Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Alabama has set an exe­cu­tion date for Doyle Lee Hamm (pic­tured), a 60-year-old man with ter­mi­nal cra­nial and lym­phat­ic can­cer that his lawyer says has ren­dered his veins unus­able for lethal injec­tion. Hamm has received radi­a­tion and chemother­a­py, and was sched­uled for surgery to remove a can­cer­ous lesion on December 13, but Alabama prison offi­cials can­celled the surgery and instead informed Hamm that a death war­rant had been issued sched­ul­ing his execution…

The racial­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry jury selec­tion prac­tices of the Clark County, Nevada, District Attorney’s office are now caus­ing it to lose con­vic­tions in cap­i­tal cas­es. In a December 18 arti­cle, the pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al watch­dog, The Open File, details repeat­ed vio­la­tions by Clark County death-penal­­ty pros­e­cu­tors of the con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­scrip­tion against strik­ing prospec­tive jurors from ser­vice on the basis of race. Four times in the past four years, the Nevada Supreme Court has…

Several months after Arizona set­tled a law­suit over the con­di­tions of con­fine­ment on the state’s death row, the state has end­ed the prac­tice of auto­mat­i­cal­ly hous­ing con­demned pris­on­ers in soli­tary con­fine­ment, and pris­on­ers and prison offi­cials alike are prais­ing the changes. Carson McWilliams (pic­tured), Division Director for Offender Operations in the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC), told the Arizona Republic that the new incarceration…

For the third time since 2012, no one in North Carolina was sen­tenced to death in 2017. All four tri­als in 2017 in which pros­e­cu­tors sought a death sen­tence end­ed with a jury either acquit­ting the defen­dant of cap­i­tal mur­der or return­ing a less­er sen­tence. Despite the his­tor­i­cal decline in death sen­tenc­ing in North Carolina, two state leg­isla­tive lead­ers, in a let­ter derid­ed by edi­to­r­i­al boards as polit­i­cal pos­tur­ing, used the recent killing of three prison guards to demand…

The Supreme Court of Kenya has declared the nation’s manda­to­ry death sen­tenc­ing pro­ce­dures uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. In a December 14, 2017 rul­ing that could affect 7,000 death-row pris­on­ers, the high court over­turned Section 204 of Kenya’s Penal Code, which required that judges impose death sen­tences upon con­vic­tion of mur­der or armed rob­bery. The deci­sion resolves con­flict­ing rul­ings by the coun­try’s low­er courts of appeal, and grants new sen­tenc­ing hear­ings to those currently…

On December 17, 2007, New Jersey abol­ished the death penal­ty. On the tenth anniver­sary of abo­li­tion, the edi­to­r­i­al board of the New Jersey Law Journal writes, ​“On the Death Penalty, New Jersey Got it Right.” The edi­to­r­i­al board wrote, ​“Abolition has proven its worth, in that there has been no surge of mur­ders, a sig­nif­i­cant decline of pros­e­cu­tion and appeal expens­es, and the elim­i­na­tion of unre­me­di­a­ble judi­cial mis­takes. [Abolition] was and remains both the…

Nearly one-third (31%) of the 39 new death sen­tences imposed in the United States in 2017 came from just three coun­ties, Riverside, California; Clark, Nevada; and Maricopa, Arizona, accord­ing to sta­tis­tics com­piled for DPIC’s annu­al year end report. In a press release accom­pa­ny­ing the annu­al report, DPIC said that the year’s sentences reflect ​“the increas­ing geo­graph­ic iso­la­tion and arbi­trary nature of the death penal­ty.” Riverside imposed…

Executions and new death sen­tences remained near his­toric lows in 2017, and pub­lic sup­port for the death penal­ty polled at its low­est lev­el in 45 years, accord­ing to DPIC’s annual report, ​“The Death Penalty in 2017: Year End Report,” released December 14. Both the 23 exe­cu­tions and the 39 pro­ject­ed new death sen­tences in 2017 were the sec­ond low­est totals in more than a quar­ter-cen­­tu­ry. Four more peo­ple were exon­er­at­ed from death row in 2017, bring­ing the total to 160…

As U.S. phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies have strength­ened dis­tri­b­u­tion con­trols on their med­i­cines to pre­vent their use in exe­cu­tions, states have been chang­ing their exe­cu­tion pro­to­cols in search of new or more read­i­ly avail­able drugs. That search has led Nebraska and Nevada to build their exe­cu­tion pro­to­cols around fen­tanyl—the drug known for its role in the cur­rent opi­oid cri­sis in America — and the par­a­lyt­ic cisatracuri­um, which…

The cer­tain­ty of appre­hen­sion, not the sever­i­ty of pun­ish­ment, is more effec­tive as a deter­rent. So argues Daniel S. Nagin (pic­tured), one of the nation’s fore­most schol­ars on deter­rence and crim­i­nal jus­tice pol­i­cy, in his chap­ter on Deterrence in the recent­ly released Academy for Justice four-vol­ume study, Reforming Criminal Justice. Reviewing deter­rence schol­ar­ship since the 1960s and five lead­ing stud­ies from the past two decades, Dr.