Entries by Death Penalty Information Center
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Oct 04, 2021
New Scholarship: A Review of Virginia’s Death-Penalty Experience Exposes the Myth that the Death Penalty is Reserved for ‘the Worst of the Worst’ Cases
The death penalty is reserved for “’the worst of the worst’ — or at least that is what we are told,” writes University of Richmond law professor Corrina Barrett Lain (pictured) in a Washington & Lee Law Review post-mortem on Virginia’s use of capital punishment. Although the “worst of the worst” is a core command of a constitutionally compliant death penalty, “the death penalty doesn’t just exist in the abstract,” Lain notes. And…
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Oct 01, 2021
Missouri Moves to Execute Intellectually Disabled Death-Row Prisoner, As Former Governor, Court Justice, and Faith and Rights Leaders Seek Mercy
As the execution date nears for a Missouri man widely regarded to be intellectually disabled, a former Missouri Governor, Supreme Court Justice, and papal envoy have joined faith and civil rights leaders, and the prisoner’s lawyers in efforts to spare his…
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Sep 30, 2021
Sherwood Brown Exonerated in Mississippi, 186th Death-Row Exoneration Since 1973
Sherwood Brown has been exonerated of the charges that sent him to death row in Mississippi in 1995 for a triple murder he did not commit. On August 24, 2021, DeSoto County Circuit Court Judge Jimmy McClure granted a prosecution motion to dismiss charges against Brown (pictured after his release), who was released later that day after having spent 26 years on the state’s death row or facing the prospects of a capital…
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Sep 29, 2021
New Podcast: Professor Frank Baumgartner on Death-Penalty Data, Public Opinion, and Capital Punishment as a “Failed Experiment”
In the September 2021 episode of Discussions With DPIC, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill political scientist Frank Baumgartner (pictured), one of the nation’s leading academic authorities on the death penalty, joins Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham to discuss what research has shown about the impact of race, gender, and geography in capital cases and the current historically low level of public support for…
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Sep 28, 2021
Death-Row Exonerees in Ohio, Oklahoma Receive Million Dollar Payments for Their Wrongful Convictions
Two men exonerated from death row, one in Ohio and one in Oklahoma, have received million ‑dollar payouts for their wrongful convictions and death sentences. Both were tried and convicted in counties with long histories of prosecutorial misconduct and high rates of wrongful capital convictions. The compensation comes more than a decade after each was released from…
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Sep 27, 2021
Texas Executes Rick Rhoades, the First Execution from Harris County in Two Years
In a case that reflects the waning use of capital punishment, even in the some of the counties that have carried out the most executions in modern times, Rick Rhoades on September 28, 2021 became the first person convicted in Harris County (Houston), Texas to be executed in two…
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Sep 24, 2021
Supreme Court Case Threatens to Deny Access to Federal Courts to Death-Row Prisoners Who Received Ineffective State Representation
Nine different groups of advocates, including former prosecutors and judges, leading legal scholars, innocence advocates, and defense attorneys, have filed friend-of-the-court amicus briefs in the United States Supreme Court asking the court to rule in favor of Arizona death-row prisoners Barry Jones and David Ramirez in cases that could have broad implications for the availability of federal judicial review of state…
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Sep 23, 2021
Texas Appeals Court Vacates Conviction of Death-Row Prisoner Clinton Young, Whose Prosecutor was Secretly on the Payroll of the Judge Who Tried Him
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has vacated the conviction of death-row prisoner Clinton Young, whose prosecutor was also on the payroll of the judge who presided over the trial and decided his trial court…
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Sep 22, 2021
Nevada Supreme Court Finds Samuel Howard Innocent of the Death Penalty 40 Years After He Was Sent to Death Row
The Nevada Supreme Court has found that a prisoner who has been on the state’s death row for more than forty years is “actually innocent” of the death penalty and must be…
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Sep 21, 2021
Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals Sets Seven Execution Dates
After more than six years with no executions and with a trial pending on the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection process, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has issued death warrants setting seven execution dates in a less than five-month period between late October 2021 and mid-March…
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