Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The Death Penalty Information Center’s Year End Report for 2008 record­ed 37 exe­cu­tions for the year that ends today. That is a 12% drop from the 42 exe­cu­tions in 2007. However, based on exe­cu­tions already sched­uled for 2009, the com­ing year may see an increase. There are 23 exe­cu­tions sched­uled for the first five months of 2009, and more dates are like­ly to be added. As was true in 2008, almost all the exe­cu­tions sched­uled are in the south and about half (12…

The Dallas Morning News renewed its call for a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions in Texas because of the numer­ous errors in the state’s death penal­ty sys­tem. The paper high­light­ed the cas­es of Michael Blair and Charles Hood as exam­ples of how the sys­tem has bro­ken down. Blair was exon­er­at­ed in 2008 after 14 years on death row. DNA evi­dence revealed that he had not been the mur­der­er of 7‑year-old Ashley Estel in 1993,…

The top med­ical offi­cer for the Department of Corrections in the state of Washington has resigned in order to avoid any par­tic­i­pa­tion in the state’s exe­cu­tion process. As the doc­tor respon­si­ble for prepar­ing oth­ers to car­ry out lethal injec­tions, Dr. Marc Stern con­clud­ed that his eth­i­cal oblig­a­tions as a physi­cian required that he recuse him­self from such actions and that resign­ing was the only way to ful­ly remove him­self from this…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a $14 mil­lion award to John Thompson, a for­mer death row inmate in Louisiana who was exon­er­at­ed after with­held evi­dence was revealed. Thompson spent 18 years in prison, includ­ing 14 years in the soli­tary con­fine­ment of death row in Angola Prison. He came with­in one month of being exe­cut­ed in 1999 when his attor­neys dis­cov­ered blood evi­dence that should have been turned over to the…

Ray Samuels, a police offi­cer for 33 years and Chief of Police in Newark, California, for 5 years, recent­ly expressed con­cern that state bud­get cuts will pre­vent impor­tant crime-fight­­­ing mea­sures from being passed, while an expen­sive death penal­ty con­tin­ues to drain the state’s finances. In an op-ed in the Contra Costa Times,…

The Presiding Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, Oliver Diaz, dis­sent­ed in a recent cap­i­tal case, Doss v. Mississippi, stat­ing he had come to the con­clu­sion that the death penalty is…

Research on death qual­i­fi­ca­tion – the selec­tion of jurors who are qual­i­fied to serve on a cap­i­tal case because they are will­ing to sen­tence some­one to death – has revealed addi­tion­al char­ac­ter­is­tics among such jurors. Professor Brooke Butler of the University of South Florida in Sarasota has stud­ied such jurors and pub­lished her results in the jour­nal of Behavioral Sciences and the Law. Her study,​“Death qual­i­fi­ca­tion and prej­u­dice: the effect of implicit racism,…