Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

A fractured Washington Supreme Court unanimously found that a death-row prisoner’s constitutional rights had been violated under circumstances that had always before required overturning a conviction and granting a new trial, but nevertheless voted to uphold his conviction and death sentence. In five opinions spanning 254 pages published on April 12, 2018, the nine justices agreed that Conner Schierman’s (pictured) rights to be present and to a public trial were violated during the jury…

Use of the death penalty declined worldwide in 2017, according to the Amnesty International’s annual global report on capital punishment. The human rights organization recorded 2,591 death sentences imposed in 53 countries in 2017, down 17% from the 3,117 death sentences it recorded from 55 countries in 2016. Executions also fell, with 23 nations carrying out a recorded 993 executions, off 4% from the 1,032 executions recorded in 2016 and 39% below the 1,634 executions reported in 2015. Two…

Nine years after New Mexico prospectively abolished capital punishment, lawyers for the state’s two remaining death-row prisoners argued to the New Mexico Supreme Court that the death penalty was unconstitutionally disproportionate punishment as applied to Timothy Allen (pictured, left) and Robert Fry (pictured, right), and that they should not be executed. The lengthy oral argument on April 10, 2018 turned on how the court should go about determining whether a death sentence is arbitrary and…

Twenty-two years after Walter Ogrod (pictured) was sentenced to death for a murder he insists he did not commit, a new Philadelphia District Attorney’s administration has dropped the office’s long-time opposition to Ogrod’s request for DNA testing and has referred the case for review by a revitalized Conviction Integrity Unit. As that review proceeds, an hour-long documentary on the case — aired April 8 as part of CNN’s Headline News Network series Death Row Stories — presents what Philadelphia…

Less than three months after the U.S. Supreme Court directed a federal appeals court to reconsider whether Georgia death-row prisoner Keith Tharpe (pictured) is entitled to federal-court review of his claim that he was unconstitutionally sentenced to death because he is Black, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has declined to review Tharpe’s appeal, saying he had never presented the issue to the state courts. Citing “principles of comity and federalism,” the court denied…

In response to what it calls “a critical and unmet need for education and training of both lawyers representing capital prisoners and decision makers who review petitions for clemency,” the American Bar Association (ABA) has created a new web resource devoted to the clemency process. The Capital Clemency Resource Initiative (CCRI) Clearinghouse — a joint project of the ABA Death Penalty Representation Project and Death Penalty Due Process Project — provides tools and resources for clemency decision…

Race discrimination exists at every stage of the death-penalty process, says veteran death-penalty and civil-rights lawyer Stephen B. Bright (pictured), but “the most pervasive discrimination that is going on is in jury selection.” In a new Discussions With DPIC podcast, Bright — the former President of the Southern Center for Human Rights who has argued jury discrimination cases three times in the U.S. Supreme Court — calls the “rampant” racial discrimination in jury selection “a matter of grave…

A Utah judge has excoriated the Utah Department of Corrections for practices he called “sneaky” and “deceitful” and a state prosecutor has dropped the death penalty after learning that state prison officials had withheld nearly 1,600 pages of prison records from a defendant facing capital charges in a prison killing. Despite a court order to produce all prison records, the department had failed to disclose medical and mental health records detailing psychiatric medication Steven Douglas…

A Utah judge has excoriated the Utah Department of Corrections for practices he called “sneaky” and “deceitful” and a state prosecutor has dropped the death penalty after learning that state prison officials had withheld nearly 1,600 pages of prison records from a defendant facing capital charges in a prison killing. Despite a court order to produce all prison records, the department had failed to disclose medical and mental health records detailing psychiatric medication Steven Douglas…