Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Courts in Idaho and Indiana are grappling with how to respond to legal challenges to lethal-injection secrecy laws after corrections officials in both states refused to release execution information requested under state public records laws. In both states, officials refused to provide details about execution drugs and their sources, saying that state law insulates the information from public disclosure. In Idaho, Judge Lynn Norton ordered the Department of Corrections to release information…

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review a federal appeals court decision vacating the conviction of Patrick Dwayne Murphy (pictured), a Native-American prisoner sentenced to death in Oklahoma state court for a murder he argues could only be prosecuted by the federal government. On May 21, 2018, the Court granted Oklahoma’s petition to review an August 2017 decision by the U.S Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruling that Murphy — a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation — should not have…

State-court factfinding by judges in Harris County, Texas death-penalty cases is “a sham” that “rubberstamps” the views of county prosecutors, according to a study of the county’s capital post-conviction proceedings published in the May 2018 issue of the Houston Law Review. In The Problem of Rubber Stamping in State Capital Habeas Proceedings: A Harris County Case Study, researchers from the University of Texas School of Law Capital Punishment Center examined factfinding orders in 191 Harris…

More than twenty years after being convicted and sentenced to death for a murder he has long said he did not commit, Corey Williams (pictured, center, with his defense team) walked free from prison in Louisiana on May 22, 2018. The deal was bittersweet for Williams, for despite the evidence of innocence, he had to agree to plead guilty to lesser charges of manslaughter and obstruction of justice to obtain his freedom. In a statement released to the media, Amir Ali (pictured, left), Williams’…

In March 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had employed an unscientific and unconstitutionally harsh standard in rejecting Bobby James Moore’s claim that he is ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. Despite a subsequent concession by Harris County prosecutors in November 2017 that Moore (pictured) qualifies as intellectually disabled under all accepted medical definitions, the state court has still not ruled on Moore’s…

Citing extensive evidence that California death-row prisoner Kevin Cooper (pictured) may have been framed, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof has urged Governor Jerry Brown to permit advanced DNA testing of evidence that could potentially prove Cooper’s innocence. In a column electronically posted by the Times on May 17, 2018 and scheduled to appear in the paper’s May 20 Sunday print edition, Kristof joins a former FBI agent, the American Bar Association, and Judge…

Texas executed Juan Castillo (pictured) on May 16, 2018, after its state courts stayed his execution to address whether his conviction and death sentence for a botched robbery and murder had been a product of false testimony, but then denied him an evidentiary hearing necessary to prove that claim. No physical evidence implicated Castillo in the murder, and he consistently asserted his innocence. To convict him, Bexar County prosecutors presented testimony from several admitted perpetrators…

State and federal prosecutors have agreed to withdraw the death penalty in exchange for guilty pleas by defendants charged with multiple killings in two unrelated high-profile murder cases. On May 4, Lake County, Indiana prosecutors dropped the death penalty against Darren Vann (pictured, left), who had killed seven women. On May 1, federal prosecutors announced they would not pursue the death penalty against Esteban Santiago (pictured right), who killed five people and wounded six others in a…

lllinois Governor Bruce Rauner has conditionally vetoed a gun-control initiative unless the legislature agrees to reinstate capital punishment in the state. Exercising an amendatory veto — a power some governors are granted that permits them to amend legislation in lieu of an outright veto — Rauner called for making the killing of a police officer or any murder in which more than one person was killed a new crime of “death penalty murder.” In a May 14, 2018 news conference at the Illinois State…

The United States Supreme Court has granted a new trial to Louisiana death-row prisoner Robert McCoy (pictured), whose lawyer admitted his guilt despite McCoy’s “adament” and “vociferous” insistence that he was innocent. Facing what counsel believed was overwhelming evidence of guilt and hoping to persuade the jury to spare McCoy’s life, defense lawyer Larry English told jurors his client had “committed three murders… . [H]e’s guilty.” In a 6 – 3 opinion for the Court on May 14, Justice Ruth…