Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Cathy Henderson (pic­tured with Sr. Helen Prejean) is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed in Texas on April 18 for the 1994 mur­der of Brandon Baugh, an infant she was babysit­ting. Henderson would be the 12^th woman put to death in the U.S. since cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was rein­stat­ed. Since her arrest, Henderson has main­tained that the child’s death was acci­den­tal. She said that she dropped the baby, frac­tur­ing his skull, and then pan­icked after real­iz­ing she could not revive him. She then buried the boy’s…

Legislation to estab­lish a com­mis­sion to exam­ine Kentucky’s death penal­ty and report its find­ings to the General Assembly has gained sup­port from for­mer law enforce­ment offi­cials and vic­tims’ fam­i­ly mem­bers. The bill, pro­posed by Rep. Tom Burch, would require the task force to review whether cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment deters crime, is applied fair­ly, and is still accept­able to the pub­lic. It would mark the first time in four decades that the state has exam­ined its death penalty…

Corrections offi­cials, pros­e­cu­tors and police chiefs recent­ly gath­ered in Annapolis, Maryland, to voice sup­port for a leg­isla­tive mea­sure that would repeal the state’s death penalty. ​“It is a human sys­tem, and because it is fal­li­ble and because it is human, it makes mis­takes. Executions make those mis­takes irre­versible,” said Matthew Campbell, a for­mer deputy state’s attor­ney for Montgomery and Howard coun­ties. Gary J. Hilton, a for­mer war­den at the Trenton State Prison in New Jersey, added…

Dr. Philip B. Woodhall, M.D., who prac­ticed emer­gency med­i­cine in North Carolina for many years, recent­ly wrote about the pro­posed role of doc­tors in car­ry­ing out lethal injec­tions. He stat­ed that med­i­cine and exe­cu­tions do not mix. “[D]octors are giv­en extra­or­di­nary rights and priv­i­leges,” he wrote, and ​“these pow­ers are ded­i­cat­ed to the preser­va­tion of human life, not to the ser­vice of death.” Woodhall urged North Carolina’s Department of Corrections to aban­don efforts to include doctors in…

Maricopa County, Arizona, has more pend­ing death penal­ty cas­es than Los Angeles County, which has more than twice as many res­i­dents, and more than the so-called ​“death penal­ty cap­i­tal” of Harris County, Texas. There are more than 130 cas­es in tri­al or await­ing tri­al, and its four indi­gent defense agen­cies say that they have run out of attor­neys to han­dle the cas­es. Strained by the record num­ber of cas­es, Judge James Keppel gave pros­e­cu­tors, defense attor­neys, and coun­ty offi­cials five days to…

In her book, ​“Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South,” University of Memphis pro­fes­sor Margaret Vandiver explores the com­plex rela­tion­ship between these two forms of pun­ish­ment and chal­lenges the assump­tion that exe­cu­tions con­sis­tent­ly grew out of — and replaced — lynch­ings. Vandiver’s book exam­ines lynch­ings and legal exe­cu­tions in three cul­tur­al­ly and geo­graph­i­cal­ly dis­tinct south­ern regions. First she researched rur­al north­west Tennessee, where lynchings outnumbered…

According to a recent Maryland poll, a large major­i­ty of vot­ers in the state sup­port replac­ing the death penal­ty with a sen­tence of life with­out parole. The poll, con­duct­ed by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, Inc., found that 61% of those sur­veyed believe that the sen­tence of life with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole is ​“an accept­able sub­sti­tute for the death penal­ty.” Only 27% of respon­dents dis­agreed. Support for life with­out parole in Maryland has jumped near­ly 20 percentage…