Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has removed a senior prison official from his position as a death-row counselor in the wake of charges that he used an anonymous Twitter account to troll a death-penalty activist and to mock federal death-row prisoners. Andrew Sutton, a Special Confinement Unit (SCU) Counselor at the Federal Correctional Complex — Terre Haute, was quietly reassigned after he was linked to a Twitter account named fozzythebear that, a lawsuit alleges, disparaged, defamed, and…

One week before the federal government intends to put three prisoners to death, two of the scheduled executions remain in doubt after rulings by federal courts in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. The scheduled January 12, 2021 execution of Lisa Montgomery (pictured, left) appeared to be back on after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed a district court ruling that had vacated her execution date. At the same time, the scheduled January 15, 2021 execution of…

Romell Broom (pictured), who survived a botched execution attempt in September 2009, has died on Ohio’s death row of suspected COVID-19 complications. He was 64 years old and had spent more than half his life on death row. A Department of Rehabilitation and Correction spokesperson said Broom died on December 28, 2020. Corrections authorities placed him on their “COVID probable list” of prisoners suspected to have died of COVID-19, pending final confirmation of his cause of death. At least 17…

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has amended its professional code of ethics to prohibit members from designing execution chambers or spaces to be used for torture, including long-term solitary confinement. “We are committed to promoting the design of a more equitable and just built world that dismantles racial injustice and upholds human rights,” said AIA 2020 President Jane Frederick. “AIA members are required to uphold the health, safety and welfare of the public. Spaces for…

Saying the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) acted unlawfully in resetting Lisa Montgomery’s execution for January 12, 2021, a federal judge in Washington has for a second time blocked efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice to put to death the only woman on federal death row. In an order issued late in the day on December 24, 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Randolph D. Moss agreed with Montgomery’s lawyers that the BOP lacked legal authority to reschedule Montgomery’s execution while a…

Fueled by at least 16 COVID-19 deaths and a record-low number of new death sentences caused by the cancelation or postponement of capital trials, the population of U.S. death row dipped 3.4% in the year spanning October 2019 through September 2020, according to the latest quarterly death-row census by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). The Death Penalty Information Center’s analysis of the Fall 2020 edition of LDF’s Death Row USA — released in mid-December 2020 — found that 86…

The Texas Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the state’s comptroller had no authority to deny death-row exoneree Alfred Dewayne Brown’s application for compensation after a trial court had declared him “actually innocent.” The court ruled on December 18, 2020 that Texas law entitled Brown to compensation for the twelve years he was imprisoned after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of a store clerk and a Houston police officer. Brown spent nine years on…

Two men scheduled for execution by the federal government in January 2021 are among the federal death-row prisoners who have tested positive for COVID-19 at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. Lawyers for Corey Johnson (pictured, left) and Dustin Higgs (pictured, below), announced that they had been notified by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) that their clients had contracted the coronavirus, amidst an outbreak of the disease at the prison in the wake of the federal…

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the human rights body charged with overseeing Western Hemisphere nations’ compliance with human rights obligations, has called on the United States to halt the scheduled January 12, 2021 execution of Lisa Montgomery. Citing Montgomery’s history of extreme trauma and mental illness and the irreversibility of execution, the IACHR ruled on December 1, 2020, that Montgomery had presented serious claims that her execution and her current…

A former Pennsylvania death-row prisoner has been freed, one month after the trial court barred his retrial because of “egregious” prosecutorial misconduct by the county district attorney. On December 1, 2020, Berks County Court of Common Pleas Judge Eleni Dimitriou Geishauser formally dismissed all charges against Roderick Johnson in the 1996 double-murder of cousins Damon and Gregory Banks in Reading, Pennsylvania and issued an order discharging him from custody. Johnson was freed after the…