Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr has filed an amicus brief supporting the grant of a new trial to Toforest Johnson (pictured, center, with family members), sentenced to death for the murder of an Alabama sheriff’s deputy. In a pleading filed in the Jefferson County Circuit Court, Carr wrote that, “A prosecutor’s duty is not merely to secure convictions, but to seek justice,” and that duty, he said, “requires intervention in this case” on Johnson’s behalf. Carr urged that “a court…

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has documented a strong link between individuals who hold dehumanizing belief systems and support for capital punishment. The study by University of Oregon Journalism and Communications Professor David Markowitz (pictured, left) and Psychology Professor Paul Slovic (pictured, right), was part of ongoing academic efforts to explain why some people dehumanize undocumented immigrants to the United States. The researchers found…

Florida death-row exoneree Clifford Williams, Jr. (pictured), who was freed in 2019 after spending 43 years in prison, will receive $2.15 million in compensation from the state of Florida under a bill signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis on June 9, 2020. The bill, specifically tailored to compensate Williams, unanimously passed both chambers of the Florida legislature in March. Williams and his nephew, Nathan Myers, were wrongfully convicted of murder in 1976. Both received jury…

Bobby Moore (pictured), the man at the center of a case that altered how Texas determines intellectual disability in death-penalty cases, has been granted parole after spending 40 years in prison. He served nearly all of that sentence on Texas’ death row. The U.S. Supreme Court twice reversed Texas appeals court decisions that would have permitted Moore’s execution before his death sentence was ultimately overturned. In 2017, in Moore v. Texas, the Court unanimously struck down Texas’…

Twenty-eight years after Philadelphia prosecutors first sought to take his life for the murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn, Walter Ogrod (pictured, second from right, with members of his defense team) has been exonerated from Pennsylvania’s death row. In a dramatic virtual hearing on June 5, 2020 that was attended by Ogrod, his family, Barbara Jean’s mother, counsel, and the media, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Shelley Robins New granted a joint motion by prosecutors and…

The North Carolina Supreme Court has struck down the state legislature’s attempted retroactive repeal of the state’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), restoring the rights of approximately 140 death-row prisoners to seek redress of death sentences that they had claimed were substantially affected by racial bias. The Court issued its rulings in the cases of death-row prisoners Andrew Ramseur (pictured, left) and Rayford Burke (pictured, right) on June 5, 2020, holding that “the retroactive application…

Texas death-row prisoner Ruben Gutierrez (pictured) has asked the Texas state courts to stay his execution because of the COVID-19 pandemic as federal litigation continues on his efforts to obtain DNA testing and to require Texas to permit him to have a chaplain present in the execution chamber if his execution proceeds. Attorneys for Gutierrez, whose execution is currently scheduled for June 16, 2020, argue that the pandemic has made it impossible for them to perform critical investigation…

U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker on June 1, 2020 denied a challenge brought by Arkansas death-row prisoners to the use of the controversial drug midazolam in carrying out executions. The ruling followed a two-week hearing on the issue held in May 2019. Lawyers for the prisoners had argued that midazolam does not adequately anesthetize a prisoner during an execution before the second and third drugs, a paralytic drug and a drug that stops the heart, are administered. An attorney for the…

Atlanta is poised to become the latest in a growing number of U.S. cities in which prosecutors have pledged not to seek the death penalty or to use it more sparingly. On May 26, 2020, at a candidate forum hosted by the Georgia Justice Reform Partnership, all three Democratic candidates in Fulton County, Georgia’s June 9 primary election for District Attorney said they would not seek the death penalty. With no Republican opponent in the general election, the winner of the Democratic primary…

State appeal courts in Nevada and Pennsylvania have barred the retrial of two former death-row prisoners as a result of prosecutorial misconduct, paving the way for their exonerations. On January 24, 2020, months after his release from prison, the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed the decision of a Las Vegas trial court that had dismissed all charges against former death-row prisoner Paul Browning (pictured, left), formally completing his exoneration. Then, on May 19, 2020, the Pennsylvania…