Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The U.S. State Department and the European Union have joined human rights and pro-democ­ra­­cy advo­cates in con­demn­ing the expan­sion of the death penal­ty in Belarus to include non-lethal ​“attempt­ed acts of ter­ror­ism,” call­ing the mea­sure an act of repres­sion against oppo­nents of the nation’s auto­crat­ic regime and its assis­tance to the Russian inva­sion of neighboring…

After 37 years of silence, a South Carolina prison doc­tor who was in the exe­cu­tion cham­ber when eight pris­on­ers it was his duty to treat were put to death has for the first time pub­licly dis­cussed his conflicting…

In an exe­cu­tion an expert has characterized as ​“botched,“ Arizona Department of Corrections per­son­nel failed for 25 min­utes to set an intra­venous line in Clarence Dixon​’s arms on May 11, 2022 before per­form­ing a bloody and apparently unauthorized ​“cut­down“ pro­ce­dure to insert the IV line into a vein in his groin. It was the first exe­cu­tion the state had car­ried out after a near­ly eight-year hia­tus fol­low­ing the botched two-hour exe­cu­tion of Joseph Wood on…

Ignoring entreaties from judges, pros­e­cu­tors, and state bar pres­i­dents, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals has denied a new tri­al to death-row pris­on­er Toforest…

The fall­out fol­low­ing Tennessee​’s abort­ed attempt to exe­cute Oscar Smith on April 21, 2022 con­tin­ues to grow, as state pros­e­cu­tors dis­closed that their plead­ings had mis­rep­re­sent­ed facts in a fed­er­al lethal injec­tion law­suit and pub­lic records revealed that at least two mem­bers of the exe­cu­tion team knew the day before Smith was to be exe­cut­ed that the drugs pur­chased to put Smith to death had not been properly…

A pros­e­cu­tor and police offi­cer who fab­ri­cat­ed evi­dence to wrong­ful­ly con­vict a for­mer Louisiana death-row pris­on­er are not enti­tled to immu­ni­ty in a law­suit alleging they ​“know­ing­ly and delib­er­ate­ly fab­ri­cat­ed” that tes­ti­mo­ny, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit…

Attorneys for Georgia death-row pris­on­er Virgil Presnell, Jr. (pic­tured left, with his moth­er) have filed a law­suit argu­ing that Attorney General Chris Carr vio­lat­ed a writ­ten agree­ment when his office set a May 17, 2022 exe­cu­tion date for their…

Saying that recent events in Texas’ attempt to exe­cute death-row pris­on­er Melissa Lucio had shak­en his faith in the crim­i­nal legal sys­tem, an influ­en­tial Republican state leg­is­la­tor has said that he would now sup­port a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions in the…

In the May 2022 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Professor Alexis Hoag (pic­tured) of Brooklyn Law School joined DPIC Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue for a wide-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tion mark­ing the 35^th anniver­sary of McCleskey v. Kemp, a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court deci­sion that reject­ed a con­sti­tu­tion­al chal­lenge to the death penal­ty that showed strong sta­tis­ti­cal evi­dence of racial dis­par­i­ties in cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tions and death sen­tences. Professor Hoag, for­mer­ly an attor­ney at the…

Documents that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) with­held from pub­lic dis­clo­sure for months reveal that ​“con­fu­sion and lack of train­ing” have left the state ​“woe­ful­ly unpre­pared to car­ry out an exe­cu­tion,” accord­ing to the American Civil Liberties…