Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

In an elec­tion viewed as a ref­er­en­dum on racial jus­tice and crim­i­nal jus­tice reform, death-penal­­­ty oppo­nent Wesley Bell (pic­tured, left) sound­ly defeat­ed sev­en-term incum­bent, Robert McCulloch (pic­tured, right) for the Democratic nom­i­na­tion for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney. With no Republican oppo­si­tion in the gen­er­al elec­tion, Bell, a Ferguson, Missouri, city council…

Two ser­vice­men — one a for­mer air­man on the U.S. mil­i­tary death row, anoth­er a dec­o­rat­ed Vietnam vet­er­an sen­tenced to death in Pennsylvania—have won relief from their cap­i­tal convictions or…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled on July 27, 2018 that Christopher S. McDaniel (pic­tured), an inves­tiga­tive reporter for BuzzFeed News, may pro­ceed with his law­suit chal­leng­ing the Missouri Department of Corrections’s pol­i­cy for select­ing exe­cu­tion wit­ness­es. McDaniel, who has writ­ten numer­ous arti­cles expos­ing irreg­u­lar­i­ties in Missouri’s exe­cu­tion pro­ce­dures, applied to the Director of the Department of…

A fed­er­al dis­trict court has vacat­ed the mur­der con­vic­tion of Arizona death-row pris­on­er Barry Jones (pic­tured) in the death of 4‑year-old Rachel Gray, and has ordered the state to imme­di­ate­ly retry or release Jones. On July 31, 2018, U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess grant­ed a new tri­al to Jones, who has spent 23 years on Arizona’s death row, find­ing that if Jones had been com­pe­tent­ly rep­re­sent­ed at tri­al,​“there is a reasonable…

Pope Francis (pic­tured) has for­mal­ly changed the offi­cial Catholic Church teach­ing on the death penal­ty, call­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment​“an attack on the invi­o­la­bil­i­ty and dig­ni­ty of the per­son” and deem­ing it​“inad­mis­si­ble”…

The lat­est edi­tion of Discussions with DPIC fea­tures H.E. Miller, Jr. and Bradley MacLean, co-authors of a recent study on the appli­ca­tion of Tennessee’s death penal­ty. Miller and MacLean describe the find­ings from their arti­cle, Tennessee’s Death Penalty Lottery, in which they exam­ined the fac­tors that influ­ence death-penal­­­ty deci­sions in the state. Based on their sur­vey of thir­ty years of homi­cide cas­es, they found that whether a death sen­tence is imposed is…

Michael Graczyk (pic­tured), who wit­nessed more than 400 exe­cu­tions as an Associated Press reporter in Texas, has retired after near­ly 46 years with the news ser­vice. On March 14, 1984, Texas exe­cut­ed James Autry — the sec­ond per­son put to death in Texas since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment statute in 1976. According to a non-exhaus­­­tive list of exe­cu­tion wit­ness­es main­tained by the Texas…

Calling the death penal­ty a waste­ful​“big gov­ern­ment” pol­i­cy that is​“inept, biased, and cor­rupt,” a lib­er­tar­i­an think tank and a New Orleans colum­nist have joined the cho­rus of con­ser­v­a­tive voic­es call­ing for the end of the death…

State lethal-injec­­­tion prac­tices may have col­lat­er­al con­se­quences that place pub­lic health at risk, accord­ing to briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court on July 23, 2018 by pub­lic health experts and an asso­ci­a­tion rep­re­sent­ing gener­ic drug man­u­fac­tur­ers. In ami­cus (or friend-of-the-court) briefs filed in con­nec­tion with a chal­lenge brought by death-row pris­on­er Russell Bucklew (pic­tured) to Missouri​’s use of lethal injec­tion, the…

Lloyd Barrus (pic­tured, left) will not become the first per­son sen­tenced to death in Montana this cen­tu­ry, after pros­e­cu­tors dropped their pur­suit of the death penal­ty for the killing of a sher­if­f’s deputy. In a motion filed July 19, 2018, Broadwater County Attorney Cory Swanson (pic­tured, right) wrote that,​“after exten­sive analy­sis of the Defendant’s his­to­ry of … men­tal ill­ness,” the state would no longer seek the death…