Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

In an opin­ion piece in the News & Observer, Professor Frank Baumgartner of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, recent­ly wrote that the declin­ing use and high costs of the death penal­ty in the state put into ques­tion the wis­dom of retain­ing the pun­ish­ment in North Carolina. Baumgartner not­ed that while mur­der rates in the state have remained rel­a­tive­ly unchanged, the num­ber of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment tri­als and death sen­tences have declined sharply.

On January 20, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the death sen­tence for Holly Wood for the 1993 shoot­ing of his for­mer girl­friend in Alabama, despite the fact that the attor­ney work­ing on the penal­ty phase of the case failed to inves­ti­gate or tell the jury about Wood’s bor­der­line men­tal retar­da­tion. A fed­er­al District Court had over­turned his death sen­tence because of the inad­e­quate per­for­mance of the inexperienced lawyer,…

On January 19, the U.S. Supreme Court grant­ed cer­tio­rari and reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Wellons v. Hall, order­ing the low­er court to re-exam­­ine the appeal of Marcus Wellons, who received the death penal­ty for a 1989 rape and mur­der in Georgia. The Court’s per curi­am opinion described ​“unusu­al events going on behind the scenes” at Wellons’ tri­al, includ­ing con­tacts out­side the court­room between the…

On January 14, and almost 30 years after the crime, the Florida Supreme Court crit­i­cized the state for ​“law­less con­duct” and vacat­ed the death sen­tence of Paul Beasley Johnson because ​“the record here is so rife with evi­dence of pre­vi­ous­ly undis­closed pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct that we have no choice but to grant relief.” Because of pop­u­lar sen­ti­ment and the noto­ri­ety of the crime, Governor Charlie Crist signed a death war­rant for Johnson in…

California recent­ly released its revised lethal injec­tion guide­lines, fol­low­ing a June pub­lic hear­ing on the pro­to­col. The 25-page doc­u­ment indi­cates small revi­sions, out­lin­ing such items as to when the cur­tains remain open in the exe­cu­tion cham­ber to def­i­n­i­tions of the term ​“chap­lain” and ​“lethal injec­tion room.” Natasha Minsker, the Death Penalty Policy Director of the ACLU of Northern California called the revi­sions super­fi­cial. Minsker added, ​“In the…