Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

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 violence. In interviews with ABC News aired September 1, 2022, Wayne Jones (pictured) and Garnell Whitfield Jr.

The California legislature has taken a major stride towards reforming the state’s death-penalty practices, passing two bills that would remove from death row individuals whose capital convictions were the product of racial discrimination and those whose deteriorated mental condition has left them permanently mentally incompetent. On August 31, 2022, the California Assembly concurred in Senate Amendments and sent to the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom The Racial Justice Act for All, which makes…

The nationwide erosion of the death penalty in the United States continued in the quarter of 2022, as the death rows of eleven states decreased in size and no state or federal death row grew larger, according to the Legal Defense Fund’s Spring 2022 Death Row USA (DRUSA) report on capital punishment. Overall, the number of people sentenced to death in the United States or facing continuing jeopardy of execution in pending capital retrial or resentencing proceedings on April 1, 2022 fell by 22…

A federal appeals court in Ohio has overturned the death sentence imposed on an African American defendant whose defense lawyer presented testimony from a clinical psychologist that one quarter of urban Black men were sociopaths who should be locked up or thrown away. In a unanimous ruling on August 22, 2022, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the “racialized testimony” offered by a defense expert at the trial of Malik Allah-U-Akbar (pictured)…

Five years after former Gov. Eric Greitens issued an execution-day reprieve for a Board of Inquiry to address questions of innocence, Marcellus Williams remains on Missouri’s death row. Though the board presented its recommendations more than a year ago, current Gov. Mike Parson has taken no action on the case. Williams was set to be executed on August 22, 2017. Mounting evidence of his innocence produced a groundswell in opposition to his execution and calls for an independent investigation…

On the eighth anniversary of the August 19, 2014 murder of kidnapped journalist James Foley, a U.S. federal district court in Virginia sentenced his killer, Islamic State militant El Shafee Elsheikh, to eight life sentences in prison. His mother, Diane Foley (pictured), a leading advocate for Americans held hostage abroad, hailed the life sentence as “a huge victory” and “a very important deterrent.” Elsheikh was convicted of kidnapping and murdering Foley and three other Americans…

Racial disparities in U.S. death sentences imposed on late adolescent offenders have grown substantially since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of capital punishment against juvenile offenders in 2005, according to a new report by University of North Carolina political scientist Frank R. Baumgartner (pictured). Baumgartner’s report, Race and Age Characteristics of those Sentenced to Death before and after Roper, released on June 21, 2022 reviewed death sentences imposed on more than…

A Death Penalty Information Center review of data from the National Registry of Exonerations has found that the pursuit or threatened use of the death penalty by police or prosecutors in nine different states led to the wrongful murder convictions of at least twelve innocent people who were exonerated in 2021. DPIC’s analysis of the National Registry’s 2021 Annual Report on Exonerations found that prosecutors in California, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, and New York wrongfully sought the…

The Idaho Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s constitution permits a governor to reject clemency recommendations made by the Commission of Pardons and Parole, reversing a lower court’s decision that had blocked the state from executing terminally ill prisoner Gerald Pizzuto (pictured). The ruling may allow Idaho to carry out its first execution in more than a decade. The August 23, 2022 decision effectively reinstates Pizzuto’s death sentence, which the Commission of Pardons and Parole…

In the August 2022 Discussions With DPIC podcast, former Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry and former U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Lester (pictured), two of the co-chairs of the bipartisan Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, call on state officials not to rush forward with the state’s planned execution of 25 prisoners. Speaking with DPIC executive director Robert Dunham, Governor Henry, a Democrat, and Judge Lester, a Republican, discuss the commission’s findings of a broken system that risks…