Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review two cases concerning the scope of death-row prisoners’ access to the federal courts in litigating the constitutionality of their convictions and sentences or the method by which states seek to execute them. On January 14, 2022, the Court granted certiorari in Nance v. Ward and Shoop v. Twyford. Nance is a Georgia death penalty case concerning the process by which prisoners may bring challenges to state execution practices. Shoop is an Ohio death…

Two conservative Republican legislators, both former supporters of capital punishment, have introduced legislation that would end death-penalty prosecutions in Utah. On January 18, 2022, the first day of the three-month 2022 legislative session in the deeply conservative state, State Representative V. Lowry Snow (pictured, left) and Senator Daniel McCay (pictured, right) introduced HB 147, which would prohibit the death penalty for aggravated murders committed after May 4, 2022 and for all…

Adam Luck (pictured), the Chairman of Oklahoma’s Board of Pardons and Parole, has resigned from the board under pressure from Governor Kevin Stitt because of Luck’s votes in favor of clemency for death-row prisoners. “When I began service on this board there was a moratorium on executions in the state of Oklahoma,” Luck wrote in his January 14, 2022 resignation letter to Stitt. “As we resumed executions in October I came to the conclusion that guided my votes during the five clemency hearings…

On Martin Luther King Day, DPIC looks at the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s views on capital punishment. In a November 1957 article in Ebony, Dr. King was asked “Do you think God approves the death penalty for crimes like rape and murder?” He responded, “I do not think that God approves the death penalty for any crime, rape and murder included…. Capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology, and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of…

The same brand of Southern pride that inspired lynchings after the U.S. Civil War fuels support for the death penalty today, writes legal analyst Joia Erin Thornton (pictured) in a commentary on the web publication, Blavity. In The Dark Southern Pride Upholding The Barbaric Death Penalty, published December 23, 2021, Thornton argues that, just as Southern states in Reconstruction turned to extreme carceral punishments to reimpose violent control over Black Americans after the abolition of…

Kentucky’s death penalty is racially discriminatory, geographically arbitrary, and riddled with systemic flaws, a new study of the commonwealth’s use of capital punishment has found. The study, A Statistical Overview of the Kentucky Death Penalty, by University of North Carolina political scientist Frank R. Baumgartner, examined Kentucky’s use of the death penalty from 1975, when its current system was implemented, to the present. Prof. Baumgartner released his analysis of the results on…

In the January 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Contra Costa County, California District Attorney Diana Becton (pictured), speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the rise in reform prosecutors across the country, the inherent flaws in capital punishment that led her to work alongside other reform prosecutors to end the death penalty, and her efforts as district attorney to bring fairness and equity to the criminal legal system. Becton is the…

A coalition of disability rights groups, legal experts, and conservative advocates are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the uniquely harsh burden of proof Georgia has imposed upon defendants seeking to establish their ineligibility for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. In four friend-of-the-court briefs filed in late December 2021, two former U.S. solicitors general, eight former prosecutors and judges, seven leading disability rights organizations, scholars…

An Alabama federal judge has issued an order halting the scheduled January 27, 2022 execution of Matthew Reeves (pictured). On January 7, Judge R. Austin Huffaker of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, granted a preliminary injunction preventing Alabama from executing Reeves “by any method other than nitrogen hypoxia.” Huffaker found that Reeves is likely to succeed in his claim that the state violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) when prison officials…

As 2021 came to a close, editorial writers in four death penalty states called for legislative and executive action to end capital punishment or further limit its use. Editorial boards for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Idaho Statesman took note that as the death penalty declines in usage and public support, it remains arbitrary and inhumane in its application and continues to place innocent lives at risk. Additionally, recently retired Los Angeles Times…