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 Fair Defense account. The office…

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 paying…

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 similarly situated co-defendants,” the…

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 behalf of its citizens on death row…

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 from a coerced confession, having been…

Jefferson Parish near New Orleans has sent 28 people to death row since the death penalty was reinstated in 1975, many of them under the current District Attorney, Paul Connick Jr., who took office in 1997. But no one has been sentenced to death in that parish in the past 5 years and prosecutors haven’t even tried a capital case in the past 4 years, despite a number of high-profile murders. This decrease in death sentencing is not unique to Louisiana. “The trend in these numbers, as across the…