Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

A new law review article highlights the lack of protections for criminal defendants’ rights to make meaningful decisions despite court-recognized rights to autonomy. In “The Myth of Autonomy Rights,” a 2021 article published in the Cardozo Law Review, Professor Kathryn E. Miller (pictured) argues that there are inadequate safeguards for the autonomy rights of the average criminal defendant, especially in capital punishment cases. Professor Miller, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Law at…

A new report by the human rights organization Amnesty International urges President Joe Biden to act upon his campaign pledge to work to abolish the death penalty by exercising his constitutional authority to commute the sentences of all federal death row prisoners. The report, titled The Power of Example: Whither the Biden Death Penalty Promise?, was released on June 27, 2022, just two days before the 50^th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia, which…

A teen offender whose spiritual transformation on Texas’ death row has caused a key prosecution mental health expert to recant his trial testimony, has filed a petition for clemency seeking a commutation of his death sentence ahead of his scheduled July 13, 2022 execution date. On June 21, 2022, lawyers for Ramiro Gonzales (pictured) submitted a petition for clemency to Governor Greg Abbott and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Gonzales’ clemency petition describes the neglect and abuse…

The Florida Supreme Court has rejected an attempt by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody to prevent DNA testing and fingerprint analysis of evidence lawyers for Henry Sireci (pictured) say could prove him innocent of a murder that sent him to death row 46 years ago. State prosecutors had sought to vacate two orders entered by the trial court on May 10, 2021 giving court approval to separate agreements between county prosecutors and counsel for Sireci and a second death-row prisoner, Tommy…

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has set execution dates for 25 of the state’s 43 death-row prisoners, scheduling nearly an execution a month from August 2022 through December 2024. If carried out, the execution schedule, unprecedented in the state’s history, would put to death 58% of the state’s death row, including multiple prisoners with severe mental illness, brain damage, and claims of innocence. The court issued its execution schedule in two orders on July 1, 2022, in response to…

Ketanji Brown Jackson has been sworn in as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the first Black woman to serve as a justice in the 232-year history of the Court. In an historic ceremony at the Supreme Court shortly after the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer took effect at noon on June 30, 2022, Chief Justice John Roberts administered the Constitutional Oath to Justice Jackson (pictured). Justice Breyer, for whom Justice Jackson served as a law clerk during the Court’s…

At the halfway point of 2022, the United States is on pace to mark the eighth consecutive year with fewer than 30 execution and fewer than 50 new death sentences. But even as the death penalty declines, a few states have attempted to ramp up executions and the United States Supreme Court has continued to impede death-row prisoners’ access to the courts and impair judicial enforcement of defendants’ constitutional rights. The low numbers of new death sentences imposed and executions carried out…

An analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center has discovered rampant prosecutorial misconduct in death penalty prosecutions. DPIC’s ongoing review of death sentences imposed and overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty statutes in 1972 has identified more than 550 prosecutorial misconduct reversals and exonerations in capital cases (click to enlarge image). That amounts to more than 5.6% of all death sentences imposed in the United States in the past…

On the 50^th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 29, 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia that struck down all existing death penalty laws, the Death Penalty Information Center released its Death Penalty Census. The census is the most comprehensive database of death sentences ever assembled, containing more than 9,700 death sentences (click to enlarge image). In the census, DPIC has attempted to identify every death sentence handed down in the U.S. from the day Furman was decided through…

Mississippi corrections officials will have unprecedented discretion in selecting how the state’s death-row prisoners will be executed under a new law that takes effect July 1, 2022. Mississippi authorizes execution by lethal injection, electrocution, firing squad, or nitrogen hypoxia. The law, which received final legislative approval March 29 and was signed by Governor Tate Reeves April 14, provides the Commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC), MDOC’s Deputy…