Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has issued an order staying the scheduled April 12 execution of Paul Storey. The unpublished April 7 order sends Storey’s case back to the trial court to consider whether the prosecution knowingly presented false evidence about the victim’s family’s views on the death penalty. Storey had been scheduled to be executed on April 12. His lawyers argued that “the State denied him his right to due process because it argued “evidence it knew to be false” when…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has upheld a lower federal court ruling blocking the state of Ohio from proceeding with plans to carry out executions with its new three-drug execution protocol. The decision affirmed a district court preliminary injunction that barred the state from using the drug midazolam as part of a three-drug execution process, and barred the state from using “any lethal injection method which employs either a paralytic agent…or potassium chloride.” Judge…

The Arkansas Parole Board voted 6 – 1 on April 5 to recommend clemency for Jason McGehee, one of the eight death-row prisoners scheduled to be executed in an unprecedented eleven-day period later this month. McGehee’s clemency petition drew support from both the former Director of the Arkansas Department of Correction, Ray Hobbs, and the trial judge who presided in his case, Robert McCorkindale. Speaking on McGehee’s behalf, Hobbs told the Board, “He has learned his lesson, and he still has value…

The Alabama legislature has approved and sent to the Governor a bill that would bring to an end the practice of permitting trial judges to impose death sentences over a capital sentencing jury’s recommendation that the defendant be sentenced to life. Alabama is the only state in the U.S. that currently permits judicial override. The legislature acted in response to mounting court challenges to Alabama’s death penalty statute. On April 4, the state House of Representatives voted 78 – 19 to pass a…

Florida Governor Rick Scott issued a series of executive orders on April 3 removing locally elected 9^th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Aramis Ayala (pictured) from 21 first-degree murder cases and replacing her with 5^th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Brad King. The removal comes two weeks after Ayala announced a policy that her office would not pursue the death penalty in murder prosecutions. The cases include a number of potential capital resentencings resulting from the Florida Supreme…

A new study of the case records of the men and women executed in the United States between 2000 and 2015 has found that 21^st-century executions disproportionately involve prisoners diagnosed with mental illness and who have experienced traumatic child abuse. In The Washington Post’s data feature, Monkey Cage, Professor Frank Baumgartner and Betsy Neill of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill write that “[m]ost Americans oppose the death penalty for the mentally ill. But our research…

As Arkansas moves toward attempting to conduct an unprecedented eight executions in eleven days, former corrections officials from across the country are warning Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson of the psychological toll the compressed execution schedule could take on prison personnel. Dr. Allen Ault (pictured), former warden and corrections commissioner in Georgia who oversaw five executions in that state, said “[t]he rapid schedule will put an extraordinary burden on the men and women…

In a joint op-ed for The Washington Post, former governors Bob Taft (pictured, l.) and Joseph E. Kernan (pictured, r.) have expressed bipartisan support for proposed legislation that would prohibit the use of the death penalty against people who have severe mental illness. Taft, a former Republican governor of Ohio, and Kernan, a former Democratic governor of Indiana, call the execution of mentally ill defendants “an inhumane practice that fails to respect common standards of decency and…

Maricopa County, Arizona County Attorney Bill Montgomery has sought the death penalty so frequently that the county has run up millions of dollars in defense costs and run out of defense lawyers qualified to handle new capitally-charged cases. The Arizona Republic reports that, with 65 active death-penalty cases and more new capital cases charged than the 35 that have been resolved since July 1, 2014, the county ran out of the specialized lawyers needed to defend the cases in January of this…

The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously struck down Texas’ standard for evaluating intellectual disability in death penalty cases, calling the state’s approach an “outlier” that, “[b]y design and in operation, … create[s] an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed.” In Moore v. Texas, the Court on March 28 vacated the judgment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), which had applied an unscientific set of lay stereotypes known as the “Briseño factors”…