Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

A federal appeals court has reversed the death sentence of an African-American Georgia death-row prisoner who was represented at trial by a defense lawyer notorious for his history of substandard representation and racial bias in death-penalty cases. On April 27, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the ruling of a federal district court and overturned the death sentence imposed on Willie James Pye (pictured). In a unanimous but unpublished opinion, the appeals court…

In an overwhelming bipartisan vote, the Texas House of Representatives has passed a bill that ends death-penalty liability under the state’s controversial “law of parties” for felony accomplices who neither kill nor intended that a killing take place and were minor participants in the conduct that led to the death of the victim. Currently, Texas law makes any participant in a felony criminally liable for the acts of everyone else involved in the crime, irrespective of how small a role he played…

One day shy of the tenth anniversary of the state’s last execution, the South Carolina legislature, frustrated by the state’s inability to obtain execution drugs, approved a bill that would authorize putting prisoners to death in the electric chair or by firing squad. On May 5, 2021, the South Carolina House of Representatives voted 66 – 43 to approve Senate Bill 200, bringing the bill closer to final passage. The State Senate passed an earlier version of the bill on March 2 by a vote of 32 – 11.

A former Utah defense lawyer has received a $250,000 settlement after suing Weber County for allegedly firing him in retaliation for his public criticism of the county’s refusal to properly fund a death-row prisoner’s capital appeal and its interference in the case. Samuel Newton (pictured), now a law professor at the University of Idaho, reached a settlement with county officials in a longstanding dispute over the Weber County Commissioners’ termination of his contract to provide criminal…

Finding “brazen misconduct” by a prosecutor who withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and then secretly served as the trial judge’s law clerk in the case, a Midland County, Texas judge has recommended that death-row prisoner Clinton Young (pictured) be granted a new trial. In a 30-page factfinding order issued on April 26, 2021, Senior Judge Sid Harle excoriated former assistant district attorney Ralph Petty and the Midland County District Attorney’s office for “shocking prosecutorial…

Kentucky prosecutors have dropped capital charges against two defendants who had challenged the constitutionality of the death penalty for crimes committed by offenders younger than 21 years old. On April 21, 2021, prosecutors announced that they will no longer seek the death penalty against Efrain Diaz, Jr. and Justin Delone Smith, two of the three adolescents accused of the 2015 killing University of Kentucky student Jonathan Krueger. A third co-defendant, Roman Gonzalez, is not eligible for…

The history of racial oppression and lynching in the U.S. South has, civil rights advocate Martin Luther King III writes, “too frequently … gone untold and unaddressed.” But, he says in an April 17, 2021 op-ed in USA Today, Virginia’s repeal of the death penalty “shows us what is possible when we confront this country’s racist past, and acknowledge how racism permeates this country’s practices and laws.” King (pictured), the eldest son of civil rights icons Coretta Scott King and the Rev. Dr.

As a state legislator in 1981, Jim Petro (pictured) supported a bill to reinstate Ohio’s death penalty after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s previous capital punishment statute. Later, as Ohio Attorney General, he supervised 19 executions in the state. Since then, his views have changed and he recently co-authored an op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch urging the legislature to repeal the state’s death penalty. In the April 2021 episode of the Death Penalty Information Center podcast…

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a Georgia death-penalty case in which the prosecution was permitted to make a visibly shackled defendant reenact the murder in front of the jury, while his defense counsel raised no objection. In a decision issued on April 19, 2021, the Court denied the petition for writ of certiorari filed by lawyers for Georgia death-row prisoner Frederick Whatley (pictured). Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, writing that “counsel’s unreasonable failure to…

The Tennessee state legislature has overwhelmingly approved and sent to the governor a bill that creates a procedure by which death-row prisoners can obtain judicial review of claims that they are ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. On April 26, 2021, HB 1062 passed the Tennessee House by a vote of 89 – 4 and the Senate by a vote of 28 – 1. The bipartisan bill was inspired by the case of Pervis Payne (pictured), a Tennessee death-row prisoner with strong evidence…