Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

In an overwhelming bipartisan vote, the Kentucky House of Representatives has approved a bill that would prohibit the death penalty for people with severe mental illness. On March 1, 2021, the House voted by a margin of 75 – 16 to pass HB 148. The bill received the support of 56 Republicans and 19 Democrats in Kentucky’s Republican-dominated legislature. House Majority Whip Rep. Chad McCoy (R‑Bardstown, pictured), who sponsored the bill, said, “This is not an insanity defense, not taking away…

As supporters of Oklahoma death-row prisoner Julius Jones submitted more than six million signatures supporting his petition for clemency, new evidence emerged that another man had committed the killing that sent Jones to death row. On February 25, 2021, Jones’ supporters joined members of his family and Oklahoma City faith leaders for a rally and march to the offices of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, where they delivered boxes containing petitions signed by more than 6 million people…

Frustrated by the inability to put prisoners to death, legislators in two states are seeking to jumpstart the execution process by changing the laws that govern how executions may be conducted. After gaining little traction in prior legislative sessions, a bill to make electrocution the default method of execution is moving forward in South Carolina, which is approaching ten years since its last execution. In Montana, after a court ruled in 2015 that the drugs in the state’s proposed execution…

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 defeat the prisoners’ court claims…

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 impose a moratorium on…

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 punishment. The Virginia Senate passed HB…

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 State. “Like so many Ohioans, I once supported capital punishment and over time, with prayer and reflection have come to believe it’s the wrong policy for the state of Ohio,” said Sen. Steve Huffman (R – Tipp City…

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 found. On February 18, 2021, the U.S. reached 225 days since Texas executed Billy Wardlow on July 8, 2020, the last state execution conducted since the COVID-19 pandemic. That interval surpassed the 224 days between the September 25, 2007 execution of Michael Richard in Texas and the May 6, 2008 execution of…

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 Epidemic, uses DPIC data and compelling…

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 of…