Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

A study of 40 years of Texas death sentences has found that the likelihood that a defendant accused of a death-eligible murder will be sentenced to death is three times greater if the case involves a white female victim. The study, A Systematic Lottery: The Texas Death Penalty, 1976 to 2016, by Scott Phillips (pictured, left) and Trent Steidley (pictured, right), University of Denver professors in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, compared two groups of Texas murder defendants…

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. The 87-year-old justice, who repeatedly expressed skepticism about the death penalty but never took the step of saying it was inherently unconstitutional, succumbed to pancreatic cancer on September 18, 2020. Her death immediately threw the future direction of the Court into turmoil. Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg had been an anchor of the four-justice moderate-to-liberal wing of the Court and had voted in the majority…

The federal government intends to execute Christopher Vialva (pictured) on September 24, 2020, the first time in nearly 70 years it will have put any teenage offender to death. But according to a prominent cognitive neuropsychologist, the decision to execute Vialva is out of step with what science now knows about the workings of the adolescent brain. Vialva was 19 years old when he and four co-defendants, aged 15, 16, 16, and 18, killed a Texas couple during a carjacking and robbery. In a…

A Florida man and an Arkansas woman, convicted of murder in separate cases involving junk science and prosecutorial misconduct, have been exonerated, decades after being wrongfully capitally prosecuted. Hillsborough Circuit Judge Christopher Nash dismissed all charges against former Florida death-row prisoner Robert DuBoise on September 14, 2020, granting a motion filed by the office of State Attorney Andrew Warren. The motion was the culmination of an investigation by Warren’s Conviction…

As the 2020 National Football League (NFL) season’s opening weekend began on Sunday, September 13, end zones were painted with the words “End Racism” and “It Takes All of Us.” Six NFL teams remained in locker rooms for the National Anthem, and players and one coach kneeled. After having been accused of blackballing players who peacefully demonstrated during the national anthem, the NFL stated in early September that “[t]he league is committed to integrating important causes vital to players and…

The Death Penalty Information Center has released a major new report on race and the U.S. death penalty, providing an in-depth look at the historical role race has played in the death penalty and detailing the pervasive impact racial discrimination continues to have throughout every stage of a death penalty case today. Enduring Injustice: the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty. released on September 15, 2020, also makes the case for why redressing discrimination in…

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 review those claims. A growing coalition of state legislators, legal associations, faith leaders, and community groups in Memphis have called for the courts to permit DNA testing that could potentially exonerate Pervis Payne…

Two former death-row prisoners whose sentences were commuted by governors in Illinois and Ohio more than a decade ago have been released from custody. Renaldo Hudson (pictured) was one of 167 prisoners whose death sentences were commuted to life without parole by Governor George Ryan in January 2003. He was released from Danville Correctional Center on September 2, 2020, after Governor J.B. Pritzker granted him a second commutation, reducing his sentence to time served. Jeffrey Hill was…

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 misconduct. D’Ambrosio first filed suit seeking a declaration of wrongful imprisonment in 2012, after the federal courts had…

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 in his case. In an Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus Seeking Relief from a Judgment of Death, filed August 13, 2020 in Midland County…