Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

In a lecture at the Widener University School of Law, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Thomas G. Saylor criticized the poor state of death penalty representation in Pennsylvania. He offered numerous cases in which death sentences were overturned because attorneys had failed to present mitigating evidence to the jury. Quoting from a special concurrence he wrote on a capital case involving ineffective assistance of counsel, he said, “Of greatest concern, these sorts of exceptionally costly…

The Georgia State Bar’s constitutional symposium recently staged a reenactment of Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court case that led to the temporary suspension of the death penalty in 1972. Stephen Bright (pictured), president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, played the role of Anthony Amsterdam, who argued on behalf of death row inmates in two of the four cases that the Court decided in Furman. The roles of the justices were performed by Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Hugh…

In his Sidebar column in the N.Y. Times, Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak recently discussed the concerns about states denying death row inmates information about how they will be executed. Liptak highlighted the recent execution of Michael Taylor in Missouri, where the state has made the pharmacy providing the drugs for lethal injection part of its “execution team,” thus obscuring any failings the pharmacy may have. This secretive approach drew criticism from a minority of judges on the U.S.

Attorneys representing the family of George Stinney, Jr., recently filed a request for a posthumous exoneration of Mr. Stinney, the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20^th century. Stinney, an African-American 14-year-old, was executed in 1944 for the murder of two young white girls less than three months after a trial that was filled with errors. Although Clarendon County, South Carolina, where the trial took place, had a population that was 72% black, only whites served on Stinney’s…

UPDATE: Louisiana Judge Ramona Emanuel ordered Glenn Ford to be “unconditionally released from the custody of the Louisiana Department of Corrections.” (KTAL NBC News, Mar. 11, 2014). Glenn Ford, who has spent 30 years on Louisiana’s death row is likely to be freed soon, after prosecutors filed motions to vacate his conviction and sentence. Prosecutors said they recently received “credible evidence” that Ford “was neither present at, nor a participant in, the robbery and murder” of which he was…

[UPDATE: The repeal bill passed the House 225 – 104 on March 12. On April 17, the Senate voted 12 – 12 and then tabled the bill.] The New Hampshire House of Representatives has scheduled a vote on repealing the death penalty for March 12. The bill, HB 1170, would replace the death penalty with life in prison without parole for future offenses. The bill overwhelmingly passed the House Criminal Justice and Public Works Committee in February by a vote of 14 – 3, including supportive votes from several…

Edward Montour, the defendant accused of killing correctional officer Eric Autobee (pictured) in a Colorado prison, agreed to plead guilty on March 6 to first degree murder in exchange for a sentence of life without parole. Autobee’s family had opposed the prosecution’s decision to seek the death penalty for Montour, standing in witness in front of the courthouse during jury selection, and asking the judge to allow them to testify at the trial. Montour pled guilty to the crime in 2003 and was…

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row, USA shows the total death row population continuing to decline in size. The U.S. death-row population decreased from 3,108 on April 1, 2013, to 3,095 on July 1, 2013. The new total represented a 12% decrease from 10 years earlier, when the death row population was 3,517. The states with the largest death rows were California (733), Florida (412), Texas (292), Pennsylvania (197), and Alabama (197). In the past 10 years, the size of…

David Floyd, a Republican state representative in Kentucky, recently introduced a bill to repeal the state’s death penalty, arguing that the law was incompatible with conservative values. Writing in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Floyd said his religious views initially caused him to oppose the death penalty, but he made a broader pragmatic case for repeal from a conservative perspective. He pointed to values such as respect for life, limiting government power, and cutting wasteful spending…

New evidence in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham suggests Texas may have executed an innocent man in 2004. The key evidence presented against Willingham at trial was from an arson “expert,” who said the fire that killed Willingham’s children was intentionally set. That evidence has since been discredited by a series of other experts who concluded the evidence did not support arson. Now attorneys for the Innocence Project have uncovered a prosecutor’s note implying that a jailhouse…