Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Equatorial Guinea has abol­ished the death penal­ty, becom­ing the 25^th African nation to end cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and the fourth in the past two years. According to state tele­vi­sion reports, on September 19, 2022, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo signed into law a new crim­i­nal code that removes the death penal­ty from the statute books of the cen­tral African nation of 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple on the continent’s…

Bell County pros­e­cu­tors have dropped their efforts to impose the death penal­ty on Marvin Guy (pic­tured), an African American man who has been held eight years with­out tri­al in con­nec­tion with the death of a white police offi­cer dur­ing a botched no-knock raid in Killeen, Texas…

A sec­ond mil­i­tary com­mis­sions pros­e­cu­tor who had advo­cat­ed using tes­ti­mo­ny obtained by tor­ture against defen­dants in the death penal­ty tri­al of the Guantánamo detainees charged with the October 2000 bomb­ing of the U.S.S. Cole (pic­tured) in waters off the coast of Yemen has been removed…

Alabama pros­e­cu­tors have told a fed­er­al judge that the state will not exe­cute death-row pris­on­er Alan Miller by nitro­gen hypox­ia on September 22, 2022, three days after sug­gest­ing there was a​“very good chance” it would be ready to attempt the first-ever execution…

The out­come of a cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion can be pre­dict­ed based upon the rel­a­tive social sta­tus of the vic­tim, the defen­dant, and the jurors, apply­ing a soci­ol­o­gy con­cept known as the geo­met­ri­cal the­o­ry of law, accord­ing to the authors of a new book, Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in…

An Alabama appeals court has upheld a fifth non-unan­i­­­mous death sen­tence imposed on a death-row pris­on­er who has faced six cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing tri­als for the same offense and was once found to be inel­i­gi­ble for the death penal­ty because of intellectual…

A new study of the Texas death penal­ty, released as the state was con­duct­ing its 400^th mod­­­ern-era exe­cu­tion in a case involv­ing a white vic­tim, has doc­u­ment­ed over­whelm­ing racial dis­par­i­ties in the Lone Star state’s capital punishment…

A South Carolina tri­al court has issued an injunc­tion pre­vent­ing the state from car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions using a fir­ing squad or the elec­tric chair, rul­ing that those meth­ods vio­late the state’s con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tion against​“cru­el, unusu­al, and…

With no exe­cu­tions in more than a decade and no new death sen­tences since 2014, Indiana​’s cost­ly death penal­ty has reached a​“de fac­to mora­to­ri­um,” says Indiana Capital Chronicle edi­­­tor-in-chief Niki Kelly. “[M]aybe it’s time to be intel­lec­tu­al­ly hon­est and admit Indiana no longer has the death penal­ty,” Kelly wrote in a September 2,…

As fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors con­sid­er what pun­ish­ment to seek against the accused gun­man in the May 2022 mass shoot­ing at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, sur­vivors and fam­i­ly mem­bers of vic­tims of the shoot­ing are con­cerned that pur­su­ing the death penal­ty will fur­ther spread the racial hatred that fueled the mas­sacre and divert atten­tion from mean­ing­ful action to com­bat white supremacist…