Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

In a sweeping look at the current state of the U.S. death penalty, USA Today reporters Richard Wolf and Kevin Johnson highlight several recent story lines that collectively illustrate a dramatic decline in the country’s use of capital punishment. Their conclusion: “The death penalty in America may be living on borrowed time.” Wolf and Johnson recount recent cases in which high-profile crimes resulted in a life without parole sentence, in many instances because victims’ families raised concerns…

Montez Spradley, sentenced to death by an Alabama judge in 2008 over a jury’s 10 – 2 recommendation for life without parole, was freed from prison on September 4. Spradley spent 9.5 years incarcerated, including 3.5 years on death row. He was granted a new trial in 2011 as a result of multiple evidentiary errors in his trial. The state’s key witness against Spradley, his ex-girlfriend, Alisha Booker, later testified that she had lied at trial because Spradley was cheating on her. “I just felt he…

UPDATE: Former Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn (pictured), former Oklahoma Sooners and Dallas Cowboys football coach Barry Switzer, and John W. Raley, Jr., the former chief federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Oklahoma, have joined with innocence advocates Barry Scheck, Co-Director of the Innocence Project, and Samuel Gross, editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, in a letter to Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin urging her to stay the execution of Richard Glossip. Glossip is…

Richard Glossip, who is scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma on September 16, is seeking a stay of execution to allow consideration of his claims of innocence. Glossip was convicted solely on the testimony of Justin Sneed, then 19 years old, who confessed to the crime and said he hired Glossip to help him. No physical evidence linked Glossip to the crime, and Sneed gave investigators multiple contradictory descriptions of the murder before adopting police suggestions that Glossip was involved.

Riverside County, California is “the buckle of a new Death Belt,” says Professor Robert J. Smith of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, producing 7 death sentences in the first half of 2015. This, Smith says, is “more than California’s other 57 counties combined, more than any other state, and more than the whole Deep South combined.” Los Angeles County has produced 33 death sentences since 2010 — the most in the Nation — and 5 Southern California counties (also including Kern…

Robert Cindrich, a former U.S. District Judge and U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, recently wrote an op-ed for the Harrisburg Patriot-News calling Governor Tom Wolf’s moratorium on executions in Pennsylvania “appropriate” and “reasonable.” Expressing concerns about “multiple, serious problems with the death penalty” in Pennsylvania, Judge Cindrich says Governor Wolf “was absolutely correct” that no executions should take place until the Pennsylvania Advisory Committee and…

As national execution numbers drop to historic lows and a growing number of states halt executions or repeal the death penalty altogether, Missouri has recently increased the number of executions it is carrying out and overtaken Texas for the highest per-capita execution rate. Missouri and Texas have carried out all of the last 15 executions in the U.S. and 80% of executions through September 1 of this year. A report by The Marshall Project explores why Missouri is bucking national trends…

U.S. District Court Judge Gregory M. Sleet has criticized the lack of judicial review provided by the state and federal courts prior to Delaware’s 2012 execution of Shannon Johnson, saying Johnson’s execution “highlights profound failings in our judicial process.” In an article in the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice magazine, Judge Sleet — who was Chief Judge at the time of the case — called “[t]he Johnson case, and its result, … by far the most troubling I have encountered.”

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winning legal commentator Linda Greenhouse analyzes the significance of and interplay between the recent Connecticut Supreme Court decision striking down the state’s death penalty and Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the U.S. Supreme Court case Glossip v. Gross. “[T]he Connecticut Supreme Court not only produced an important decision for its own jurisdiction; but it addressed the United States Supreme Court frankly and directly,” Greenhouse…

The Dutch public employees’ pension fund, Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP (ABP), has divested from the pharmaceutical company Mylan after learning that the Virginia Department of Corrections had supplies of one of Mylan’s products in stock for use in executions. A spokesman for ABP — which with net assets of $416 billion is the world’s third largest pension fund — said, “As the Dutch government and Dutch society as a whole renounced the death penalty a long time ago, we do not want Dutch pension…