Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has vacated a stay of execution for Missouri death-row prisoner Walter Barton (pictured) who is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday, May 19, 2020. The court’s unsigned opinion, issued on Sunday, May 17, lifted a stay of execution that had been issued May 15 by a federal district court judge. The district court said a stay was necessary to afford it time to address a petition Barton had filed that challenged his conviction and death sentence based…

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has found that a former prosecutor now serving as a justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court deliberately destroyed exculpatory evidence in a case in which he had sought the death penalty. On April 29, 2020, a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court affirmed the rulings of a federal district court overturning the convictions of life-sentenced prisoners Tina Jimerson and John Brown, Jr. because of the “bad faith” misconduct…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has upheld the ruling of a Dallas trial court that denied a new trial to death-row prisoner Charles Flores (pictured), whose conviction and death sentence were the product of hypnotically assisted testimony. The TCCA said its decision was “[b]ased upon the trial court’s findings and conclusions,” which the appeals court acknowledged had simply “adopted the State’s proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law.” No physical evidence links Flores, a…

The city of Cleveland will pay a record $18 million dollars to settle a civil rights lawsuit by three former death-row prisoners who, as a result of police misconduct, spent more than a combined 80 years imprisoned for a murder they did not commit. Kwame Ajamu (pictured, left), his brother Wiley Bridgeman (pictured, center), and Rickey Jackson (pictured, right) were convicted in 1975 of the robbery and murder of Harold Franks based on the coerced false testimony of a 12-year-old boy, Eddie…

In the May 2020 edition of Discussions with DPIC, veteran capital defense lawyer Kelley Henry (pictured), who is representing several Tennessee death-row prisoners facing execution dates in 2020, speaks with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham about the unprecedented challenges of litigating death-penalty cases during the coronavirus pandemic. Henry, a Supervisory Assistant Federal Public Defender in Nashville, provides an inside view of how the extended public health emergency has affected…

Judicial enforcement of constitutional rights in Texas death penalty cases has become increasingly rare and is virtually non-existent in the state’s federal courts, a new University of Houston Law Center study has found. The study, Reversal Rates in Capital Cases in Texas, 2000 – 2020, published online on April 27, 2020 in the UCLA Law Review, reports that reversal rates in cases in which Texas capital defendants were sentenced to death in the first two decades of the 21^st century have plummeted…

Oklahoma will not seek to carry out any executions while litigation continues in federal court on the state’s lethal-injection protocol, a U.S. federal district court judge has announced. At a May 5, 2020 hearing on the Oklahoma death-row prisoners’ execution lawsuit, Judge Stephen Friot (pictured) of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma ordered state officials to disclose details of plans to train corrections officers to carry out executions, setting a June 5 deadline…

Pervis Payne (pictured) was young, black, and, he says, in the wrong place at the wrong time. The son of a minister, he is on death row in Tennessee, convicted of the horrific murders of a white woman and her two-year-old daughter and the stabbing of her three-year-old son in 1987. His case, profiled by Steven Hale in The Appeal on April 29, 2020, features evidence of innocence, intellectual disability, prosecutorial misconduct, and racial stereotyping. Payne is scheduled to be executed on…

Alleging that the Texas prison system is “failing to undertake take basic measures to protect [them] from the risk of disease and death” presented by the coronavirus pandemic, prisoners on the state’s death row have filed a class-action motion to join a federal prison-conditions lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). The motion and an accompanying class-action complaint, filed May 1, 2020 by the Texas Innocence Network in the U.S. District Court for the Southern…

In a federal capital case with implications relating to tribal sovereignty, a federal appeals court has denied a Native-American prisoner’s appeal seeking to investigate racial bias in his case, while questioning the federal government’s pursuit of the death penalty against him. On May 1, 2020, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied Lezmond Mitchell’s request to re-open his habeas corpus challenge to his conviction and death sentence based on a 2017 U.S.