Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and American Civil Liberties Foundation have filed a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) seeking a court order requiring the BOP to disclose how much the federal government’s resumption of federal executions is costing taxpayers and what steps the government has undertaken to assess and address the COVID-19 public health risks created by the executions. “As the nation faces both dire public health and economic crises,” the lawsuit says…

Declaring that “[r]acism still exists and has no place in society,” the Tennessee Supreme Court on June 25, 2020 directed its Access to Justice Commission (AJC) to create “a new initiative to identify and eliminate barriers to racial and ethnic fairness and justice.” The court’s pronouncement, at the height of the racial justice protests that swept the nation following the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, was meant to signal its concern about racial bias in the…

As federal courts in Washington, D.C. and California declined to halt the execution of Lezmond Mitchell, the National Congress of American Indians, thirteen tribal governments, and more than 230 members from more than 90 U.S. tribes joined Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez in asking President Donald Trump to commute the death sentence of the sole Native American on federal death row. Native-American commentators also called on the president to spare Mitchell’s life, saying his execution…

In a political maneuver that further injected issues of race, gender, and political disenfranchisement into local law enforcement policy, Missouri’s Republican Governor Mike Parson has asked state lawmakers to grant Republican state attorney general Eric Schmitt authority to prosecute murder cases in the city of St. Louis. The proposal targeted cases that are currently under the exclusive purview of Democratic St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, the state’s only Black female…

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts has vetoed a bill that would have increased transparency in the state’s execution process. LB 238, which passed the state’s unicameral legislature on August 13, 2020 by a vote of 27 – 10 with 12 members present but not voting, would have allowed witnesses to see the execution from the moment the prisoner enters the death chamber until the prisoner is declared dead or the execution is halted. In his August 17 veto message to the legislature, Ricketts claimed that…

In a ruling imbued with historic significance, the North Carolina Supreme Court has for the first time acknowledged pervasive discrimination in the state’s use of capital punishment and vacated a death-row prisoner’s death sentence under the since-repealed Racial Justice Act (RJA). By a vote of 4 – 3, it held that Cumberland County Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks ’ April 2012 finding that race was a substantial factor in sentencing Marcus Robinson to death was tantamount to an acquittal of…

Legislators in an August 13, 2020 virtual forum on capital punishment say that the economic impact of the coronavirus on state budgets adds to their concerns about the viability and desirability of the death penalty as a social policy. In an internet news conference sponsored by Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, three Republican state representatives who have sponsored bills to abolish their states’ death penalty laws characterized the death penalty as a waste of taxpayer money…

Attorney General William Barr has promised victims’ family members that, in exchange for information necessary to bring two British ISIS detainees believed responsible for the murders of four Americans, two British aid workers, and more than twenty others to trial in the United States, the Department of Justice (DOJ) will not seek the death penalty against them. The Washington Post reported on July 31, 2020 that Barr told “senior administration officials” at a July 29 White House meeting that…

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released The State of Criminal Justice 2020, its annual report on issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. The ABA book includes a chapter on significant capital punishment developments over the past year, authored by Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice. Tabak’s analysis highlights the continuing long-term downward trend in…

The slow but steady erosion of U.S. death row continued in the first quarter of 2020, data from the latest quarterly death-row census by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) has revealed. The Spring 2020 edition of Death Row USA (DRUSA), released August 10, reports that 2,603 people were on death row or facing resentencing as of April 1, 2020. That marked a decline of 17 since the January 1, 2020 report and a 2.6% drop from the 2,673 LDF reported for April 1, 2019. The death-row…