Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, has writ­ten a new book, Just Mercy, about his expe­ri­ences defend­ing the poor and the wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed through­out the south. It includes the sto­ry of one of Stevenson’s first cas­es as a young lawyer, that of Walter McMillian, who was even­tu­al­ly exon­er­at­ed and freed from death row. McMillian, a black man, had been con­vict­ed of the murder of…

is a death row inmate in Texas, who has been diag­nosed with schiz­o­phre­nia and schizoaf­fec­tive dis­or­der and believes he is at the cen­ter of a strug­gle between God and Satan. The state has con­tin­ued to insist he is com­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed. Panetti rep­re­sent­ed him­self at his tri­al, appear­ing in court wear­ing a cow­boy out­fit and mak­ing bizarre, ram­bling state­ments. He attempt­ed to sub­poe­na Jesus Christ, the pope, and 200 others.

An arti­cle in the lat­est edi­tion of The Angolite, a mag­a­zine pub­lished by pris­on­ers at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, tells the sto­ries of the ten men who have been exon­er­at­ed from death row in that state. The piece promi­nent­ly fea­tures Glenn Ford, the state’s most recent inmate to be freed. Ford spent 30 years on death row before being released in 2014. Among the oth­er cas­es described is that of…

Phillip Cheatham was rep­re­sent­ed at his death penal­ty tri­al by a lawyer who failed to devel­op a read­i­ly avail­able ali­bi defense and por­trayed Cheatham as a pos­si­ble killer. The lawyer, Ira Dennis Hawver (pic­tured at his dis­bar­ment hear­ing, left), pre­sent­ed Cheatham as a drug-deal­ing killer who would not have left a wit­ness alive to iden­ti­fy him and would have tak­en few­er shots to kill the vic­tims. Hawyer admitted he…

William Sessions, for­mer head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, recent­ly point­ed to cas­es of defen­dants who were exe­cut­ed based in part on faulty hair and fiber analy­sis in call­ing for changes in the use of foren­sic evi­dence. In an op-ed in the Washington Times, Sessions told the sto­ry of Benjamin Boyle, who was exe­cut­ed in Texas in 1997. His con­vic­tion was based on test­ing con­duct­ed by an FBI crime lab that an…

Jim Petro served as Ohio’s Attorney General and presided over 18 exe­cu­tions. However, he aban­doned his sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment after see­ing the risks of wrong­ful exe­cu­tions:​“Our jus­tice sys­tem is based on the deci­­­sion-mak­ing of human beings, and human beings are fal­li­ble. We make mis­takes and our judg­ments are influ­enced by bias­es and imper­fect moti­va­tions. Implementing the death penal­ty makes our errors permanent and…

Twenty-one Oklahoma death row inmates, includ­ing three with upcom­ing exe­cu­tion dates, have filed suit against the state of Oklahoma chal­leng­ing the state’s lethal injec­tion pro­to­col. At a hear­ing in the case on September 18, U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot urged the state to stay the exe­cu­tions, which are sched­uled for November and December, say­ing,​“It does not seem real­is­tic to me that the steps that need to be tak­en can hard­ly be com­plet­ed between now and then.” The…

The lat­est edi­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row, USA showed an ongo­ing decline in the size of the death row pop­u­la­tion. The num­ber of pris­on­ers on death row decreased from 3,070 on January 1, 2014, to 3,054 on April 1. The new total rep­re­sent­ed a 12% drop from 10 years ear­li­er, when the death row pop­u­la­tion was 3,487. California con­tin­ued to have the largest death row, with 743 inmates, followed by…

In a recent speech in the U.S. Senate call­ing for the reau­tho­riza­tion of the Justice for All Act, Senator Patrick Leahy (D‑VT) spoke about the recent exon­er­a­tions of two men in North Carolina, cit­ing the impor­tance of DNA test­ing in their release from prison after 30 years:​“The dozens of exon­er­a­tions made pos­si­ble by the Justice for All Act are tes­ta­ment enough to its val­ue,” Leahy said,​“Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown are…

In The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution, his­to­ri­an John Bessler reveals the pro­found influ­ence that the Italian thinker, Cesare Beccaria, had on the con­sti­tu­tion­al founders of the United States, includ­ing George Washington and John Adams. Beccaria’s best­selling book, On Crimes and Punishments, argued against tor­ture and the death penal­ty, say­ing only pun­ish­ments proven absolutely…