Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) have issued new reports documenting the continuing historic decline of the death penalty across the United States. On September 29, 2020, BJS released Capital Punishment, 2018 – Statistical Tables, documenting that death row in the United States has decreased in size for 18 consecutive years from 2001 to 2018. Two days later, on October 1, 2020, LDF followed with the…

For second time in eight days, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has reversed course after initially rejecting a death-row prisoner’s claim of intellectual disability and has resentenced the prisoner to life. The decisions, both involving foreign nationals and both supported by local prosecutors, marked the sixth and seventh time that Texas courts have vacated death sentences imposed on intellectually disabled capital defendants since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 struck down the…

In the September 30, 2020 episode of the Discussions With DPIC podcast, Native American Rights Fund senior staff attorney Joel Williams joins Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robert Dunham for a conversation about tribal sovereignty, the death penalty, and the historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma. Williams, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, explains how 2020 has been a landmark year on the question of tribal sovereignty and the death penalty. He and…

A self-described tough-on-crime Oklahoma state representative says has serious doubts as to the reliability of the Sooner State’s death penalty. “As taxpayers and voters,” Republican State Representative Kevin McDugle (pictured) writes in a September 5, 2020 commentary in the Tulsa World, “we are all participating in this decision to kill — each of us has a finger on the needle that injects the poison. … These are life-and-death decisions that must be made with life-and-death accuracy.”

The Republic of Kazakhstan has joined the ranks of nations that have formally committed to abolishing the death penalty. On September 23, 2020, in conjunction with the 75^th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Kazakhstani President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced that the country had signed the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which commits signatory nations to abolish the death penalty. The action was taken as a step “[t]o…

The North Carolina Supreme Court has ordered that three African American death-row prisoners who had proven that their death sentences violated the state’s since repealed Racial Justice Act (RJA) must be resentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. In three decisions issued on September 25, 2020, the court ruled that North Carolina had violated constitutional principles of double jeopardy and the prohibitions against after-the-fact enhancements of punishment when the…

A new National Public Radio (NPR) analysis of more than 200 autopsies of death-row prisoners executed by lethal injection has found that 84% of those executed showed evidence of pulmonary edema, a condition in which a person’s lungs fill with fluid that creates the feeling of suffocation or drowning that experts have likened to waterboarding. The pulmonary edema findings were endemic to deaths by lethal injection, remaining consistent irrespective of the state that carried out the execution or…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has denied habeas corpus relief to three Georgia death-row prisoners in a series of opinions that narrowly interpreted the scope of a defendant’s right to effective representation in the penalty phase of a capital trial. The decisions, issued in unrelated cases over the course of 36 hours on September 15 and 16, 2020, absolved court-appointed counsel of significant failures in investigating, presenting, and arguing to the jury reasons to spare…

The federal government conducted its sixth and seventh executions in ten weeks on September 22 and 24, putting William Emmett LeCroy (pictured) and Christopher Vialva to death amid continuing challenges to the federal execution protocol and to carrying out executions during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the federal appeal courts set aside LeCroy’s execution challenges, Vialva’s lawsuit challenging the legality of the federal execution protocol remained pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. After the…

Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act show that the federal government’s choice to bring hundreds of people to the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana to carry out five executions in July and August in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic likely caused a COVID-19 outbreak that has already killed three and hospitalized others. In a statement issued September 21, 2020, the ACLU blasted federal officials for repeatedly carrying…