Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

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 incarceration. In early September 2021, former death-row prisoner Robert Miller reached a $2 million settlement with Oklahoma City…

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 years. Rhoades was sentenced to death in Harris County in 1992. With 130 executions since the 1970s, the county is responsible for putting more prisoners to death than any other county in the nation, and for more…

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 convictions. The briefs, filed on September 22, 2021, urge the court to…

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 appeals. In an unsigned opinion and order with no dissents, the TCCA on September 22, 2021 granted Young’s petition for a new trial. “Judicial and prosecutorial misconduct — in the form of an undisclosed employment relationship between the trial judge and the prosecutor appearing…

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 resentenced. In a ruling issued on September 16, 2021, the court reversed the death sentence imposed on Samuel Howard in 1983 for a 1980 robbery and murder in Las Vegas, holding that the sole remaining aggravating circumstance in his case that had made him eligible for the death penalty was invalid. Writing for a unanimous…

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 2022. The death warrants were issued September 20, 2021, 25 days after Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor filed and then revised a motion requesting the execution dates and 40 days after…

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 him. Eric Atkins, vice chair of the Ed Johnson Project committee, which spearheaded the creation of the memorial, said, “Hopefully…

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 case. On September 3, 2021, citing statistical evidence from a study that found that the races of the defendant and the victim have significantly influenced the…

“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 spared. Acker is an emeritus distinguished teaching professor in the University of Albany’s School of Criminal Justice and Stull is a senior staff…

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 penalty. In an open letter to Cox and the legislature released September 14, 2021, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, Grand County Attorney Christina Sloan, Summit County Attorney Margaret Olson, and Utah County Attorney David Leavitt — two Republicans and two Democrats…