Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Official misconduct and perjury or false accusation continue to be the main reasons innocent men and women are wrongfully convicted in America, according to the 2019 annual report by the National Registry of Exonerations. That misconduct, the report indicates, is most prevalent in cases involving the most serious criminal charges. The registry reported on March 31, 2020 that 143 men and women were exonerated in 2019 following wrongful convictions across the United States. More than half (76)…

Courts are failing badly in keeping junk psychological science out of the courtroom in criminal cases, permitting the admission of psychological tests that have never been reviewed for reliability and others that have been found unreliable, a recent study reports. Among the problematic tests, another group of psychologists write, is a “psychopathy checklist” commonly used by prosecutors to argue that a defendant poses a future danger to society and should be sentenced to death. The article…

After ignoring health risks posed by lengthy court proceedings during the coronavirus pandemic and facing criticism that a capital prosecution following the state’s abolition of capital punishment would amount to a politically partisan waste of taxpayer dollars, prosecutors in Adams County, Colorado have announced that they will drop the death penalty in a high-profile case involving the killing of a sheriff’s deputy. On March 30, 2020, 17^th Judicial District Attorney Dave Young filed papers…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has once again rejected the findings of a trial court that a death-row prisoner was entitled to relief from his conviction or death sentence. Applying a narrow interpretation of a 2013 junk-science law, the court on March 11, 2020 set aside the recommendation of an El Paso County trial court that death-row prisoner Rigoberto Avila should be granted a new trial as a result of the prosecution’s reliance on false and outdated scientific evidence. The…

After receiving unanimous support in the Florida House of Representatives, a bill that would have expanded access to postconviction DNA testing failed in the Florida Senate when the legislative body adjourned its 2020 legislative session without taking up the bill. Introduced by State Representative Jamie Grant (pictured, R – Tampa) on February 5, 2020, CS/HB 7077 sailed through the House of Representatives with ease, passing the House Appropriations Committee on February 18 by a vote of 27 – 0…

The public health crisis from the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has halted executions in the United States and, legal experts say, is likely to continue to do for the foreseeable future. With nine of the eleven serious death warrants between March 15 and June 30, 2020 scheduled in Texas, the decisions by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) to issue 60-day stays for the two prisoners with March execution dates suggests that other stays are likely to follow. Citing “the current health…

In a decision that exposed the deep divide between the United States and its European allies on capital punishment issues, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom unanimously ruled that the British government unlawfully provided information to the United States about two suspected Islamic State members without first obtaining assurances that the information would not be used to impose or carry out the death penalty. The landmark ruling, issued March 25, 2020 in the case of Elgizouli v.

Georgia death-row prisoner Billy Daniel Raulerson, Jr. (pictured) is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a state law that, he argues, is permitting Georgia to unconstitutionally execute individuals with Intellectual Disability. On March 27, 2020, the Court is scheduled to consider whether to hear the case of Raulerson v. Warden and to review the constitutionality of Georgia’s evidentiary requirement that capital defendants prove they are intellectually disabled “beyond a reasonable…

On March 23, 2020, Colorado became the 22^nd U.S. state to abolish the death penalty, as Governor Jared Polis (pictured) signed legislation repealing the state’s capital punishment statute and commuted the sentences of the state’s three death-row prisoners to life without possibility of parole. The state was the tenth to legislatively or judicially abolish capital punishment in the past fifteen years. Colorado’s abolition of capital punishment exemplifies a nationwide trend away from the death…

A Birmingham judge has denied a new trial to Alabama death-row prisoner Toforest Johnson (pictured, center), saying he had not proven his claim that his conviction and death sentence for the killing of a sheriff’s deputy in 1995 were the product of prosecutorial misconduct. Johnson was convicted in 1999 of murdering Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputy William G. Hardy. Over the course of four different court proceedings, the state presented at least five different accounts of who committed the…