Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

“The death penalty in Washington is like a zombie, not alive or dead, yet continuing to eat its way through precious resources in the criminal-justice system,” The Seattle Times editorial board declared on May 21, urging the state legislature to end capital punishment. Washington currently has a moratorium on executions, imposed by Governor Jay Inslee in 2014, leading the Times to declare the practice “effectively dead.” But because death sentences can still be imposed, and appeals continue for…

No death penalty jury has ever found a defendant charged with intentional murder to be ineligible for the death penalty under Georgia’s intellectual disability law, according to a new empirical study published in Georgia State University Law Review. The study, by Georgia State Law Professor Lauren Sudeall Lucas, examined 30 years of jury verdicts under the state’s Guilty But Mentally Retarded statute, which has the most onerous standard in the nation for proving intellectual disability.

Lush Cosmetics announced on May 15 it has launched a commercial effort to raise awareness about capital punishment and support the abolition of the death penalty. The company’s “Death ≠ Justice” campaign includes the release of a short documentary, “Exonerated,” which tells the story of Ohio death-row exoneree Kwame Ajamu. Ajamu (then 17 years old), his brother Ronnie Bridgman, and Ricky Jackson were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 1975. They were exonerated 39 years later in…

In a repudiation of the city’s past history as one of the nation’s leading producers of death sentences, Philadelphia has joined the trend of major national jurisdictions to select reform candidates who have pledged to limit or eliminate use of the death penalty. On May 16, primary voters in the overwhelmingly Democratic city selected long-time civil rights lawyer Lawrence Krasner (pictured) as the Democratic nominee for District Attorney. Krasner, a defense attorney who entered the public’s…

On May 13, 2017, James “Jimmy” Dennis (pictured, center, with some of his defense team) was released from prison after more than 25 years on Pennsylvania’s death row. His release marked the culmination of three unrelated wrongful capital prosecutions in Philadelphia in the early-1990s, with the common thread a pattern of misconduct by the same two Philadelphia homicide detectives. Dennis, Anthony Wright, and Percy St. George were all capitally charged for murder in cases investigated by…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on May 12 granted a stay of Tilon Carter’s May 16 execution to consider his claim that he was convicted based on “false or misleading testimony by the State Medical Examiner” concerning the cause of the victim’s death. Carter (pictured) was convicted and sentenced to death based upon testimony by a local medical examiner that the 89-year-old victim, James Tomlin, had died of suffocation. His lawyers say that new scientific evidence that was unavailable at the…

The Florida Supreme Court has directed that Ralph Daniel Wright, Jr. (pictured) be acquitted of the murder charges for which he was sentenced to death in 2014, making him the 159^th person exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973. On May 11, 2017, the court unanimously vacated Wright’s convictions for the murders of his ex-girlfriend and their son, ruling that the “purely circumstantial” evidence against him was insufficient to convict. A majority of the court joined a…

Newly unsealed psychiatric evaluations and court transcripts in the case of Dylann Roof (pictured) — sentenced to death for the racially motivated killing of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina — raise additional questions as to whether Roof was competent to waive representation in his death penalty proceedings and to forego presenting mental health evidence in his defense. The documents confirm that Roof represented himself in jury selection and in the penalty stage of his…

The nation’s death rows are shrinking more rapidly than new defendants are being sentenced to death, according to a new Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) statistical brief, “Capital Punishment, 2014 – 2015.” The statistical brief, which analyzes information on those under sentence of death in the United States as of December 31, 2014 and December 31, 2015, documents a continuing decline in executions, new death sentences, and death row populations across the U.S. 2015 marked the fifteenth…

The Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct has issued a formal reprimand to a sitting Burnet County judge who posted on Facebook a photo of a black murder suspect accused of killing a police officer with the comment, “Time for a tree and a rope.” Judge James Oakley (pictured), who is white, denied that the comment about Otis Tyrone McKane was a race-based reference to lynching. “My comment was intended to reflect my personal feelings that this senseless murder of a police officer should…