Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Louisiana’s death penalty is disproportionately imposed in cases involving white female victims, especially if the defendant in the case is a Black man, a new study by three leading death-penalty researchers has confirmed. Louisiana prosecutors were more than five times as likely to seek the death penalty, and juries more than five times as likely to impose it, in cases involving a Black male offender and a white female victim than in crimes in which both the alleged offender and the victim…

Judge Stephen Friot (pictured) of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma has ruled that Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol is constitutional. After holding a week-long hearing on the state’s three-drug protocol in February and March 2022, Judge Friot credited the testimony of state experts over the prisoners’ expert testimony on the likelihood that the protocol would result in severe pain. While attorneys for the 28 prisoners who brought the suit can appeal the ruling…

A Tennessee death-row prisoner who county prosecutors agree is intellectually disabled is appealing a trial judge’s refusal to vacate his death sentence under a law designed to provide condemned prisoners a mechanism to enforce the constitutional prohibition against executing individuals with intellectual disability. On June 1, 2022, lawyers for Byron Black (pictured) filed an appeal with the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals challenging Senior Judge Walter Kurtz’s ruling that Black could…

Federal courts denied relief in two lawsuits brought by Arizona death-row prisoner Frank Atwood, clearing the path for his execution on June 8, 2022. Atwood had sought an opportunity to present new evidence of his innocence, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected that petition. The appellate court also affirmed the Arizona federal district court’s denial of Atwood’s challenge to the state’s lethal-injection procedure, which Atwood said would cause him excruciating pain due…

More countries abandoned the death penalty and a record low number carried it out, but extreme practices in a few outlier nations caused global executions to rise in 2021, according to the human rights group Amnesty International. Amnesty found mixed trends in its annual report on death sentences and executions, as the global geographic erosion of capital punishment continued, but a surge in executions in Iran and Saudi Arabia as pandemic restrictions eased led to a global increase of 20% in…

Court records from a lawsuit brought by Tennessee death-row prisoners have revealed widespread irregularities in the state’s execution practices. A series of four articles published in the Nashville newspaper, The Tennessean, on May 25, 2022 documented a rash of non-compliance with Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol by corrections officials and execution contractors. Examining thousands of pages of records filed in federal civil rights lawsuits by death-row prisoners Terry Lynn King and…

Arizona violated state law, state corrections policies, and a court order by denying a reporter from the state’s largest daily circulation newspaper access to view the May 11 execution of Clarence Dixon and by blocking witnesses’ views of a portion of the execution process, a lawyer for the newspaper has charged. In a May 20, 2022 letter to Arizona Department of Corrections (ADOC) Director David Shinn and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, David Bodney, attorney for Phoenix Newspapers, Inc. (PNI)…

Autopsies of the four men executed by Oklahoma between October 2021 and February 2022 show that all four prisoners had excess fluid in their lungs, giving additional credence to death-row prisoners’ claims that Oklahoma’s lethal-injection process will subject them to an unconstitutionally torturous death. The autopsy report for Gilbert Postelle, obtained by Oklahoma Watch through a public records request and published May 25, 2022, found that Postelle experienced pulmonary edema with “frothy…

Two more African nations have taken major steps towards abolishing the death penalty. On May 25, 2022, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema (pictured) announced that, in commemoration of Africa Freedom Day, he was commuting the sentences of 30 death-row prisoners and submitting a bill to parliament to end capital punishment in the southern African nation. Two days later, the National Assembly of the Central African Republic voted by acclamation to pass a law abolishing that nation’s death…

The fates of two men subject to potentially imminent execution in Texas hang in the balance, as the state’s attorney general and one local prosecutor challenge the discretion of other key officials not to move forward with executions. The controversy over the execution dates highlights emerging tensions between prosecutors about enforcement of death sentences and the provision of fair process before a prisoner is executed. In Harris County, prosecutors are challenging Houston Judge Natalia…