Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

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 state. In an April 29, 2022 interview on WFAA-TV’s Inside Texas Politics with Jason Whitely, Representative Jeff Leach (pictured), co-chair of the Texas House of Representatives’ bi-partisan Criminal Justice Reform Caucus, said “every option [for…

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 NAACP Legal Defense…

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 Union. On June 4, 2021, the ACLU filed a request with TDCJ for records related to the state’s May 19, 2021 execution of Quintin Jones, in which the execution team failed to bring media witnesses into the chamber. The execution, which…

Support for capital punishment in Louisiana has fallen by seven percentage points in the last four years, according to the 2022 Louisiana Survey by the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs at Louisiana State University. “Four years ago supporters of the death penalty outnumbered opponents by 24 points, today that difference is only 13 points,” Mike Henderson, Associate Professor at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication and principal author of the report on the survey, said. 51% of…

An Arizona trial court has ruled that Clarence Dixon, a death-row prisoner with auditory and visual hallucinations and delusional thought processes from paranoid schizophrenia, is competent to be executed. In an opinion dated May 3, 2022 — the same day the court conducted an evidentiary hearing on the issue — Pinal County Judge Robert Carter Olson found that Dixon “has a mental disorder or mental illness of schizophrenia” but that his mental state was not “so distorted by this mental illness…

In a case legal experts say could redress a miscarriage of justice or institutionalize it, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the Texas federal courts’ refusal to permit DNA testing of crime-scene evidence that could potentially exonerate death-row prisoner Rodney Reed. On April 25, 2022, the Court granted Reed’s petition for writ of certiorari, which raises the question of when the time clock begins to run on a state prisoner’s federal civil rights lawsuit seeking access to DNA…

The capital sentencing trial of Nikolas Cruz in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (pictured) in Parkland, Florida has been delayed once again as jury selection in the high-profile case devolved into chaos and confusion. The fourth week of jury selection in Cruz’s penalty trial was postponed after Broward County Judge Elizabeth Scherer granted a prosecution motion to restart jury selection based upon the improper removal of 11 jurors from the case, then later…

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (pictured) has paused all executions scheduled for 2022 and called for an “independent review” of the state’s execution protocol to address a “technical oversight” that led him to halt Oscar Franklin Smith’s execution less than a half-hour before it was scheduled to be carried out on April 21, 2022. In a news release issued at 5:43 a.m. on Monday, May 2, 2022, Lee announced that the state would retain former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton to conduct a third-party review…

The U.S. Supreme Court has heard argument in two death penalty cases that present highly technical legal issues that could profoundly affect the extent to which prisoners convicted in state courts will have meaningful access to federal review of their cases. In two of the last cases to be argued before Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement at the end of the Court’s term, the Court on April 25 and 26 considered Nance v. Ward, a Georgia case about the proper way to challenge execution protocols…

Carman Deck (pictured) has been sentenced to death three times. Each of those death sentences were overturned — once by the U.S. Supreme Court — as a result of prejudicial constitutional violations in his trials. Nonetheless, he faces execution in Missouri on May 3, 2022 because a procedural technicality overturned his third grant of relief, blocking him from presenting his claim that critical mitigating evidence calling for a sentence less than death had become unavailable due to the long…