Entries by Death Penalty Information Center
News
Sep 20, 2021
Chattanooga Dedicates Memorial to Ed Johnson, An Innocent Man Sentenced to Death on False Rape Charges and Lynched After U.S. Supreme Court Stayed His Execution
On September 19, 2021, community leaders in Chattanooga, Tennessee dedicated a memorial to Ed Johnson, an innocent Black man wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 1906 for allegedly raping a white woman and lynched by a white mob after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order staying his execution. The memorial also honors the two lawyers who worked to save…
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Sep 17, 2021
OUTLIER COUNTIES: Ohio Death-Row Prisoner Challenges Sentence Based on Hamilton County Race Discrimination Study
An African-American man sentenced to death in Hamilton County, Ohio in 1999 for the murder of a white man is seeking to overturn his conviction and death sentence based on evidence from a recently published study that he was more than five times more likely to be sentenced to death because of his race and the race of the victim in his…
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Sep 16, 2021
NEW SCHOLARSHIP: History Says Those Left on Death Row After Capital Punishment Statutes are Struck Down or Repealed Should Not be Executed
“What should become of individuals who are awaiting execution following the repeal or judicial invalidation of capital punishment legislation?,” ask authors James R. Acker (pictured, left) and Brian W. Stull (pictured, right) in a recent article published in the Akron Law Review. If history is a guide, they say, the prisoners’ lives should be…
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Sep 15, 2021
Four Utah Prosecutors Urge Legislature to Repeal and Replace Death Penalty
Four Utah district attorneys, representing counties that comprise 57.5% of the state’s population, have urged the state legislature and Utah Governor Spencer Cox to enact legislation to repeal and replace Utah’s death…
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Sep 14, 2021
Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board Recommends Clemency for Julius Jones
The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board has voted to recommend that Governor Kevin Stitt commute the death sentence imposed on Julius Jones (pictured) by an Oklahoma County jury in 1999 to a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of…
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Sep 13, 2021
Death-Row Exoneree Curtis Flowers Sues Mississippi Prosecutor Who Prosecuted Him Six Times
Former Mississippi death-row prisoner Curtis Flowers (pictured), who was exonerated in 2020, is suing the officials whose misconduct led to his arrest and repeated wrongful conviction. Flowers was tried six times and spent 23 years wrongfully incarcerated for a quadruple murder in a white-owned furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. In a complaint filed September 3, 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Flowers alleges…
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Sep 13, 2021
News Brief: Ohio Governor Reprieves and Reschedules Four More Executions
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (pictured) has issued reprieves further postponing four executions that had been scheduled between January and May 2022. The governor’s orders, announced September 10, 2021, rescheduled the executions for between December 2024 and May…
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Sep 12, 2021
Report: After 20 Years of Decline, Spring 2021 Death-Row Population Matches Level in 1991
The number of people on death row or facing possible capital resentencing across the United States now matches a three-decade low, according to data compiled by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and analyzed by the Death Penalty Information…
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Sep 10, 2021
California Supreme Court Upholds Death-Penalty Statute Against Challenge That Could Have Overturned Hundreds of Death Sentences
The California Supreme Court has upheld the state’s death-penalty statute against a constitutional challenge that had the potential to overturn the sentences of hundreds of people on California’s death row. In a unanimous ruling issued August 26, 2021 in People v. McDaniel, the court held that a capital jury need not unanimously agree to the existence of an aggravating circumstance before weighing it in the sentencing decision so long as every juror found that the…
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Sep 09, 2021
U.S. Supreme Court Stays Texas Execution, Agrees to Review Contours of the Right to Religious Exercise in the Execution Chamber
In an after-hours order issued on September 8, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court halted Texas’s planned execution of John Henry Ramirez and agreed to review his claim that the state’s refusal to allow his pastor to “lay hands” on him or pray audibly during the execution violated federal law and his First Amendment right to the free exercise of…
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