Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Calling the punishment ​“sim­ply wrong,” United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has vowed to ​“nev­er stop call­ing for an end to the death penal­ty.” Speaking at the launch of a new book by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, ​“Moving Away from the Death Penalty: Arguments, Trends and Perspectives,” the Secretary-General high­light­ed the world­wide decline of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, noting that ​“more and more coun­tries and States are abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty.” Data from the…

Oklahoma County has exe­cut­ed 41 pris­on­ers since 1976, the third high­est in the coun­try, and is among the 2% of American coun­ties respon­si­ble for 56% of the men and women cur­rent­ly on the nation’s death rows. A ThinkProgress report chron­i­cles the decades-long pat­tern of mis­con­duct com­mit­ted under its long-time District Attorney ​“Cowboy Bob” Macy…

Prisoners sen­tenced to death in the small num­ber of U.S. coun­ties that most aggres­sive­ly pur­sue the death penal­ty often suffer the ​“dou­ble wham­my” of getting ​“both the dead­liest pros­e­cu­tors in America and some of the country’s worst cap­i­tal defense lawyers,” accord­ing to an arti­cle in Slate by Robert L. Smith. In review­ing the the unusu­al­ly high num­bers of death ver­dicts from 3 coun­ties that are near the top of the nation in dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly pro­duc­ing death sen­tences over the last…

Ernest Johnson (pic­tured) is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed in Missouri on November 3, despite strong evi­dence that he is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled and there­fore ineligible for…

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argu­ment in Foster v. Chatman on November 2. Timothy Foster, an intel­lec­tu­al­ly lim­it­ed black teenag­er charged with killing an elder­ly white woman, was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 1987 by an all-white jury after Georgia pros­e­cu­tors struck every black mem­ber of the jury pool. Foster argued that pros­e­cu­tors imper­mis­si­bly exer­cised their strikes on the basis of race, in vio­la­tion of the Court’s 1986 decision in…

The U.S. Department of Justice released its annu­al FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2014, report­ing no change in the nation­al mur­der rate since 2013. In the Northeast, the region with the fewest exe­cu­tions, the mur­der rate declined 5.7%, from 3.5 to 3.3 per 100,000 pop­u­la­tion. The mur­der rate was 1.7 times high­er in the South, which car­ries out the most exe­cu­tions of any region. That region saw a 3.4% increase in the homi­cide rate, and its 5.5 murders…

Capital pun­ish­ment is dom­i­nat­ing the dis­cus­sion in the runoff elec­tion between James E. Stewart, Sr. and Dhu Thompson to suc­ceed act­ing Caddo Parish, Louisiana District Attorney Dale Cox. Cox’s con­tro­ver­sial state­ments about the death penal­ty — includ­ing that the state needs to ​“kill more peo­ple” — have focused nation­al atten­tion on the parish, which ranks among the two per­cent of U.S. coun­ties respon­si­ble for 56 per­cent of the inmates on death row…

15.1% of cap­i­tal defen­dants sen­tenced to death in Pennsylvania since 1980 were rep­re­sent­ed at tri­al by a lawyer who has been dis­ci­plined for pro­fes­sion­al mis­con­duct, and that has risen to 18.2% in the past decade, accord­ing to an inves­tiga­tive report by The Reading Eagle. These rates of dis­ci­pline were between 5 and 6 times high­er than the 3% dis­ci­pli­nary rate for Pennsylvania lawyers as a whole over the past 30 years. The dis­ci­pli­nary issues have disproportionately…

Derrick Jamison was exon­er­at­ed from death row in Ohio on October 25, 2005, 20 years to the day after he was sen­tenced to death in Hamilton County (Cincinnati). On the 30^th anniver­sary of his sen­tenc­ing and the 10^th anniver­sary of his release, a Salon pro­file describes the work Jamison now does to edu­cate peo­ple about the risks of wrongful…

In an inter­view with Bill Keller of The Marshall Project, President Obama said the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penalty is ​“deeply trou­bling,” and ques­tioned the man­ner in which cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is applied in the United States. While the President said that he is not opposed to capital punishment ​“in the­o­ry,” he expressed con­cern about issues includ­ing racial bias, wrong­ful con­vic­tions, and botched executions. ​“We know, sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, that there’s a racial bias that…