Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Lester Bower was exe­cut­ed in Texas on June 3 despite main­tain­ing his inno­cence through­out the 30 years he spent on death row. The evi­dence of Bower’s inno­cence includ­ed tes­ti­mo­ny from a woman who said that her boyfriend and three of his friends — not Bower — had com­mit­ted the mur­ders for which Bower was exe­cut­ed. The wit­ness came for­ward in 1989, after read­ing that Bower had been sen­tenced to death for the crime her boyfriend had con­fessed to committing six…

In an inter­view with The Marshall Project, Bryan Stevenson (pic­tured), direc­tor of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy, dis­cussed the role the his­to­ry of slav­ery, lynch­ings, and racial ter­ror­ism in the South played in the racial­­ly-moti­­vat­ed killings of nine black peo­ple in an his­toric black church in Charleston, South…

This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a Georgia case, Foster v. Humphrey, in which an all-white jury sen­tenced a black man to death after pros­e­cu­tors struck every black prospec­tive juror in the case. The Court will deter­mine whether pros­e­cu­tors vio­lat­ed the Court’s 1986 deci­sion in Batson v. Kentucky, which banned the prac­tice of dis­miss­ing poten­tial jurors on the basis of race. In antic­i­pa­tion of the case, The New Yorker pub­lished an analysis…

Recent edi­to­ri­als from lead­ing news­pa­pers in three of the largest death row states cri­tique flaws in the death penal­ty and call for its abo­li­tion. The Sacramento Bee quot­ed fed­er­al dis­trict court judge Cormac Carney’s recent rul­ing find­ing California’s death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because exe­cu­tions are so rare that they ​“serve no ret­ribu­tive or deter­rent pur­pose.” The Bee called the state’s cap­i­tal punishment system ​“an abject failure”…

A new study by North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation exam­ines the finan­cial and human costs of cas­es in which, ​“pros­e­cu­tors sought the death penal­ty despite a clear lack of evi­dence, result­ing in acquit­tal or dismissal of…

84 years after Pennsylvania exe­cut­ed a black 16-year-old for the 1931 mur­der of his white school matron, the descen­dants of the boy’s tri­al lawyers are try­ing to exonerate…

CORRECTION: On June 18, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its deci­sion in Brumfield v. Cain, a Louisiana death penal­ty case deal­ing with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. The Court held that the fed­er­al dis­trict court was enti­tled to con­duct an evi­den­tiary hear­ing to deter­mine whether Kevan Brumfield has intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty and is there­fore inel­i­gi­ble for exe­cu­tion. It reversed a rul­ing of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that would…

The Spring 2015 update to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s pub­li­ca­tion, Death Row, USA, reports that 3,002 men and women were on death rows across the United States as of April 1, 2015. This reflects a con­tin­u­ing decline in the size of death row, down 13% since Spring 2005, when 3,452 peo­ple were on America’s death rows. Several states saw sig­nif­i­cant drops in their death row pop­u­la­tions over that peri­od while car­ry­ing out few or no executions:…

On June 12, a unan­i­mous pan­el of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rebuffed what it described as ​“a con­cert­ed effort” by Pennsylvania pros­e­cu­tors to bar lawyers from the Philadelphia fed­er­al com­mu­ni­ty defend­er’s cap­i­tal habeas unit from rep­re­sent­ing death row inmates in Pennsylvania state-lev­­el appeals. The for­mer Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania state courts had sharply critized the unit — which has over­turned more than 100 Pennsylvania death sen­tences — for…

On June 12, the State Bar of Texas dis­barred Burleson County District Attorney Charles Sebesta, the pros­e­cu­tor whose mis­con­duct led to the wrong­ful con­vic­tion of death row exoneree Anthony Graves (pic­tured, r.). The bar found that Sebesta vio­lat­ed no few­er than five of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, includ­ing mak­ing a false state­ment to a court, using evi­dence known to be false, and fail­ing to dis­close excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence to the defense. In 2006, the…