Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The last three men scheduled for execution in Georgia said they did not commit the killing and that DNA testing that was not available at the time of trial could prove it. In two of the cases, victim family members supported the request for testing. Prosecutors opposed the requests, and the courts refused to allow the testing. Two of the three men were executed, with doubts still swirling as to their guilt. Shawn Nolan, a federal defender who represented Georgia prisoner Ray “Jeff” Cromartie…

Three groups, representing prosecutors, the Catholic Church, and political conservatives, have filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the efforts of Florida death-row prisoner James Dailey (pictured) to obtain judicial review of his innocence claim. Dailey filed a petition for certiorari on January 10, 2020 asking the Supreme Court to hear his case, after the Florida courts refused to consider evidence that another man had confessed to the murder. Dailey, a veteran who served three…

As the death penalty continues to wilt across the country, whatever penological justification it once purportedly served is dying as well, say capital punishment scholars Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker (pictured). In their new article The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of the Death Penalty in the United States in the January 2020 Annual Review of Criminology, the Steikers examine four central issues in the rise and fall of the death penalty in the United States and explore what an American…

Calling the death penalty “a failed government program,” 21 current and former Virginia prosecutors have signed on to a letter to the commonwealth’s General Assembly urging the legislature to abolish capital punishment. The letter was signed by former Attorneys General Mark L. Earley, Sr., a Republican who presided over 36 executions during 13 years in office, and Democrat William G. Broaddus, nine current or former Commonwealth’s Attorneys elected across the state, and 12 other former homicide…

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 2019, the prospects of the…

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 systems. After hours of emotional debate on the floor of the state senate in Denver, Colorado senators voted 19 – 15 to repeal the state’s death-penalty statute. Hours earlier, in Richmond, the Virginia state senate passed a bill that would bar the death penalty for individuals who were suffering from severe mental illness…

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 unconstitutionally sentenced prisoners on death row. Before his latest…

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 Circuit on January 28, 2020. Issues related to the…

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 shared were denied. Lance was convicted in 1999 of murdering his ex-wife, Joy Lance, and her boyfriend, Dwight Wood. He has maintained his innocence in the killings and sought DNA testing of evidence from the crime scene. His two adult children, Jessie Lance and Stephanie Cape, not only supported that request, but also asked the…

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 testing in the days leading up to his execution can prove what…