Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

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…

The death penalty and lynching were instruments of “white supremacist political and social power” in North Carolina, diverging in form but not in function. So writes University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill American Studies Professor Seth Kotch In his newly released book, Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina. Lethal State tracks North Carolina’s use of the death penalty from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the present. Kotch summarizes the through line of capital…

A Kentucky trial court has issued an order declaring the Commonwealth’s execution protocol unconstitutional. It was the third time in a decade the state courts have ruled in favor of death-row prisoners in their challenges to the protocol. The July 2, 2019 ruling by Franklin Circuit Court Judge Phillip J. Shepherd came in response to a claim brought by the state’s death-row prisoners that Kentucky’s execution regulations could allow Kentucky to unconstitutionally execute an intellectually…

An Indiana federal district court judge has vacated the death sentence imposed on federal death-row prisoner Bruce Webster, finding that Webster is ineligible for the death penalty because he is intellectually disabled. After a five-day hearing in April 2019, in which the court heard live testimony from seven mental health experts and considered deposition testimony from three others, Senior Judge William T. Lawrence of the Southern District of Indiana ruled on June 18, 2019 that new evidence…

“Being the survivor of a homicide victim has a pain for which there aren’t any words,” says New Hampshire Representative Renny Cushing (pictured), in the latest episode of the Death Penalty Information Center podcast, Discussions with DPIC. But “[f]illing another coffin doesn’t do anything to bring our loved ones back, it just widens the circle of pain. There’s a big difference between justice and vengeance,” he says. In an interview with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham, Cushing…

The New Mexico Supreme Court has cleared the state’s death row, vacating the death sentences imposed on the state’s final two death-row prisoners, and directing that they be resentenced to life in prison. The rulings, issued by a divided court on June 28, 2019 in the cases of Timothy Allen (pictured, left) and Robert Fry (pictured, right), came almost ten years to the day after New Mexico’s death-penalty abolition, signed into law by Governor Bill Richardson, took effect. However, the 2009…

At the midpoint of 2019, death sentences and executions remain near historic lows in the United States, with executions and pending execution dates concentrated heavily in a few southern states. The year’s executions and new death sentences have disproportionally involved defendants or prisoners with mental illness, brain damage, and/or severe childhood trauma, and those with inadequate representation. New Hampshire became the 21^st state to abolish the death penalty, and California’s governor…

In the midst of National Pride Month commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and the birth of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, South Dakota has issued a death warrant seeking to execute a gay man whose death sentence was tainted by anti-gay bias. Charles Rhines (pictured) was sentenced to death by a jury that, according to juror affidavits, was influenced by bigoted stereotypes in reaching its decision. On June 25, 2019, in response to a motion filed by state prosecutors…