Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Following recent­ly passed leg­is­la­tion, Texas will open an office with nine attor­neys to man­age post-con­vic­­tion appeals in death penal­ty cas­es. In the past, appoint­ed attor­neys some­times missed fil­ing dead­lines or filed inad­e­quate briefs, there­by jeop­ar­diz­ing their clients’ cas­es. The Office of Capital Writs will be fund­ed by redi­rect­ing mon­ey already in the state bud­get: $500,000 for­mer­ly used to pay pri­vate attor­neys for appeals and $494,520 from the state’s…

There nev­er was any ques­tion that Brian Nichols was guilty of the cour­t­house shoot­ing of a judge and three oth­er vic­tims in 2005. He had offered to plead guilty if the death penal­ty was not pur­sued, but the state insist­ed on a full death penal­ty tri­al that end­ed up being the most expen­sive cap­i­tal case in Georgia’s his­to­ry. In 2008, the case con­clud­ed with Nichols being sen­tenced to life with­out parole. Recently, the defense costs were revealed to be more than $3 mil­lion, with the state…

The Ohio Parole Board made a rare rec­om­men­da­tion of clemen­cy on July 17, vot­ing 5 – 2 that Jason Getsy​’s death sen­tence should be reduced to life with­out parole. Getsy is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on August 18 for the mur­der of Ann Serafino in 1995. A co-defen­­dant who ini­ti­at­ed and orga­nized the crime received a less­er sen­tence of 35 years to life. ​“In impos­ing a death sen­tence, it is imper­a­tive that we have con­sis­ten­cy and sim­i­lar penal­ties imposed upon…

John Bellinger, who served as legal advis­er to the State Department from 2005 to 2009, has called on President Obama to assist in the review of the death penal­ty cas­es of for­eign nation­als who were denied rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The U.S. has rat­i­fied the Vienna Convention and the Protocol that pro­vides for res­o­lu­tion of dis­putes in the International Court of Justice in the Hague (ICJ). Mexico brought a suit to this court on…

The risk that inno­cent peo­ple could be exe­cut­ed remains high, as illus­trat­ed by the two most recent exon­er­a­tions from death row. Ronald Kitchen was freed from prison Illinois after the state dis­missed all charges against him on July 7. He had spent 13 years on death row and a total of 21 years in prison. Governor George Ryan had com­mut­ed his sen­tence to life in 2003, along with all oth­er death row inmates. Kitchen’s orig­i­nal con­vic­tion was derived largely…