Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) offi­cials repeat­ed­ly mis­rep­re­sent­ed accounts of the exe­cu­tions they car­ried out in 2020 and 2021, pro­vid­ing san­i­tized descrip­tions of the exe­cu­tions that omit­ted all ref­er­ences to dra­mat­ic body move­ments and signs of dis­tress observed by media wit­ness­es, accord­ing to an Associated Press report. The sworn accounts by exe­cu­tion­ers, which fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors pro­vid­ed to an expert wit­ness and to a fed­er­al dis­trict court judge to…

Expressing con­cerns about wrong­ful con­vic­tions, racial­ly dis­parate impact, and arbi­trari­ness, Attorney General nom­i­nee Merrick Garland (pic­tured) told the Senate Judiciary Committee dur­ing his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing on February 22, 2021 that the death penal­ty has given him ​“great pause.” Garland said that he ​“expect[s] that the President will be giv­ing direc­tion” on the fed­er­al death-penal­­ty pol­i­cy, and that it was ​“not at all unlike­ly” that the Department of Justice would…

Death-penal­­ty repeal leg­is­la­tion in Virginia will move to Governor Ralph Northam’s desk, after both hous­es approved the bill passed ear­li­er in the ses­sion in the oppo­site cham­ber. Virginia’s leg­isla­tive rules required the House of Delegates to pass the Senate bill or vice ver­sa, even though the bill text was iden­ti­cal. Governor Northam has pledged to sign the bill, which will make Virginia the 23^rd state, and the first in the South, to abolish capital…

A bipar­ti­san group of leg­is­la­tors has announced the intro­duc­tion of a bill to repeal Ohio’s death penal­ty. In a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on February 18, 2021, four Republican and four Democratic leg­is­la­tors spoke about the lat­est effort to end cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the Buckeye…

The United States has entered the longest peri­od in 40 years with­out any state car­ry­ing out an exe­cu­tion, an analy­sis of data in the Death Penalty Information Center exe­cu­tion database has…

For the first time in its his­to­ry, National Geographic mag­a­zine has tack­led the sub­ject of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Sentenced to death, but inno­cent, a fea­ture sto­ry in the March 2021 issue of the mag­a­zine, chron­i­cles the sto­ries of fif­teen death-row exonerees and illu­mi­nates the per­va­sive issue of inno­cence and the death penal­ty in the United States. The arti­cle, released on the same day as the Death Penalty Information Center’s new report The Innocence…

New research by the Death Penalty Information Center has found 11 pre­vi­ous­ly unrecord­ed death-row exon­er­a­tions, bring­ing the total num­ber of peo­ple exon­er­at­ed after being wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death to 185. The data now show that for every 8.3 peo­ple who have been put to death in the U.S. since exe­cu­tions resumed in the 1970s, one per­son who had been wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death has been exon­er­at­ed. Wrongful cap­i­tal con­vic­tions occurred in vir­tu­al­ly every part…

Continuing an unpar­al­leled pat­tern of rul­ings adverse to Texas death-row pris­on­ers, a divid­ed U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has rein­stat­ed the con­vic­tion and death sen­tence of a moth­er con­vict­ed of killing her two-year-old daugh­ter in what, the defense has argued, was actu­al­ly an accidental…

In his new book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, jour­nal­ist Maurice Chammah presages the death of America’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem. Chammah expert­ly weaves togeth­er sys­temic issues with indi­vid­ual, human­iz­ing case details to illus­trate the efforts of lawyers, orga­ni­za­tions, and activists who are chal­leng­ing the foun­da­tions of the sys­tem with the goal of abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty. The New York Times called it ​“a case…

Inadequate test­ing, resis­tance to con­tact trac­ing, and poor social dis­tanc­ing prac­tices like­ly made the thir­teen fed­er­al exe­cu­tions in 2020 – 2021 COVID-19 super­spread­er events, the Associated Press has con­clud­ed. In the ten days after the December 10, 2020 exe­cu­tion of Brandon Bernard, 70% of pris­on­ers on fed­er­al death row and hun­dreds of oth­ers incar­cer­at­ed in the Terre Haute Correctional Complex where the exe­cu­tions took place test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19.