Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

“Commission mem­bers unan­i­mous­ly rec­om­mend that the cur­rent mora­to­ri­um on the death penal­ty be extend­ed,” said a near­ly 300-page report pub­lished by the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission in 2017. More than six years lat­er, almost none of the 45 rec­om­men­da­tions have been imple­ment­ed. Former U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Lester, one of three co-chairs of the Commission, reit­er­at­ed the call for a mora­to­ri­um in a November 27, 2023 let­ter to the edi­tors of non​doc​.com. ​“Whether you support…

In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Sandra Babcock (pic­tured), Clinical Professor at Cornell Law School, Faculty Director, and founder of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Ms. Babcock’s clin­ic cur­rent­ly rep­re­sents death sen­tenced women in the United States, Malawi, and Tanzania and is focused on pro­vid­ing defense teams in reten­tion­ist coun­tries with train­ing and con­sul­ta­tion in order to pro­vide the best…

U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released its lat­est report for the year 2021, con­firm­ing a con­tin­ued decrease in the num­ber of peo­ple on death rows in the United…

On November 13, 2023, offi­cials announced that the U.S. Army had over­turned the con­vic­tions of 110 Black sol­diers of the 3^rd Battalion, 24^th Infantry Regiment, who were charged with mutiny in con­nec­tion with the racial vio­lence that occurred dur­ing the 1917 Camp Logan rebel­lion. Nineteen Black sol­diers were hanged fol­low­ing the court-mar­­tial rul­ing on December 11, 1917, which was the largest exe­cu­tion of mil­i­tary sol­diers in his­to­ry. In her state­ment, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth…

Victims’ fam­i­lies, retired Judge James Brogan, and for­mer Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Director Gary Mohr have pub­licly expressed sup­port for leg­is­la­tion pend­ing in both the state Senate and House that would abol­ish the death penalty in…

A death-sen­­tenced pris­on­er whose appeal was lost for thir­ty years was resen­tenced to life with parole on November 14, 2023, when the Harris County, Texas District Attorney’s office said it is no longer pur­su­ing the death penal­ty. Syed Rabbani, a Bangladeshi nation­al, has been on death row since 1988 for a fatal Houston shoot­ing. Mr. Rabbani filed his appeal in 1994, but it remained pend­ing in the Harris County Court sys­tem until 2022, when the Harris County District Clerk’s Office…

A recent arti­cle in the Post and Courier details research into the rea­sons why 18 death sen­tences have been over­turned in South Carolina, find­ing one of the main rea­sons to be pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct. Research found that 11 of the 18 pris­on­ers received new sen­tences because of pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct, while the oth­er sev­en received new sen­tences after the deci­sion in Atkins v. Virginia because they had intellectual…

Death-row exoneree Walter Ogrod’s fed­er­al law­suit against the City of Philadelphia and mem­bers of the Philadelphia Police Department was set­tled for $9.1 mil­lion on November 3, 2023. Mr. Ogrod, who was exon­er­at­ed in 2020 after 23 years on death row, was ini­tial­ly con­vict­ed in 1996 based on a coerced con­fes­sion and false tes­ti­mo­ny from jail­house infor­mants in a case fur­ther taint­ed by police and pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct and inad­e­quate legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion at tri­al. In a statement confirming…

On November 8, 2023, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey sched­uled an exe­cu­tion date for Kenneth Smith, mark­ing the first attempt by a U.S. state to use nitro­gen gas in an exe­cu­tion. Mr. Smith was con­vict­ed of the 1988 mur­der-for-hire death of Elizabeth Sennett in Jefferson County, Alabama and has been on death row for near­ly 34 years. Following the state Supreme Court’s 6 – 2 deci­sion green­light­ing Attorney General Steve Marshall’s request for an exe­cu­tion war­rant, Gov. Ivey set a 32-hour exe­cu­tion date…

On November 2, 2023, Demetrius Minor, the National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty and Davis Turner, a retired attor­ney whose broth­er was mur­dered in Nashville in 2009 and a board mem­ber of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, co-authored an op-ed in The Tennessean dis­cussing a recent report by the Death Penalty Information Center. ​“Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty” details the his­to­ry of racial violence…