Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) have issued new reports doc­u­ment­ing the con­tin­u­ing his­toric decline of the death penal­ty across the United…

For sec­ond time in eight days, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has reversed course after ini­tial­ly reject­ing a death-row prisoner’s claim of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty and has resen­tenced the pris­on­er to life. The deci­sions, both involv­ing for­eign nation­als and both sup­port­ed by local pros­e­cu­tors, marked the sixth and sev­enth time that Texas courts have vacat­ed death sen­tences imposed on intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled cap­i­tal defen­dants since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017…

In the September 30, 2020 episode of the Discussions With DPIC pod­cast, Native American Rights Fund senior staff attor­ney Joel Williams joins Death Penalty Information Center exec­u­tive direc­tor Robert Dunham for a con­ver­sa­tion about trib­al sov­er­eign­ty, the death penal­ty, and the his­toric U.S. Supreme Court rul­ing in McGirt v.

A self-described tough-on-crime Oklahoma state rep­re­sen­ta­tive says has seri­ous doubts as to the reli­a­bil­i­ty of the Sooner State’s death…

The Republic of Kazakhstan has joined the ranks of nations that have for­mal­ly com­mit­ted to abol­ish­ing the death…

The North Carolina Supreme Court has ordered that three African American death-row pris­on­ers who had proven that their death sen­tences vio­lat­ed the state’s since repealed Racial Justice Act (RJA) must be resen­tenced to life impris­on­ment with­out pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole. In three deci­sions issued on September 25, 2020, the court ruled that North Carolina had vio­lat­ed con­sti­tu­tion­al prin­ci­ples of dou­ble jeop­ardy and the pro­hi­bi­tions against after-the-fact…

A new National Public Radio (NPR) analy­sis of more than 200 autop­sies of death-row pris­on­ers exe­cut­ed by lethal injec­tion has found that 84% of those exe­cut­ed showed evi­dence of pul­monary ede­ma, a con­di­tion in which a person’s lungs fill with flu­id that cre­ates the feel­ing of suf­fo­ca­tion or drown­ing that experts have likened to…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has denied habeas cor­pus relief to three Georgia death-row pris­on­ers in a series of opin­ions that nar­row­ly inter­pret­ed the scope of a defendant’s right to effec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the penal­ty phase of a cap­i­tal tri­al. The deci­sions, issued in unre­lat­ed cas­es over the course of 36 hours on September 15 and 16, 2020, absolved court-appoint­ed coun­sel of sig­nif­i­cant fail­ures in inves­ti­gat­ing, pre­sent­ing, and…

The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment con­duct­ed its sixth and sev­enth exe­cu­tions in ten weeks on September 22 and 24, putting William Emmett LeCroy (pic­tured) and Christopher Vialva to death amid con­tin­u­ing chal­lenges to the fed­er­al exe­cu­tion pro­to­col and to car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. As the fed­er­al appeal courts set aside LeCroy’s exe­cu­tion chal­lenges, Vialva’s law­suit chal­leng­ing the legal­i­ty of the fed­er­al exe­cu­tion pro­to­col remained pending in…

Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act show that the fed­er­al government’s choice to bring hun­dreds of peo­ple to the fed­er­al prison com­plex in Terre Haute, Indiana to car­ry out five exe­cu­tions in July and August in the midst of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic like­ly caused a COVID-19 out­break that has already killed three and hospitalized…