Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

A new report by a special committee created by Orange County, California District Attorney Tony Rackauckas (pictured) cites a “failure of leadership” as the root cause of a multi-decade history of prosecutorial misconduct involving jailhouse informants. Documents obtained by defense lawyers and The Orange County Register had revealed what the paper called “a secret and well-organized network of snitches” that had been hidden from defense counsel and the courts. In May 2015, California Superior…

Natrona County, Wyoming District Attorney Mike Blonigen (pictured) recently called for a reconsideration of the state’s death penalty after a federal judge overturned the death sentence of Dale Wayne Eaton, a decade after Blonigen obtained it in 2004. At the time U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson reversed Eaton’s sentence in 2014, Eaton was the only person on Wyoming’s death row. Judge Johnson ruled that Eaton had received ineffective representation, in part because of inadequate funding of…

Several newspapers across the country featured themes from DPIC’s 2015 Year End Report in editorials and opinion pieces at the end of December: “Once broadly accepted, capital punishment is increasingly a fringe practice. A handful of states conduct nearly all executions. Four — Texas, Missouri, Georgia and Florida — carried out 93 percent of them in 2015. Sixty-three percent of new death sentences came from a mere 2 percent of U.S. counties, a group with a history of disproportionately using…

Three death-row exonerees, including two who became symbols of the risks of wrongful capital convictions, died in 2015. David Keaton (pictured, far left), the first man exonerated from death row in the modern era of the death penalty, died on July 3 at the age of 63. A teenaged Keaton was sentenced to death in Florida in 1971 for the murder of an off-duty police officer. His conviction was based upon a coerced confession and erroneous eyewitness testimony. Keaton was exonerated in 1973 when new…

In 1997, a St. Louis County, Missouri jury unanimously voted to sentence David Barnett to death. Eighteen years later, after learning horrific details of the physical and sexual abuse to which Barnett had been subjected as a small child, Andrew Dazey — the jury foreman in Barnett’s trial — says “[t]here’s no way” he would have voted for death. At trial, Barnett’s lawyer presented some evidence of his client’s abuse, mental illness, and suicide attempts. However, he failed to present at least 11…

Prosecutors across the country are seeking the death penalty less frequently and in recent interviews two district attorneys, one from Texas and one from Pennsylvania, have given some of their reasons why. Randall County, Texas District Attorney James Farren (pictured) told KFDA-TV in Amarillo that his experience handling one particularly lengthy and costly capital case has changed how he will make decisions in future cases that are eligible for the death penalty. He said that his office has…

For the third time in two years, the Delaware Supreme Court has reversed the conviction of a death row inmate because his trial was tainted by prosecutorial misconduct. On December 14, the court ordered a retrial for Chauncey Starling, who was convicted in 2003 of killing two people in a Wilmington barber shop, in part because prosecutors had failed to disclose that they had dropped charges against a key witness for violating his parole. Instead, prosecutors informed defense counsel that those…

Although Georgia carried out 5 of the 28 executions in the U.S. in 2015, it imposed no new death sentences and a significantly changed legal landscape points to a “new Georgia” with the death penalty in decline. The Georgia legal publication, Daily Report, dubbed the decline in death sentences its “newsmaker of the year,” and explored the reasons for the change. Jerry Word, the division director of the Georgia Capital Defender, said that with the Defender’s early intervention initiative…

In a unanimous decision issued December 21, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld Gov. Tom Wolf’s (pictured) imposition of a moratorium on executions while he awaits the results of a legislative commission’s report on Pennsylvania’s death penalty. On February 13, 2015, Wolf issued a temporary reprieve to Terrance Williams and announced that he would put all executions on hold. At that time, he said that Pennsylvania’s “capital punishment system has significant and widely recognized defects” and…

The North Carolina Supreme Court has reversed the historic rulings of a Cumberland County, N.C. trial court that had overturned the death sentences of four North Carolina death-row prisoners under the state’s Racial Justice Act. Ruling entirely on procedural grounds, the state’s high court expressed no opinion on the lower court’s fact findings that North Carolina prosecutors had engaged in a decades-long practice of intentional race discrimination in jury selection in capital cases. In April…