Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) has released its lat­est Death Row USA report. Data from this and pre­vi­ous reports for 2003 show that there were 143 new death sen­tences in the United States in 2003, the fewest num­ber since 1977 and about 50% few­er than the annu­al new sen­tences in the late 1990s, which aver­aged about 300 per year. According to LDF, 3,503 peo­ple were on death row in the United States as of January 1, 2004, a decrease from the 3,697 report­ed on October 1, 2002.

Mexican President Vicente Fox has urged the United States to halt the exe­cu­tion of Osvaldo Torres, a Mexican for­eign nation­al who is sched­uled to die in Oklahoma on May 18^th. Oklahoma set the exe­cu­tion date despite a 2003 rul­ing by the International Court of Justice, based in The Hague, that called for stay­ing Torres’s exe­cu­tion and the exe­cu­tion of two oth­er for­eign nation­als in Texas until the Court could fur­ther review the case. The alle­ga­tion before the world court is that Torres and more…

Florida Senator Victor Crist (R‑Tampa), a long-time death penal­ty sup­port­er, is ask­ing his leg­isla­tive col­leagues to sup­port a bill to bar the juve­nile death penal­ty in Florida. ​“In my heart and soul I believe it’s the right thing to do. There is a cer­tain essence of juve­niles that make them dif­fer­ent,” said Crist. Research sup­ports that notion. David Fassler, a Vermont psy­chi­a­trist who helped the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry draft its pol­i­cy against capital punishment…

Steven Manning, a for­mer Chicago police offi­cer who was exon­er­at­ed from Illinois’ death row in 2000 but remained in a Missouri prison on anoth­er charge, has been freed after Missouri pros­e­cu­tors dropped all charges against him. In January 2000, 7 years after he was sen­tenced to death in Illinois, a judge threw out Manning’s death sen­tence and con­vic­tion because the state used inad­mis­si­ble tes­ti­mo­ny to secure his con­vic­tion. Cook County pros­e­cu­tors lat­er dis­missed their case against…

In its review of death penal­ty expens­es, the State of Kansas con­clud­ed that cap­i­tal cas­es are 70% more expen­sive than com­pa­ra­ble non-death penal­ty cas­es. The study count­ed death penal­ty case costs through to exe­cu­tion and found that the medi­an death penal­ty case costs $1.26 mil­lion. Non-death penal­ty cas­es were count­ed through to the end of incar­cer­a­tion and were found to have a medi­an cost of $740,000. For death penal­ty cas­es, the pre-tri­al and tri­al lev­el expens­es were the most…

West Hartford Police Chief James Strillacci, pres­i­dent of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, has told state law­mak­ers that resources devot­ed to the death penal­ty would be bet­ter spent else­where. He noted, ​“It is a prac­ti­cal issue. We have a death penal­ty law on the books, but we haven’t exe­cut­ed any­one since 1960, and it does­n’t look like any­one will be exe­cut­ed. The process is long, labor inten­sive and expen­sive. Now, any mon­ey we’ve put into death penal­ty cas­es has really…

Governors Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Dave Freudenthal of Wyoming have signed into state law bipar­ti­san leg­is­la­tion ban­ning the exe­cu­tion of those who were under the age of 18 at the time of their crimes. Of the 38 death penal­ty states, 19 for­bid the death penal­ty for juve­niles. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment also for­bids the prac­tice. Twelve addi­tion­al states do not allow the death penal­ty at all. The U.S. Supreme Court will con­sid­er the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the juvenile death…

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rever­sal of Delma Banks’ death sen­tence in Texas because of pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct, the Dallas Morning News has called for a halt to exe­cu­tions while state offi­cials review seri­ous prob­lems in the…

In a recent study exam­in­ing death sen­tenc­ing trends around the coun­try, researchers report­ed sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences between the rates at which black defen­dants who kill white vic­tims are sen­tenced to death, as com­pared to the rate at which black defen­dants who kill black vic­tims are sen­tenced to death. In every one of the sev­en states for which data was avail­able, blacks who kill whites were far more like­ly to receive a death sen­tence than blacks who killed blacks.

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper is call­ing on pros­e­cu­tors to open their files to defense attor­neys in first-degree mur­der cas­es to avoid wrong­ful con­vic­tions like that of for­mer death row inmate Alan Gell, who was exon­er­at­ed and freed in February. Cooper called Gell’s first trial a ​“trav­es­ty” and stat­ed that the prosecutors committed ​“inex­cus­able neglect” in their han­dling of the trial. ​“The orig­i­nal pros­e­cu­tors in this case owe every­one an apol­o­gy: the defen­dant, the victim’s…