Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Death sentences reached their lowest level in the modern era and executions hit a generational low despite an historically anomalous federal execution spree, according to the 2020 Year End Report from the Death Penalty Information Center. As the nation grappled with a deadly pandemic and experienced a reawakening on racial justice, most states put trials and executions on hold. At the same time, ignoring public health warnings and bucking national trends, the federal government carried out ten…

Saying that “[l]ethal injection appears to us to be impossible from a practical point of view today,” Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (pictured) told reporters it is “pretty clear” that the state will not execute anyone in 2021. In a December 8, 2020 year-end interview with Associated Press, DeWine said the state has an “unofficial moratorium” on the death penalty as a result of its inability to procure lethal injection execution drugs and that legislators would have to choose a different method of…

Just hours after taking office, newly elected Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón issued a series of sweeping changes that ended new death-penalty prosecutions and moved towards reconsidering existing death sentences in the county with the nation’s largest death row. The policy changes signaled the potential nationwide impact of local prosecutor elections in 2020, as new reform prosecutors prepare to take the helm in counties that constitute more than 11% of the country’s total death…

The federal government carried out back-to-back executions of Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois on December 10 and 11, 2020, capping the deadliest run of federal executions in the United States in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. According to the Espy file, a database of executions in the U.S. and its colonies between 1608 and 2002, the ten executions since July 14 constitute the most federal civilian executions in a calendar year since the federal government executed sixteen civilian prisoners…

Eight members of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) execution team and a religious advisor have tested positive for the coronavirus after participating in the November 19 execution of Orlando Hall (pictured). The COVID-19 infections, which federal authorities had not previously revealed, came to light in documents produced in a lawsuit two prisoners have filed to halt the remaining federal executions. The Terre Haute federal correctional complex, where federal executions are conducted, is in…

In the December 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot from Emory University Hospital speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about his discoveries from the autopsies of more than 200 executed prisoners. Those autopsies revealed the gruesome effects of execution by lethal injection and shattered the popular myth that lethal injection is a humane and painless execution process. Zivot and Dunham also discuss the ethical…

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 least 68 years. Five of the nine surviving trial jurors in Bernard’s case provided his defense team with videotaped statements or…

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 death penalty. In a joint statement released on December 3, 2020, 95 current and former prosecutors, U.S. Attorneys, police chiefs, and sheriffs wrote that the U.S. death penalty process “is broken, implicates systemic racism…

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 suggests. The review of more than 130 cases involving defendants whose death sentences have been overturned because of the constitutional prohibition against executing persons with intellectual disability found that more than 80% of 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 death row. James Frazier (pictured, left), 79, Ohio’s oldest death-row prisoner, died of the virus on November 19, 2020 after 15 years on death row. He suffered from dementia following a series of strokes, and his lawyers had recently filed a petition to bar his execution on grounds of mental incompetency. Richard “Ricky” Davis (pictured, right), 56, who…