Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

As the December 10, 2020 exe­cu­tion date of fed­er­al death-row pris­on­er Brandon Bernard (pic­tured with his fam­i­ly) approached, jurors and a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor in his case came for­ward say­ing that the teen offender’s life should be spared. Bernard, who was 18 years old at the time of the offense, became the youngest offend­er exe­cut­ed by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in at…

Saying​“our nation’s long exper­i­ment with the death penal­ty has failed,” a coali­tion of near­ly 100 crim­i­nal jus­tice offi­cials is call­ing on the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to halt the five exe­cu­tions cur­rent­ly sched­uled for December 2020 and January 2021 and to end its use of the…

Defendants of col­or and for­eign nation­als who are intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly like­ly to be sen­tenced to death, a Death Penalty Information Center analy­sis of cas­es involv­ing intel­lec­tu­al­ly disabled defendants…

New COVID-19 out­breaks on the nation’s death rows have killed pris­on­ers in Ohio and Missouri and sick­ened at least 11 men on Tennessee​’s…

Saying that the state lacked the abil­i­ty to car­ry out a lethal injec­tion, the South Carolina Supreme Court has stayed the sched­uled December 4, 2020 exe­cu­tion of Richard Moore (pic­tured). With no state exe­cu­tions sched­uled for the remain­der of the year, the stay means that states will car­ry out few­er exe­cu­tions in 2020 than in any…

In two long-await­­­ed deci­sions that will alter the land­scape of Florida’s death row, the Florida Supreme Court has lim­it­ed the reach of a land­mark rul­ing that over­turned the state’s con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tion against death sen­tences imposed after a non-unan­i­­­mous jury vote for death. The court’s January 2020 deci­sion in State v. Poole had raised the specter that the court might rescind orders that had over­turned the death sen­tences of more than 100 Florida…

The range of meth­ods avail­able to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to car­ry out exe­cu­tions could be expand­ed under a new Department of Justice reg­u­la­tion pub­lished on November…

In the November 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Gretchen Engel (pic­tured, left), Executive Director of North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), joins Ngozi Ndulue (pic­tured, below), Senior Director of Research and Special Projects at DPIC, for a dis­cus­sion of their orga­ni­za­tions’ recent reports on race and the death penal­ty. This fall, DPIC released Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death…

Public sup­port for the death penal­ty is at its low­est lev­el in a half-cen­­­tu­ry, with oppo­si­tion high­er than any time since 1966, accord­ing to the 2020 annu­al Gallup poll on Americans’ attitudes about…

Despite its defeat at the polls on November 3, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is press­ing for­ward with efforts to con­duct an his­tor­i­cal­ly unprece­dent­ed num­ber of lame duck exe­cu­tions and in announc­ing new fed­er­al cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tions that it will not be in position…