Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The United States government carried out its third execution in four days on July 17, 2020, executing Dustin Honken (pictured). The week’s executions doubled the number of prisoners the government has put to death since Congress reauthorized the federal death penalty in 1988. With overnight U.S. Supreme Court rulings vacating injunctions that would have halted the July 14 and 16 executions of Daniel Lee and Wesley Purkey, few legal avenues had remained for Honken to challenge his execution.

For the second time in three days, the United States government has executed a prisoner after a 5 – 4 overnight decision of the U.S. Supreme Court short-circuited judicial review of significant legal claims and after the original death warrant setting his execution date had expired. Wesley Ira Purkey was executed at the United States Penitentiary Terre Haute and pronounced dead at 8:19 a.m. on July 16, 2020, more than 15 hours after the time the Federal Bureau of Prisons had set for a scheduled…

Lawyers for Wesley Purkey (pictured), the second of three federal death-row prisoners scheduled to be executed during the week of July 13, are seeking to halt his execution, arguing that mental illness and dementia have left him mentally incompetent. As Purkey challenges the constitutionality of his execution, his spiritual advisor, Rev. Dale Hartkemeyer, is seeking to move back the execution until the COVID-19 pandemic subsides. Hartkemeyer’s lawsuit asserts that conducting the execution…

The U.S. federal government ended its 17-year hiatus between executions on July 14, 2020, putting Daniel Lewis Lee (pictured) to death moments after overnight rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated prior court orders that had placed the execution on hold. Two more executions are scheduled this week, with a fourth set for August. Although Lee’s death warrant expired at midnight on July 13, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) attempted to…

As the U.S. Department of Justice seeks to resume federal executions after a 17-year hiatus, the government’s rushed timeframe, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and unresolved issues involving the lethal-injection protocol, and the victims’ family’s rights have combined with alleged constitutional violations in the cases of the three prisoners slated for execution this week to produce a chaotic whirlwind of last-minute litigation. Federal courts facing compressed timelines have issued rulings…

As the scheduled July 13, 2020 date for the first federal executions in 17 years approaches, faith leaders, diplomats, and legal experts have asked the federal government to call them off. 1,000 faith leaders from across the country have urged President Trump and Attorney General Barr to halt the executions. They are joined by the European Union, which on July 10 also issued a statement strongly opposing the resumption of federal executions. Complementing their efforts, two recent op-eds by…

The United States Supreme Court has vacated the conviction of a Native American death-row prisoner in Oklahoma, giving dramatic effect to a sweeping new decision that affirmed the sovereignty of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation over tribal lands that span the eastern half of the state. In an historic ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Court declared that Congress had never disestablished the Creek Reservation that was created by a series of treaties between 1832 and 1866 in the aftermath of the…

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to step in to resolve festering disputes about the scope of the protections its prior rulings afford to intellectually disabled death-row prisoners. On July 2, 2020, the Court denied petitions to review three such cases, allowing death sentences in Alabama and Tennessee to stand despite the application of unconstitutionally restrictive standards in assessing a prisoner’s intellectual disability, while rebuffing Oklahoma’s efforts to undo a lower court ruling…

Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. (pictured), the “Golden State Killer,” whom prosecutors had one year earlier held out as a “poster child for the death penalty,” has pleaded guilty to 13 counts each of murder and rape in exchange for multiple life sentences. At a June 29, 2020 hearing, the 74-year-old former police officer admitted to a total of 161 crimes involving 48 victims, including dozens of rapes that could not be charged because the statute of limitations on prosecuting them had long ago…

Former Pennsylvania death-row prisoner Kareem Johnson has been exonerated, thirteen years after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death by a Philadelphia jury. On July 1, 2020, the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas completed his exoneration, formally entering an order dismissing all charges against him in his capital case. On May 19, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had barred his reprosecution because of prosecutorial misconduct that exhibited a conscious and reckless disregard for…