Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The counties in the United States that have the highest per capita rate of killings by police officers also rank among the highest in the country in the number of people sentenced to death. In his criminal justice blog, “The Watch,” for the Washington Post, Radley Balko details the “remarkable correlation” between killings by police and death sentences imposed. “There are more than 3,000 counties in the United States,” Balko writes. “But the 13 with the highest rates of police killings are not…

Terry Williams was barely 18 when he killed Amos Norwood, a man who had been sexually abusing him since Williams was 13. A recent article in Mother Jones discusses how the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office — which championed the cause of sexual abuse victims during landmark prosecutions of several clergy abuse cases — is aggressively seeking to execute Williams, employing the very stereotypes about abuse victims it publicly rejected in the clergy trials. At the time of those trials, D.A.

Donnis Musgrove (pictured), an Alabama death row prisoner with a substantial claim of innocence, died of lung cancer on Alabama’s death row on November 25, while his case was pending before a federal judge. Musgrove’s attorneys had asked U.S. District Judge David Proctor to rule quickly because of Musgrove’s medical condition. Musgrove and his co-defendant, David Rogers, who previously died on Alabama’s death row, were sentenced to death in 1988. Rogers’ lawyer, Tommy Nail — now a state court…

Capital murder indictments have plummeted and life sentences risen sharply in Ohio over the past five years, according to a report by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The newspaper’s examination of Ohio prison and other public records revealed that capital indictments in the state have dropped by 77% since 2010, mirroring national trends. Prosecutors are far more likely to seek a sentence of life without parole in cases in which they once would have pursued the death penalty. The paper also reports…

Lawyers for capital defendants and death row inmates across the country have begun to respond to what lawyers in one federal case described as the “clarion call for reconsideration of the constitutionality of the death penalty” issued by Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in their dissenting opinion in June in Glossip v. Gross. Systemic challenges to the death penalty have been filed in a Vermont federal court and a Utah state trial court seeking hearings to present…

Lawyers for Texas death row prisoner Robert L. Roberson III have filed a petition asking the United States Supreme Court to review whether Seth Kretzer and James W. Volberding — the same appointed lawyers who were accused of abandoning Raphael Holiday, whom Texas executed in November — had a conflict of interest that interfered with Mr. Roberson’s right to an independent legal advocate in his federal habeas corpus proceedings challenging his conviction and death sentence. In his petition…

On Sunday, November 29, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a segment on Arizona’s 2‑hour botched execution of Joseph Wood (pictured). As described by 60 Minutes, Wood’s “execution with a new cocktail of drugs was supposed to take 10 minutes. It took almost two hours, the longest execution in U.S. history.” On July 23, 2014, Arizona gave Wood 15 consecutive doses of midazolam and hydromorphone, the same drug combination that had been used in the botched execution of Dennis McGuire in Ohio six months…

Death row exoneree Anthony Graves (pictured, right, with Sen. Richard Durbin after testifying before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights in 2012) has experienced what he calls the “injustice of the justice system” and is working to make the system better. Graves was exonerated from death row in Texas in 2010, 16 years after being wrongfully convicted in a multiple murder case. Using some of the $1.5 in compensation that he was awarded for his wrongful…

A majority of Americans prefer life without parole to the death penalty, according to the 2015 American Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. The poll of 2,695 Americans found that 52% preferred life without parole, while 47% preferred the death penalty. The poll found that respondents’ views on capital punishment tracked their views about racial justice and differed greatly by race. 53% of all Americans agreed with the statement, “A black person is more likely than a white…

Caddo Parish, Louisiana, known nationally for its aggressive pursuit of the death penalty, has elected its first black District Attorney. In a November 21 runoff election conducted against the backdrop of controversial remarks about the death penalty by the current DA and a threatened civil rights lawsuit over systemic racial discrimination by Caddo Parish prosecutors in jury selection, former judge James E. Stewart, Sr. defeated current Caddo Parish prosecutor Dhu Thompson, 55% to 45%. Ten…