Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

On November 2, 2023, Demetrius Minor, the National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty and Davis Turner, a retired attor­ney whose broth­er was mur­dered in Nashville in 2009 and a board mem­ber of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, co-authored an op-ed in The Tennessean dis­cussing a recent report by the Death Penalty Information Center.​“Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty” details the his­to­ry of racial…

A bill to repeal the death penal­ty in Pennsylvania has passed a com­mit­tee in the commonwealth’s House of Representatives. The Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee vot­ed 15 – 10 in favor of HB 999 on October 31, 2023. That vote is the first step toward abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty in Pennsylvania, which has had a for­mal mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions since 2015 and has not executed…

The Gallup Crime Survey has asked about the fair­ness of death penal­ty appli­ca­tion in the United States since 2000. For the first time, the October 2023 sur­vey reports that more Americans believe the death penal­ty is applied unfair­ly (50%) than fair­ly (47%). Between 2000 and 2015, 51%-61% of Americans said they thought cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was applied fair­ly in the U.S., but this num­ber has been drop­ping since 2016. This year’s num­ber of 47% rep­re­sents a his­toric low in the…

In this month’s Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Margot Ravenscroft (pic­tured), Director of AMICUS UK, a British char­i­ty whose vol­un­teers sup­port the cap­i­tal defense effort in the United States. Ms. Ravenscroft describes how AMICUS was found­ed by a British woman who became a pen friend to a Louisiana death row pris­on­er Andrew Lee Jones. Jane Officer, a retired school­teacher, spent many years exchang­ing let­ters with Mr. Jones and returned to the…

Brent Brewer, pic­ture cour­tesy of attorneys for…

Will Speer, cen­ter, seat­ed, at his…

Photo used under Creative Commons license courtesy The…

In August 2023, Alabama released the first-ever exe­cu­tion pro­to­col for nitro­gen hypox­ia, an untest­ed exe­cu­tion method in which pris­on­ers will be put to death by suf­fo­ca­tion as they are forced to breathe pure nitro­gen gas. Alabama’s heav­i­ly redact­ed pro­to­col pro­vides that pris­on­ers will be fit­ted with a mask and breath­ing tube to con­trol the gas, which will slow­ly deprive them of oxy­gen. However, use of this untest­ed method may also pose dan­gers to spiritual…

In July 2020, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, under the direc­tion of Attorney General Bill Barr, resumed fed­er­al exe­cu­tions for the first time in 17 years. Over the course of the fol­low­ing six months, 13 fed­er­al death row pris­on­ers were exe­cut­ed. During those six months, the WFIU News team was grant­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to report on and wit­ness all 13 exe­cu­tions at United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute in Indiana. In the time since these exe­cu­tions, the…

The Death Penalty Information Center has updat­ed its Death Penalty Census, a data­base of every death sen­tence imposed since 1972. The data­base now con­tains infor­ma­tion accu­rate as of January 1, 2022, inclu­sive of the 50^th year of the mod­ern death penal­ty. The Census con­tains infor­ma­tion on 9,820 death sen­tences imposed on 8,842 defen­dants. It includes the name, race, and gen­der of each defen­dant, along with the region, state, coun­ty, and year in which the…