Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

On June 9, Richard Strong was executed in Missouri, despite the fact that four Justices of the Supreme Court would have granted him a stay and despite evidence that he suffered from severe mental illness. A broad challenge to Missouri’s secretive lethal injection process (Zink v. Lombardi) has yet to be resolved, and Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan voted to stay Strong’s execution because of that challenge. However, five votes are needed to stay an execution. In addition…

Harris County, Texas prosecutors announced on June 8 that they have dismissed charges against Alfred Dewayne Brown, who had been sentenced to death in 2005 for the murders of a Houston police officer and a store clerk during a robbery. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had overturned Brown’s conviction last year because prosecutors withheld a phone record that supported Brown’s alibi. Prosecutors in 2013 said that the phone record had been inadvertently misplaced. Brown had long maintained…

With lethal injection in administrative crisis and facing constitutional challenges, some states are looking towards abolition and others towards alternative methods of execution. In an article for The Marshall Project, reporters Maurice Chammah, Andrew Cohen, and Eli Hager explore the histories of nitrogen gas, electrocution, and the firing squad — different methods of execution three states have recently adopted as alternatives to lethal injection in the event lethal injection is declared…

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory granted pardons to Leon Brown (l.) and Henry McCollum (center, r.), allowing the two men to receive compensation for their wrongful convictions. Brown and McCollum are half-brothers who were convicted of the 1983 murder of an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to death. McCollum spent 30 years on death row before being exonerated by DNA evidence in 2014. Brown was released after 30 years in jail, eight of them on death row. At the time of their arrests, Brown was…

A new poll by Quinnipiac has found that more Americans prefer life without parole (48%) than the death penalty (43%) for people convicted of murder. Since Quinnipiac last asked the question in 2013, support for life without parole has risen by five percentage points and dropped for the death penalty by five points. A June 2014 ABC News/Washington Post poll also showed that more Americans preferred life without parole to the death penalty. Quinnipiac found that 58% of Americans say they support…

UPDATE: Bower was executed as scheduled. EARLIER: Lester Bower is scheduled to be executed in Texas on June 3, after spending more than 30 years on death row. Judges have denied relief on several issues raised by Bower, including a claim that prosecutors had withheld evidence from the defense supporting Bower’s consistent assertion that he is innocent. Bower was convicted of the 1983 murder of four men in Grayson County, Texas. He says he met with one of the men to purchase an ultralight…

In a cover story for TIME Magazine, award-winning journalist and TIME editor-at-large David Von Drehle explores the decline of capital punishment in the U.S. Von Drehle offers five significant reasons for the drop in death sentences, executions, and public support for the death penalty in the United States. First, he cites persistent problems with the administration of the death penalty: botched executions and a lengthy appeals process that fails to identify wrongful convictions for decades, if…

California Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals (pictured) disqualified the entire Orange County District Attorney’s Office from prosecuting a death penalty case after finding that prosecutors had engaged in a systemic pattern of police and prosecutorial misconduct involving the deliberate, but undisclosed, use of prison informants to obtain incriminating statements from defendants. None of the 250 prosecutors in the office are now permitted to participate in the case. Attorneys for the…

In his column for TIME Magazine, basketball hall of famer, author, and filmmaker Kareem Abdul-Jabbar broadly explores the state of the death penalty In the United States and concludes that life without parole is the better option for American society. Stating that “[t]he primary purpose of the death penalty is to protect the innocent,” Abdul-Jabar notes that there is a significant difference between the death penalty’s goal in theory and its application in practice. “While it’s true that the…

The Nebraska legislature voted 30 – 19 to override the veto of Governor Pete Ricketts and abolish the death penalty. Nebraska becomes the 19^th state to repeal the death penalty, and the 7^th state to do so since 2007. It is the first predominantly Republican state to abolish the death penalty in over 40 years, and state legislators said Republican support was critical to the bipartisan repeal effort. Sen. Jeremy Nordquist said, “This wouldn’t have happened without the fiscally responsible…