Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

A new generation of prosecutors, elected across the country on a platform of criminal justice reform, are taking a different approach to criminal justice policies than their predecessors, including a reduction in the use of capital punishment. A Christian Science Monitor profile of these prosecutors — focusing on Mark Gonzalez (pictured), the Nueces County, Texas, district attorney — says “[f]rom Texas to Florida to Illinois, many of these young prosecutors are eschewing the death penalty, talking…

Utah is not providing sufficient funding to competently represent death-row prisoners during their appeals, according to a motion filed on behalf of Douglas Lovell, the man most recently sentenced to death in the state. Because of that, Lovell’s lawyer Samuel Newton says, Lovell’s death sentence should be vacated and he should be resentenced to life in prison. Newton bases his claim on a 2008 Utah Supreme Court opinion, Archuleta v. Galetka, in which the court warned that “low levels of public…

Four counties that rank among the most aggressive users of capital punishment in the United States have prolonged patterns of prosecutorial misconduct, according to a new report by the Harvard-based Fair Punishment Project. The report, “The Recidivists: Four Prosecutors Who Repeatedly Violate the Constitution,” examined state appellate court decisions in California, Louisiana, Missouri, and Tennessee from 2010 – 2015, and found that prosecutors in Orange County, CA; Orleans Parish, LA; St. Louis…

The legacies of Scharlette Holdman (pictured) and Marie Deans — two women who changed the landscape of capital punishment in the United States — are memorialized in a recent story in the Marshall Project and a new book scheduled for release in August. Maurice Chammah’s article, We Saw Monsters. She Saw Humans, marks the July 12, 2017 passing of mitigation pioneer Scharlette Holdman and tells the story of her forty-year fight on behalf of capital defendants and death-row prisoners. The forthcoming…

The number of prisoners on Florida’s death row is now lower than it was on June 30, 2005, as the pace of death sentencing slows and courts reverse the unconstitutional non-unanimous death sentences by which numerous capital defendants had been condemned. Applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Hurst v. Florida and subsequent Florida Supreme Court decisions in Hurst v. State and Perry v. State, state courts declared unconstitutional Florida’s practice of permitting trial judges to…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has reversed a ruling by a Texas federal district court that had denied Scott Panetti (pictured), a severely mentally ill death-row prisoner, the appointment of counsel and funding for a mental health expert and investigator to evaluate his competency to be executed. In a 2 – 1 ruling issued July 11, 2017, the Fifth Circuit, noting that “a decade has now passed since the last determination of whether this concededly mentally ill petitioner is…

As a psychiatrist in the Wayne Unit of Texas’ Huntsville prison from 1960 to 1963, Dr. Lee Hartman presided over 14 electric-chair executions. When his grandson, Ben Hartman, a journalist, began investigating Dr. Hartman’s life, he discovered journals that chronicle those executions and the psychological toll they took, possibly contributing to Dr. Hartman’s suicide in 1964. Dr. Hartman’s journals contain basic data on the men who were executed, including their names, race, a summary of the…

Something went wrong during the execution of Ricky Gray (pictured), who was put to death in Virginia on January 18, 2017, according to an independent expert who reviewed the official autopsy report of Gray’s death. Dr. Mark Edgar, associate director of bone and soft tissue pathology at the Emory University School of Medicine, reviewed the official autopsy report, which Gray’s family obtained from the Virginia medical examiner’s office. Dr. Edgar says Gray suffered an acute pulmonary edema…

In 1989, William Henry Bell, Jr. was convicted of murdering an elementary school principal. Nearly 30 years later, South Carolina’s Free Times reports that the reversal of his death sentence because of intellectual disability provides evidence of the death penalty’s continuing decline in the state and across the country. At the time of the murder, Bell maintained that he was innocent, but after four days in jail, he confessed to the murder. Prior appeals — including one alleging a pattern of…

Orange County, California Sheriff Sandra Hutchens appeared before Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals (pictured) on July 5 to explain her department’s 4 – 1/2‑year failure to comply with court orders directing the department to produce documents related to a multi-decade practice in the county of misusing prison informants to illegally obtain incriminating statements from accused defendants. In May 2015, Judge Goethals barred the entire Orange County District Attorney’s office from…