Entries by Death Penalty Information Center
News
Sep 03, 2020
DPIC Analysis: Federal Execution Spree Out of Step with U.S. Death Penalty Trends and Attitudes
At a time in which the United States as a whole and individual states and counties have continued their long-term movement away from the death penalty, the federal government’s current execution spree has established it as an outlier jurisdiction out of step with the practices of the nation as a…
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Sep 02, 2020
Books: “When Truth Is All You Have” Tells Story of the Centurion Ministries’ Role in the Modern Innocence Movement
When Truth is All You Have, a new memoir by Centurion Ministries founder Jim McCloskey (pictured) tells the story of what many consider to be the birth of the modern innocence movement. The book, written with former USA Today national editor Philip Lerman, and released in July 2020, describes McCloskey’s personal and professional evolution as he created Centurion Ministries in 1983, the first-ever organization dedicated to…
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Sep 01, 2020
Mississippi Supreme Court Grants New Trial to Eddie Howard, Sentenced to Death by Junk Bite-Mark Evidence
The Mississippi Supreme Court has granted a new trial to death-row prisoner Eddie Lee Howard, Jr. (pictured), finding that the combination of scientifically invalid bite-mark evidence used to convict him and new DNA evidence entitled him to a new trial in the 1992 murder and alleged rape of an 84-year-old white…
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Aug 31, 2020
Coronavirus Prison Fatalities Surpass Two Decades of Executions; COVID-19 Has Killed More California Death Row Prisoners Than the State Has Executed in 27 Years
More prisoners in the United States have died in the coronavirus pandemic than have been executed in the country in past two decades, new prison data shows, and more California death-row prisoners have been killed by the virus than have been executed in the state since…
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Aug 28, 2020
Former Florida Death-Row Prisoner Robert DuBoise Freed After DNA Proves His Innocence
A Florida trial court has freed a former death-row prisoner after local prosecutors said new DNA evidence had proven his innocence of the rape and murder for which he was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death 37 years…
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Aug 27, 2020
Ignoring Tribal Sovereignty, Federal Government Executes Native American Death-Row Prisoner Lezmond Mitchell
Over the objections of Native American leaders across the country, the federal government on August 26, 2020 executed Lezmond Mitchell (pictured), the sole Native-American prisoner on federal death row. Mitchell, a Navajo citizen, became the first Native American executed by the federal government for a crime committed against a member of his own tribe on tribal…
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Aug 26, 2020
Autopsy Results Provide ‘Virtual Medical Certainty’ that Prisoners will Experience ‘Excruciating Pain’ During Federal Executions
As the federal government began to carry out the second round of executions it has scheduled for 2020, autopsy results from the first round of executions in July suggest to a “virtual medical certainty” that federal death-row prisoners will experience “excruciating pain” while they are being put to death by lethal injection with…
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Aug 25, 2020
California Supreme Court Overturns Scott Peterson’s Death Sentence
Ruling in one of the most sensationalized trials of the early 2000s, the California Supreme Court has overturned the death sentence imposed on Scott Peterson for the murders of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn son in December 2002. The court upheld Peterson’s convictions for the two…
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Aug 24, 2020
ACLU Lawsuit Seeks Information on Cost and Public Health Risks of Federal Executions
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and American Civil Liberties Foundation have filed a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) seeking a court order requiring the BOP to disclose how much the federal government’s resumption of federal executions is costing taxpayers and what steps the government has undertaken to assess and address the COVID-19 public health risks created by the executions. “As the nation faces both dire public health and economic crises,”…
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Aug 21, 2020
Commentary: Tennessee’s Commitment to Racial Justice Tested as Attorney General Continues to Push for Execution in Case Rife with Racial Bias
Declaring that “[r]acism still exists and has no place in society,” the Tennessee Supreme Court on June 25, 2020 directed its Access to Justice Commission (AJC) to create “a new initiative to identify and eliminate barriers to racial and ethnic fairness and justice.” The court’s pronouncement, at the height of the racial justice protests that swept the nation following the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, was meant to signal its concern about…
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