Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

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…

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 (LDF). The Fall 2019 edition of Death Row USA, released earlier this month, reports that 2,639 people were on death row or facing capital resentencing across the United States as of October 1, 2019. That number represents a 3.0% drop from last year’s October report and a 27% decline from the…

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 from the disease. Tharpe challenged his death sentence after Barney Gattie, a juror in his case…

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 constitutions. The court’s January 23, 2020 decision…

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 North Philadelphia. On December 23, 2019, conceding that later-fired prosecutors had withheld “a plethora of significant material, exculpatory evidence,” the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office dropped the charges against Williams. Less than a month later, on January 21…

Saying that Nicholas Sutton “has gone from a life-taker to a life-saver,” lawyers for the Tennessee death-row prisoner filed an application for clemency with Governor Bill Lee on January 14, 2020. The clemency application, which requests that Lee commute Sutton’s sentence to life without parole, contained affidavits of support from seven Tennessee correctional officials, members of the victims’ families, and five of the jurors in the case. Sutton currently faces a February 20, 2020 execution…

A DPIC analysis of executions and new death sentences in 2019 has found that even as death penalty usage declined across the United States, racial disparities in its application persisted. Studies have consistently found racial disparities at nearly every stage of the capital punishment process, from policing and charging practices, to jury selection, to jury verdicts, to which cases result in executions. Those patterns of discriminatory sentencing and executions — and particularly…

On Martin Luther King Day, DPIC looks at the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s views on the death penalty. Dr. King’s philosophy of non-violence had no room for capital punishment. In one of his most famous sermons, Loving Your Enemies, Dr. King preached: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” In 1952, Jeremiah Reeves, a…