Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

For the third con­sec­u­tive year, the Washington State Senate has vot­ed to remove the death penal­ty from the state’s statute books. In a 28 – 18 vote praised by abo­li­tion advo­cates for its bipar­ti­san­ship, four sen­ate Republicans joined 24 of their Democratic col­leagues on January 30, 2020 to for­mal­ly repeal Washington’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment law. With a new Speaker replac­ing Democratic lead­er­ship who had pre­vent­ed the bill from com­ing up for a vote in the House in 2018 and…

In leg­isla­tive votes 1,600 miles apart on January 30, 2020, state sen­ates in Colorado and Virginia took his­toric steps toward abol­ish­ing or reform­ing their state death-penalty…

After near­ly two decades of cap­i­tal tri­als and death-penal­­­ty rever­sals, for­mer Florida death-row pris­on­er David Snelgrove has been resen­tenced to life in prison with­out parole. His three sen­tenc­ing tri­als pro­vid­ed a barom­e­ter of the impact of the United States Supreme Court and Florida Supreme Court deci­sions in Hurst v. Florida and Hurst v. State, and the lengths to which pros­e­cu­tors were will­ing to go in attempts to keep…

Lawyers for white suprema­cist Dylann Roof (pic­tured) have asked a fed­er­al appeals court to vacate his fed­er­al con­vic­tions and death sen­tences for the racial­­­ly-moti­­­vat­ed mur­ders of nine wor­shipers at an his­toric African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015. Roof’s lawyers raised more than a dozen claims of con­sti­tu­tion­al and legal error in a 321-page legal brief filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth…

Georgia exe­cut­ed Donnie Lance on January 29, 2020 after his requests for DNA test­ing and a plea for clemen­cy sup­port­ed by the chil­dren he and mur­der vic­tim Joy Lance…

In its unprece­dent­ed rush to exe­cute eight pris­on­ers over an eleven-day peri­od in April 2017, Arkansas may have exe­cut­ed an inno­cent man. Civil rights and legal reform orga­ni­za­tions filed a state Freedom of Information Act law­suit on January 23, 2020 on behalf of the broth­er of Ledell Lee (pic­tured), a man Arkansas exe­cut­ed on April 20, 2017. The law­suit argues that DNA and fin­ger­print evi­dence that courts blocked the defense from…

Death row and the num­ber of pris­on­ers fac­ing active death sen­tences in the U.S. con­tin­ue to decline, accord­ing to the lat­est quar­ter­ly sur­vey of death row by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund…

Keith Tharpe — an African American sen­tenced to death 29 years ago by a jury that includ­ed a mem­ber who called him the​“N‑word” and doubt­ed whether​“Black peo­ple even have souls”— died on Georgia’s death row January 24, 2020. He was 61 years old. In a press state­ment, his lawyers from the Georgia Death Penalty Resource Center said he had been suf­fer­ing from can­cer and like­ly died of complications…

In a dra­mat­ic rever­sal made pos­si­ble by changes in court per­son­nel, the Florida Supreme Court has repu­di­at­ed its pri­or deci­sions requir­ing that cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing juries unan­i­mous­ly agree to the death penal­ty before a tri­al judge may sen­tence a defen­dant to death.​“Our court … got it wrong,” the jus­tices said, when it ruled in 2016 that death sen­tences imposed after non-unan­i­­­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tions for death vio­lat­ed the state and federal…

In a case pros­e­cu­tors now describe as a​“per­fect storm” of injus­tice, Pennsylvania death-row pris­on­er Christopher Williams (pic­tured) and his co-defen­­­dant Theophalis Wilson have been exon­er­at­ed of a 1989 triple murder in…