Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Attorneys for a Missouri inmate facing imminent execution have asserted that the Department of Corrections has violated state and federal laws in acquiring its lethal injection drugs. Herbert Smulls is scheduled for execution on January 29, but a challenge has been filed in federal court alleging that the state’s pentobarbital was obtained from a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma, which is unlicensed in Missouri. The suit also stated the drug has not been stored properly. A correctional…

New Hampshire, which is considering a bill to repeal the death penalty, only has one inmate on death row — Michael Addison, who was convicted of killing a police officer. Now that officer’s former partner, John Breckenridge (pictured), has had a change of heart about the death penalty and is calling for an end to capital punishment. Initially, Breckenridge supported a death sentence for Addison, and even spoke in favor of the death penalty before the state’s death penalty commission. However, he…

The Death Penalty Information Center’s website has been selected for inclusion in the archives of the U.S. Library of Congress. DPIC’s materials will be part of the Library’s historic collection of Internet resources on public policy topics, which will be made available to researchers at Library of Congress facilities, and may also be available on the Library’s public access website at a later date. The Library’s Web Archiving Team said, “Our web archives are important because they contribute…

Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., encouraged New Hampshire to repeal the death penalty, saying that even though she lost her father and grandmother to murder, “I can’t accept the judgment that killers need to be killed, a practice that merely perpetuates the cycle of violence.” She called the death penalty “unworthy of a civilized society,” and warned that “retribution cannot light the way to the genuine healing that we need in the wake of heinous acts of…

A new poll by the Barna Group found that only 40% of practicing Christians supported the death penalty, and support was even lower among younger Christians. According to the poll released on January 17, only 23% of practicing Christian “millennials” (i.e., those born between 1980 and 2000) agreed with the statement: “The government should have the option to execute the worst criminals.” Without regard to their regular practice of their faith, only 42% of Christian baby boomers (born between…

On January 16, Ohio carried out the first lethal injection in the U.S. using a new protocol, resulting in a lengthy and disruptive execution. Ohio employed a back-up procedure to execute Dennis McGuire, using midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a painkiller. Witnesses to the execution reported that McGuire snorted, gasped, and struggled during the execution, which took longer than usual for death to occur. Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School and lethal injection expert, said…

In an op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman, former Texas Governor Mark White called for a new hearing for Edgar Tamayo, a Mexican national scheduled for execution on January 22. Foreign nationals charged with crimes in the U.S. are entitled to assistance from their consulate under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, but Tamayo was denied that right. White joins U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the Mexican Foreign Minister in calling for hearings to determine whether assistance…

The Kansas Judicial Council, an advisory body to the legislature, released preliminary findings on the cost of the death penalty in preparation for legislative hearings on a repeal measure. The council found that state Supreme Court Justices spend 20 times more hours on death penalty appeals than on non-capital appeals; the Department of Corrections spends than twice as much ($49,380 versus $24,690) to house a death-row inmate per year as to house a general-population inmate; and capital cases…

Six retired judges in North Carolina urged the the state Supreme Court to uphold the rulings of a lower court that found racial bias in the use of the death peanlty. Former chief justices James Exum and Henry Frye, along with former judges Willis Whichard, Melzer Morgan, Wade Barber and Russell Walker filed a brief in support of inmates whose death sentences were reduced to life without parole in 2012 under the state’s Racial Justice Act. The Act allowed death row inmates to present statistical…

A recent editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser criticized a proposal by Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange to speed up death penalty appeals. His proposed legislation would require two parts of the appeal process to essentially run concurrently. The editorial cautioned that lack of adequate representation for death penalty defendants would make the accelerated process more problematic. The paper concluded, “Anything that smacks of haste in capital punishment cases is inherently troubling.