Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The process of death qualification, which excludes people who oppose the death penalty from serving on capital juries, is racially discriminatory, civil rights advocate Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II wrote in an October 10, 2022 op-ed. Rev. Barber and his co-authors, pastor Dumas Harshaw Jr. and preacher Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, introduce their article with a recognition of J.W. Hood, a Black man and AME Zion pastor, who fought to abolish slavery and co-authored North Carolina’s modern…

Alan Eugene Miller has asked federal courts to bar Alabama from setting a second execution date days after the Alabama Attorney General’s office filed a motion in the state’s Supreme Court to expedite a new execution warrant. The state attempted to execute Miller on September 22, 2022, but called off the execution after failing to establish an intravenous (IV) line. On October 4, 2022, the Alabama Attorney General’s office filed an expedited motion in the Alabama Supreme Court asking the court…

With three justices dissenting, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of Texas death-row prisoner Andre Thomas, who was sentenced to death by jurors who admitted to racial bias. In a case involving an interracial murder and marriage, jurors who opposed interracial relationships were allowed to serve without objection by defense counsel. These beliefs were referenced by the prosecution during closing argument at the sentencing phase, where jurors were tasked to weigh Thomas’ long…

In a 4 – 1 vote, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied clemency to Richard Fairchild, the third of 25 people the state scheduled for execution between August 2022 and December 2024. Fairchild’s attorneys argued that he was represented at trial by incompetent counsel who never presented evidence of Fairchild’s severe childhood abuse and of his repeated traumatic brain injuries. Fairchild’s clemency petition also detailed the debilitating effects of his serious mental illness and organic…

The Death Penalty Information Center has released a new report on race and the death penalty in Oklahoma, placing the state’s death penalty system in historical context. The report documents the role that race has played in Oklahoma’s death penalty and details the pervasive impact that racial discrimination continues to have in the administration of capital punishment. Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty, released October 14, 2022, notes that Oklahoma is at an…

A non-unanimous Florida jury has returned a verdict of life without parole for Nikolas Cruz, the teen offender convicted of killing 17 people in the February 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (pictured) in Parkland, Florida. The October 13, 2022 verdict, in which three jurors voted to spare Cruz’s life, concluded a six-month sentencing trial. Florida law, like that of nearly every death-penalty state, requires a unanimous jury verdict before a death sentence may be…

The U.S. Supreme Court heard argument on October 11, 2022 on whether a Texas death-row prisoner was time-barred from obtaining federal review of the state’s refusal to grant him DNA testing that could prove his innocence because he waited for the state appeals process to finish before filing his federal lawsuit. The technical issue in Reed v. Goertz is when the two-year time clock began to run on Rodney Reed’s federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that Texas had unconstitutionally denied him…

The South Carolina Supreme Court will hear argument one month sooner on the state’s appeal of a trial court ruling that declared two of its statutorily methods of execution — death by electric chair and firing squad — unconstitutional. The argument will now be held on December 13, 2022 in the Supreme Court Courtroom in Columbia. Argument initially had been set for January 12, 2023 at Coastal Carolina University. The court did not provide any explanation for the scheduling change. The appeal…

In its landmark decision in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the use of the death penalty against individuals with intellectual disability constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Twenty years later, however, “there is not just the risk, but the certainty” that states continue to sentence intellectually disabled defendants to death, three legal scholars argue, and the federal courts are letting them get away with it. Cornell…

Alabama has set a November 17, 2022 execution date for a death-row prisoner whose jury voted 11 – 1 to spare his life. On September 30, 2022, barely a week after the botched attempted lethal injection of Alan Miller, the Alabama Supreme Court granted a motion by state prosecutors to issue a death warrant for Kenneth Smith. Smith, now 57, was sentenced to death in 1996 when his trial judge overrode the jury’s near-unanimous recommendation for a life sentence. At the time, Alabama was one of only…