Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

As U.S. pharmaceutical companies have removed medicines from the market to prevent states from obtaining them for executions, states have turned to alternatives, like the sedative midazolam. Dr. Armin Walser, who was part of the team that invented the drug in the 1970s, is dismayed at that development. “I didn’t make it for the purpose” of executing prisoners, Dr. Walser told The New York Times. “I am not a friend of the death penalty or execution.” For most of midazolam’s history, the…

A Florida bill that would require the jury to make a unanimous recommendation for death before a judge may impose a death sentence will head to Governor Rick Scott for final approval, after both houses of the Florida legislature passed it by overwhelming margins. Senate Bill 280 passed unanimously (37 – 0) on March 9, and the corresponding House Bill 527 passed by a 112 – 3 vote on March 10. If signed by the governor, the bill will bring Florida into compliance with the Florida Supreme Court’s…

In a new article for the Lewis & Clark Law Review, author Carla Edmondson argues that the future dangerousness inquiry that is implicit in capital setencing determinations “is a fundamentally flawed question that leads to arbitrary and capricious death sentences” and because of the “persistent influence of future dangerousness … renders the death penalty incompatible with the prohibitions of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments on cruel and unusual punishment.” Edmonson’s article, Nothing is…

On March 7, the United States Supreme Court denied a stay of execution for Texas death-row prisoner Rolando Ruiz, declining to consider his claim that the more than 20 years he had been incarcerated on death row, mostly in solitary confinement, violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Ruiz’s lawyers had urged the Court to consider this issue, writing, “At this point, a quarter-century has elapsed since Mr. Ruiz committed a contract murder in 1992, two days…

Companion reports released on March 7 by the National Registry of Exonerations found record numbers of exonerations and wrongful convictions involving official misconduct in 2016, and striking evidence of racial bias both in the wrongful convictions themselves and in the time it took the judicial process to exonerate the wrongfully incarcerated. The Registry’s report, Exonerations in 2016, found a record 166 exonerations in 2016, with 54 defendants exonerated of homicide. A DPIC review of the…

A Wake County, North Carolina jury voted to spare Nathan Holden’s life on March 3, marking the eighth consecutive capital sentencing trial in the county in which juries had opted to sentence a defendant to life without parole instead of the death penalty. No jury in Wake County has imposed a death sentence since 2007. Prosecutors had sought the death penalty against Holden for murdering his ex-wife’s parents and attempting to kill her. The jury convicted Holden of two counts of first-degree…

As the Florida legislature considers a bill that would change Florida’s “Clean Hands” policy, which denies compensation for wrongful convictions if the defendant had a prior felony record, Alabama lawmakers are deciding whether to grant compensation to Anthony Ray Hinton (pictured), who was exonerated in 2015 after spending nearly 30 years on death row. In Florida, death row exoneree Herman Lindsey told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee about his having been denied compensation because of…

Texas capital murder exoneree Christopher Scott (pictured) has urged Dallas County’s new District Attorney, Faith Johnson, to drop the death penalty from murder charges pending against Erbie Bowser. Bowser, who is black, is a seriously mentally ill Marine veteran who was discharged from military service after having been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He faces four capital charges in the killings of his girlfriend, his estranged wife, and their daughters. When police found him…

The costs of the death penalty are more than financial, they are emotional; and these effects are felt not just by the parties to the trial and the families of victims and defendants, but by the jurors as well. A recent report in the Akron Beacon Journal describes the traumatic psychological impact serving in the Summit County, Ohio death penalty trial of Eric Hendon had on the jurors in that case. After a three-month trial and capital-sentencing hearing, the jury found Hendon guilty of a 2013…

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson signed orders on February 27 for an unprecedented eight executions to be carried out over a period of eleven days in April. The scheduled dates for the four sets of double executions are: April 17, Bruce Ward and Don Davis; April 20, Stacey Johnson and Ledell Lee; April 24, Jack Jones and Marcel Williams; and April 27, Kenneth Williams and Jason McGehee. Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge asked that the dates be set after the U.S. Supreme Court on…