Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

A federal district court in Texas has heard evidence on, and now must decide, whether a severely mentally ill man is competent to be executed. On October 24, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas began presiding over the competency hearing of Scott Panetti (pictured), whose case established the constitutional standard for competency to be executed, to determine whether he has a rational understanding of his death sentence and the reason for it or is so mentally ill…

In 1994, the United States Supreme Court held in Simmons v. South Carolina that when the prosecution makes future dangerousness an issue in a capital case, a defendant has a due process right to inform jurors that he will not be parole eligible if he is not sentenced to death. For more than a decade, Arizona courts refused to apply that precedent. Then, in 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court summarily struck down that practice in Lynch v. Arizona, holding that the state had failed to implement clearly…

In the October 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue and Data Storyteller Tiana Herring discuss DPIC’s 2022 report Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty. The report looks at the racial history, present, and future of Oklahoma’s death penalty. Ndulue and Herring explore Oklahoma’s unique history, the key findings of the report, its relationship to DPIC’s earlier work, and lessons from Oklahoma’s…

In what the Tampa Bay Times described as “an epic turnaround” in a 46-year-old capital case, a Florida trial judge is poised to order DNA testing of evidence death-row prisoner Tommy Zeigler has long asserted will prove him innocent of the quadruple murder for which he was convicted and sentenced to death in 1975. On October 27, 2022, Circuit Court Judge Patricia L. Strowbridge indicated she was likely to sign an order directing the production of physical evidence, including guns, fingernail…

Two-thirds of Black women and more than half of Black men have been struck from jury service in Duval County death penalty cases, more than double the rate at which white prospective jurors are excluded, a study of capital jury selection in the Florida county has found. The study, Racialized Impacts of Death Disqualification in Duval County, Florida, conducted by University of Central Florida criminal justice professor Dr. Jacinta M. Gau, was the centerpiece of a challenge to the county’s…

With a federal court ruling on his innocence claims considered imminent, Oprah Winfrey has designated the autobiography of California death-row prisoner Jarvis Jay Masters, That Bird Has Wings, as the September 2022 selection for the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. Masters, who has converted to Buddhism and become a talented author and podcast host in the years since his controversial conviction and death sentence for the 1985 murder of corrections officer Sergeant Hal Burchfield, filed his habeas…

On October 19^th, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled against Oklahoma death-row prisoners who had argued that they should be allowed to have their attorney present throughout their execution so that counsel could intervene and file for emergency relief if a problem arose during the execution. The prisoners presented evidence of a rash of botched executions in Oklahoma since 2014. Five of the eight executions performed in Oklahoma since April 2014 have involved…

When California’s Racial Justice Act becomes applicable to the cases of prisoners on the state’s death row beginning in January 2023, it will vastly reshape the legal landscape of the state’s death penalty, legal reform advocates say. The California Racial Justice Act for All, passed by the state legislature on August 28, 2020 and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom September 29, provides death-row prisoners retroactive relief from convictions or death sentences that had been obtained “on the…

A federal prison warden has denied an Oklahoma District Attorney’s request to transfer John Fitzgerald Hanson (pictured) to Oklahoma’s custody to be executed, stating that the transfer “is not in the public’s best interest.” Hanson is incarcerated at a federal prison in Louisiana. In 2000, Hanson was sentenced by the federal government to life in prison plus 107 years for a series of armed robberies. He was later sentenced to death in Tulsa County, Oklahoma for the 1999 murders of Mary Bowles…

Two leading United Nations human rights experts have condemned capital punishment as incompatible with international legal requirements, saying the death penalty is “almost impossible” to administer while respecting the human rights of the accused. In a joint statement issued from Geneva, Switzerland on Oct. 10, 2022 in connection with the observance of the 20^th World Day Against the Death Penalty, Dr. Alice Jill Edwards, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or…