Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Doubts about the appro­pri­ate­ness of a death sen­tence have prompt­ed for­mer pros­e­cu­tor Thomas Vanes to call for new DNA test­ing in the case of Darnell Williams, a man he sent to death row as a Lake County, Indiana state’s attor­ney. Williams is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on Friday, August 1. Vanes and John Gnajek, a mem­ber of the jury that sent Williams to death row, have filed a suit in fed­er­al court ask­ing for a stay of Williams’ exe­cu­tion until new DNA test­ing is com­plet­ed on blood evidence…

Pentagon gen­er­al coun­sel William J. Haynes II has assured British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the U.S. will not seek the death penal­ty against two British cit­i­zens fac­ing tri­al on ter­ror­ism charges before mil­i­tary tri­bunals. The two men, Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg, are among the 680 pris­on­ers from 42 coun­tries being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in con­nec­tion with the cam­paign against ter­ror­ism. Prior to Blair’s recent vis­it to Washington, dur­ing which he raised the issue with President…

Stating that ​“this Court is unwill­ing to con­tort the law of fed­er­al kid­nap­ping,” and that fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors failed to present suf­fi­cient evi­dence to sup­port that charge dur­ing the recent cap­i­tal mur­der tri­al of Jay Lentz, a fed­er­al judge in Virginia has over­turned the jury’s guilty ver­dict in the case. In the rul­ing, U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee crit­i­cized the gov­ern­ment for try­ing what he deemed a local homi­cide case in fed­er­al court. Earlier, the jury had reject­ed the government’s…

After years of sup­port­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, for­mer San Francisco pros­e­cu­tor Bill Fazio recent­ly changed his posi­tion on the death penal­ty. Fazio, who now serves as a defense attor­ney, stated, ​“Life with­out parole is a viable alter­na­tive.” He not­ed that he began to recon­sid­er his stance on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment after the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed his sole death penal­ty con­vic­tion. Fazio noted, ​“It was an error by the tri­al judge, and it made me real­ize that after 21 years there was still…

Governor Rod Blagojevich has signed a mea­sure requir­ing police to record their inter­ro­ga­tions of homi­cide sus­pects. The gov­er­nor’s sig­na­ture makes Illinois the first state to offi­cial­ly imple­ment such a pol­i­cy. Blagojevich, a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor, not­ed that his pre­vi­ous­­ly-voiced con­cerns that video taped inter­ro­ga­tions would impede police from doing their job had been over­rid­den by the knowl­edge that the tapes will yield ​“clear­er, more reli­able” evi­dence for the state’s jus­tice sys­tem. The law…

After spend­ing a quar­ter cen­tu­ry in prison, includ­ing time on Ohio’s death row, Timothy Howard and Gary Lemar James have been freed from prison and all charges against the men will be dropped. The men, who have main­tained their inno­cence since their arrest in 1976, were freed, accord­ing to Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien, ​“in the inter­est of jus­tice.” O’Brien stated, ​“The les­son to be learned is what I said in the let­ter I sent a year and a half ago. We don’t want any­body in prison…

In a recent Letter to the Editor that appeared in The New York Times, for­mer Governor Mario Cuomo urged New Yorkers to rethink the death penal­ty in light of recent inno­cence cas­es in the…

In a rul­ing that could affect near­ly every death row inmate in the state, the North Carolina Supreme Court has upheld the prac­tice of using indict­ments with­out aggra­vat­ing fac­tors in mur­der cas­es. The rul­ing came in the case of death row inmate Henry Lee Hunt. Hunt’s attor­neys had argued that, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rul­ing in Ring v. Arizona, fail­ure to include aggra­vat­ing fac­tors in first-degree mur­der indict­ments is a vio­la­tion of the due process clause of the 14^th Amendment.

“The Execution of Wanda Jean,” an HBO doc­u­men­tary direct­ed by Liz Garbus of Moxie Firecracker Films, and a series of news arti­cles by the staff of the York Daily Record, includ­ing exten­sive cov­er­age of the release of Pennsylvania native Ray Krone from Arizona’s death row, will receive hon­ors dur­ing the Death Penalty Information Center’s (DPIC) Seventh Annual Thurgood Marshall Journalism Awards at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The pro­gram will also fea­ture keynote remarks from…

A recent arti­cle by Alex Kotlowitz in the New York Times Magazine exam­ined why jurors who affirmed their will­ing­ness to impose a death sen­tence are increas­ing­ly vot­ing for life in cap­i­tal cas­es. The article…