Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

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 been exonerated. On September 4, 2020, nearly 23 years after he was first questionably convicted of a quadruple murder in Winona, Mississippi, the Mississippi Attorney General’s office dropped all charges against Flowers and a Montgomery…

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 largest death row. On August 28, 2020, the California senate gave its final approval to Assembly Bill 2512, which amends California’s death penalty intellectual disability statute to prohibit the use of race-based IQ…

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 as a whole. The federal government has executed five prisoners in less than two months (click to enlarge map), with two more executions slated for September 22 and 24. No state has carried out any…

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 organization dedicated to fighting wrongful convictions in the United States. Barbara Bradley…

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 white woman. In an 8 – 1 decision on August 27, 2020, the court held that the discredited forensic testimony, “along with new DNA testing and the paucity of other evidence linking Howard to the…

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 state since 1993. Ohio State University Law Professor Douglas Berman reported in his Sentencing Law and Policy blog that as of August 23, 2020, prisons across the United States had confirmed the deaths of 858 prisoners from COVID-19. “This…

A Florida trial court has freed a former death-row prisoner after local prosecutors said new DNA evidence had proven his innocence of the rape and murder for which he was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death 37 years ago. Based on junk-science bite-mark evidence and false testimony from a prison informant, Robert DuBoise (pictured with his mother, Myra, following his release) was convicted of raping and murdering 19-year-old Barbara Grams. The jury unanimously recommended that DuBoise…

Over the objections of Native American leaders across the country, the federal government on August 26, 2020 executed Lezmond Mitchell (pictured), the sole Native-American prisoner on federal death row. Mitchell, a Navajo citizen, became the first Native American executed by the federal government for a crime committed against a member of his own tribe on tribal lands. The Navajo Nation government has long opposed the death penalty as inconsistent with its culture and traditions and repeatedly…

As the federal government began to carry out the second round of executions it has scheduled for 2020, autopsy results from the first round of executions in July suggest to a “virtual medical certainty” that federal death-row prisoners will experience “excruciating pain” while they are being put to death by lethal injection with pentobarbital. An autopsy of Wesley Purkey (pictured), authorized by Purkey’s next-of-kin and conducted by Western Michigan University forensic pathologist Joyce L.

Ruling in one of the most sensationalized trials of the early 2000s, the California Supreme Court has overturned the death sentence imposed on Scott Peterson for the murders of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn son in December 2002. The court upheld Peterson’s convictions for the two murders. In an opinion authored by Justice Leondra Kruger (pictured), the court unanimously ruled that Peterson had been unconstitutionally sentenced to death as a result of “a series of clear and…