Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The Georgia Supreme Court is considering a challenge to the uniquely high burden of proof the state imposes on capital defendants and death-row prisoners to determine whether they are ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. On March 23, 2021, the court heard argument in a case brought by Rodney Young, a death-row prisoner who asserts that Georgia’s harsh standard unconstitutionally subjects defendants with intellectual disability to capital prosecution and possible…

Describing capital punishment as an “inherently flawed” and “abhorrent practice,” United Nations human rights experts have called on President Joe Biden to take action to end the death penalty in the U.S. In a statement issued from the Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland on March 11, 2021, the rights experts said the death penalty “serves no deterrent value and cannot be reconciled with the right to life.” A press release from the High Commissioner’s…

Saying “[t]here is no place today for the death penalty in this commonwealth, in the South, or in this nation,” Governor Ralph Northam (pictured) signed historic legislation making Virginia the 23^rd U.S. state and the first in the South to abolish capital punishment. Governor Northam signed the bill in a March 24, 2021 ceremony at the Greensville Correctional Center, where the commonwealth’s execution chamber had been located since 1991. With Virginia’s abolition, a majority of U.S. states…

The United States Supreme Court has granted a Department of Justice request filed during the administration of President Donald Trump to review a federal appeals court decision that overturned the death sentences imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (pictured) for his role in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more than 250 others. After rescheduling the case for consideration six separate times, the Court agreed on March 22, 2021 to hear the government’s…

A group of business leaders have launched a campaign calling for an end to capital punishment. Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson (pictured) announced the initiative at the virtual South By Southwest festival on March 18, 2021, saying, “The death penalty is broken beyond repair and plainly fails to deliver justice by every reasonable measure. It is marred by cruelty, waste, ineffectiveness, discrimination and an unacceptable risk of error. … By speaking out at this crucial moment, business…

The movement to repeal capital punishment in Ohio has gained additional steam as former Governor Robert Taft and former state attorneys general Jim Petro and Lee Fisher (pictured, left to right) called on the Ohio state legislature to end the state’s death penalty. The three former state officials served together in the legislature when Ohio adopted its capital punishment statute in 1981 and later played key roles in carrying it out. In a March 9, 2021 guest column in The Columbus Dispatch…

A New York City judge has released three men from prison after 24 years imprisonment for murder, finding that a high-ranking prosecutor in the Queens County District Attorney’s office deliberately concealed exculpatory evidence while pursuing the death penalty against a teenage defendant. On March 5, 2021, Justice Joseph Zayas, the Administrative Judge of the Queens County Supreme Court, granted a joint request by the Queens County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit and lawyers for…

More than a dozen former Alabama prosecutors, judges, and state bar presidents have filed briefs in a Birmingham court calling for a new trial for Alabama death-row prisoner Toforest Johnson (pictured, center, with family members). The extraordinary filings join Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr in supporting efforts by lawyers from the Southern Center for Human Rights, the University of California-Berkeley Law School Death Penalty Clinic, and the Innocence Project to free Johnson…

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has voided the convictions of a second death-row prisoner who was unlawfully tried and condemned in the Oklahoma state courts for an offense that occurred on Native American tribal lands. On March 11, 2021, applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2020 tribal sovereignty ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Oklahoma appeals court vacated Shaun Bosse’s convictions and death sentences for the murders of three citizens of the Chickasaw Nation within the…

In the United States, the responsibility for defining what is a crime and enforcing the criminal laws rests primarily with the states. That fact, New York Times columnist Charles Blow (pictured) writes, makes action at the state level “[t]he true frontier of criminal justice equality.” From cash bail to the death penalty, Blow says, “[i]f the criminal justice system is to move toward racial equality and liberation this change will have to start with the states.” Blow’s February 24, 2021…