Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

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 year since 1983. In an order issued November 30, the court wrote that it had “been advised the South Carolina Department of Corrections does not have, and will not…

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 death-row prisoners and granted them new…

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 27, 2020. The regulation, one of numerous last-minute changes in federal practices adopted in the lame-duck period of the Trump Administration, permits the federal government to perform executions using any form of lethal injection “or by any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed or…

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 Penalty. Less than a month later, CDPL…

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 capital punishment. Fifty-five percent of respondents to a national survey conducted between September 30 and October 15, 2020 told Gallup that they were “in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder,” down one percentage point from the levels reported in 2018 and 2019. The figure…

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 to carry out. After the close of business on Friday, November 20, 2020, one day after carrying out the first execution during a presidential transition period in more than a century, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced its intention…

South Carolina has issued a death warrant to execute Richard Moore (pictured) on December 4, 2020, but, his lawyers say, the state has refused to tell him how it intends to carry it out. In a motion to stay Moore’s execution, filed in the South Carolina Supreme Court on November 16, Moore’s lawyers say that “the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) has provided no information about how it intends to carry out the … execution,” preventing Moore from making an intelligent selection…

On November 20, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to conference the case of Calvin McMillan, one of thirty-two Alabama death-row prisoners whose death sentences were imposed by trial judges who overrode jury recommendations to sentence the defendants to life. McMillan has asked the Court to declare the practice unconstitutional, and two jurors who voted for life in judicial override cases and three former state court judges in states that had permitted the practice, have filed…

In a dramatic deviation from historical practices, the Trump Administration is poised to conduct the first federal executions during a lame-duck presidency in more than a century. The Department of Justice has scheduled three federal executions during the administration’s lame-duck period: Orlando Hall on November 19, Lisa Montgomery on December 8, and Brandon Bernard on December 10. The last time the U.S. government carried out an execution between a presidential election and the inauguration…

Lawyers for federal death-row prisoner Orlando Hall (pictured), who is scheduled to be executed on November 19, 2020, have filed a motion to stay his execution based upon evidence that his death sentence was a product of pervasive racial discrimination. In pleadings filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana on November 12, Hall, who is Black, argues that his conviction and death sentence are the unconstitutional product of systemic racial discrimination in the…