo moves D’Ambrosio one step clos­er to receiv­ing com­pen­sa­tion for the more than two decades he spent on death row as a result of prosecutorial…

Texas death-row pris­on­er Clinton Young (pic­tured), who came with­in days of exe­cu­tion in October 2017 while pros­e­cu­tors hid evi­dence of his inno­cence, has filed a claim for a new tri­al based upon pre­vi­ous­ly undis­closed evi­dence that an assis­tant dis­trict attor­ney who pros­e­cut­ed him was simul­ta­ne­ous­ly employed by the tri­al judge to pro­vide legal advice…

After six tri­als marred by pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct and racial prej­u­dice, draw­ing a scathing rebuke from the U.S. Supreme Court, for­mer Mississippi death-row pris­on­er Curtis Flowers (pic­tured with the ankle mon­i­tor that had kept him under house arrest) has…

In the clos­ing days of its 2020 leg­isla­tive ses­sion, the California leg­is­la­ture passed a trio of racial jus­tice reform bills expect­ed to reduce the influ­ence of racial, eth­nic, and socioe­co­nom­ic bias in the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty in the state with the country’s…

At a time in which the United States as a whole and indi­vid­ual states and coun­ties have con­tin­ued their long-term move­ment away from the death penal­ty, the fed­er­al government’s cur­rent exe­cu­tion spree has estab­lished it as an out­lier juris­dic­tion out of step with the prac­tices of the nation…

When Truth is All You Have, a new mem­oir by Centurion Ministries founder Jim McCloskey (pic­tured) tells the sto­ry of what many con­sid­er to be the birth of the mod­ern inno­cence move­ment. The book, writ­ten with for­mer USA Today nation­al edi­tor Philip Lerman, and released in July 2020, describes McCloskey’s per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al evo­lu­tion as he cre­at­ed Centurion Ministries in 1983, the first-ever…

The Mississippi Supreme Court has grant­ed a new tri­al to death-row pris­on­er Eddie Lee Howard, Jr. (pic­tured), find­ing that the com­bi­na­tion of sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly invalid bite-mark evi­dence used to con­vict him and new DNA evi­dence enti­tled him to a new tri­al in the 1992 mur­der and alleged rape of an 84-year-old…

More pris­on­ers in the United States have died in the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic than have been exe­cut­ed in the coun­try in past two decades, new prison data shows, and more California death-row pris­on­ers have been killed by the virus than have been exe­cut­ed in the…