Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

In a highly publicized death-penalty trial, Brendt Christensen (pictured) was sentenced to life in prison without parole on July 18, 2019 for the rape and murder of Chinese graduate student Yingying Zhang when a federal jury in Peoria, Illinois did not reach a unanimous decision on what sentence was appropriate for his crime. The trial attracted broad national and international attention as a result of the sensational circumstances surrounding the murder, Ms. Zhang’s status as an international…

Calling Governor Gavin Newsom’s moratorium on executions a “paradigm shift” in the death-penalty landscape, a defendant facing the death penalty in Los Angeles has petitioned the California Supreme Court to halt capital prosecutions in the state. On July 1, 2019, lawyers for Cleamon Johnson — whose death penalty trial is scheduled to begin in January 2020 — have filed a pretrial petition for review, arguing that capital juries “cannot be expected to provide a fair and reasoned penalty-phase…

Citing race disparities, ineffective representation by court-appointed lawyers, and arbitrary case outcomes, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office has asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to strike down the state’s death penalty. In a brief filed on July 15, 2019 in the consolidated appeals of Philadelphia death-row prisoner Jermont Cox and Northumberland County’s Kevin Marinelli, the District Attorney’s office argued that Pennsylvania’s death penalty “has repeatedly been handed out in an…

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who described his deciding vote to uphold the constitutionality of capital punishment in 1976 as the one court vote he most regretted, has died. He was 99 years old. A media advisory released by the Supreme Court on July 16, 2019, said that Stevens died of complications from a stroke he suffered the day before. “He brought to our bench an inimitable blend of kindness, humility, wisdom, and independence,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in…

Amidst an ongoing lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of South Carolina’s death-row conditions, the state has moved its death-row prisoners to a different prison. On July 11, 2019, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDOC) moved the state’s 38 death-row prisoners from Kirkland Correctional Institution to the nearby Broad River Correctional Institution (pictured), into a facility that had originally been built to house death-row prisoners in 1988. In a press release, SCDOC said…

Rick Unklesbay served as a prosecutor in the Pima County Attorney’s Office in Arizona for nearly four decades, prosecuting more than 100 homicides, including sixteen in which death sentences were imposed. He put Don Miller on death row and, in November 2000, watched as Arizona put Miller to death. In Arbitrary Death: A Prosecutor’s Perspective on the Death Penalty, Unklesbay tells the story of nine of those death-penalty cases and how the arbitrary nature of the U.S. justice system has changed…

In the span of two weeks, juries in four unrelated cases in which Florida prosecutors had sought the death penalty have instead returned life sentences. The cases — which were considered probable death verdicts if judges were permitted to impose sentence — illustrate the impact of the changes in Florida law in 2016 and 2017 banning judicial death sentences based on non-unanimous jury recommendations for death. Between June 27, 2019 and July 11, 2019, jurors in the cases of Jose Martinez, Karari…

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section will soon release its annual report on issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. The new publication, The State of Criminal Justice 2019, includes a chapter by Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice, describing significant death penalty cases and capital punishment developments over the past year. Tabak’s death-penalty chapter…

The number of people on death row or facing capital resentencing in the United States has continued its 19-year decline, according to a new death-row census by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). The Spring 2019 edition of Death Row USA, released in early July, reports that 2,673 people in 32 states or in U.S. federal or military custody were on death rows across the U.S. as of April 1, 2019. That total reflects a 2.6% drop from the same time in 2018 and an 18.6% decline over…

A Texas county court has set an execution date for a Jewish death-row prisoner despite his pending federal appeal alleging that the judge who presided over his trial and sentencing should have been removed from the case because of his bigoted racist and anti-Semitic views. On July 3, 2019, Dallas County Judge Lela Mays set an October 10 execution date for Randy Halprin, while he is actively litigating a claim that former Judge Vickers Cunningham repeatedly referred to Halprin and his…