Entries by Hayley Bedard

On August 25, 2026, the Ohio Parole Board rec­om­mend­ed, fol­low­ing a full clemen­cy hear­ing a week ear­li­er, that Governor Mike DeWine grant death-sen­­­tenced pris­on­er Tyrone Noling a com­mu­ta­tion and parole eli­gi­bil­i­ty begin­ning January 1, 2029. Mr. Noling had asked the parole board for a full par­don, but the board, in a split vote, instead rec­om­mend­ed a sen­tence com­mu­ta­tion and parole eli­gi­bil­i­ty. Mr. Noling has spent 30 years on Ohio’s death row for the murders of…

On August 11, 2026, for­mer North Carolina death-sen­­­tenced pris­on­er Frank Chambers, a Black man, was resen­tenced to two con­sec­u­tive life sen­tences in con­nec­tion with the 1992 shoot­ing deaths of an elder­ly white cou­ple in Rowan County. Evidence of sig­nif­i­cant mis­con­duct emerged in Mr. Chambers’ case, and pros­e­cu­tors ulti­mate­ly con­ced­ed that this evi­dence taint­ed the fair­ness of Mr. Chambers’ death sen­tence and led to his resen­tenc­ing. According to his counsel,…

UPDATE: Nathalie Greenfield, an attor­ney for Ms. Andrew, told KGOU that her team would be fil­ing an appeal to the United States Supreme Court with­in the next 90 days. On August 14, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit declined to recon­sid­er Brenda Andrew’s case and the total­i­ty of the evi­dence in deter­min­ing whether her tri­al was fun­da­men­tal­ly unfair — leav­ing in place a pan­el rul­ing that found gen­der-biased evi­dence at her tri­al did not…

On August 11, 2026, the Parliament of Lebanon passed leg­is­la­tion for­mal­ly abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty. The country’s abo­li­tion marks the first coun­try in the Middle East to abol­ish the prac­tice and the sec­ond coun­try among the League of Arab States to do so (Djibouti abol­ished in 1995). A major­i­ty of the mem­bers in Lebanon’s 128-seat Parliament vot­ed in favor of this leg­is­la­tion, with Hezbollah’s par­lia­men­tary bloc vot­ing against it. The leg­is­la­tion will now be…

In a let­ter issued ahead of the exe­cu­tion of James Duckett and Dominick Occhicone on July 28, 2026, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops​“wish[ed] to remind Catholics of the teach­ing of our Church against the use of the death penal­ty in sit­u­a­tions — like our own — where blood­less means are suf­fi­cient to pun­ish offend­ers and pro­tect pub­lic safe­ty.” Noting​“Florida’s alarm­ing rate of exe­cu­tions” and the state’s efforts to expand the death penalty’s scope, the…

On July 30, 2026, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey set a new exe­cu­tion date for Jeffery Lee after the state’s unsuc­cess­ful attempt to exe­cute him using nitro­gen gas in June. Gov. Ivey set Mr. Lee’s exe­cu­tion by lethal injec­tion for September 17, 2026, just over three months after an Alabama fed­er­al judge per­ma­nent­ly blocked the state from using its nitro­gen gas pro­to­col. This new exe­cu­tion date came after U.S. District Judge Emily Marks, the same judge who enjoined the state from…

Missouri has car­ried out exe­cu­tions at one of the high­est rates of any state since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment to resume 50 years ago, accord­ing to a new analy­sis of death sen­tences issued between 1972 and 2025. The Marshall Project, draw­ing on data com­piled by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Frank Baumgartner and the Death Penalty Information Center, found that Missouri has exe­cut­ed more than half of the peo­ple it has sentenced…

In a July 17, 2026, op-ed, for­mer Barack Obama advi­sor Van Jones and for­mer George W. Bush appointee David Safavian joint­ly argue that courts con­tin­ue to accept dis­cred­it­ed foren­sic tech­niques as reli­able evi­dence, con­tribut­ing to wrong­ful con­vic­tions across the coun­try. The authors con­trast the con­fi­dent foren­sic experts seen on tele­vi­sion crime dra­mas with real-world court­rooms where they say,​“pho­ny foren­sics” meth­ods — micro­scop­ic hair com­par­i­son, bite…

On July 20, 2026, attor­neys for death-sen­­­tenced pris­on­er Darrell Hines, in a new fil­ing, asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to con­di­tion­al­ly stay Mr. Hines’ August 13 exe­cu­tion date because the Tennessee Department of Corrections (TDOC) has refused to iden­ti­fy whether it will use the same physi­cian involved in the state’s failed exe­cu­tion attempt of Tony Carruthers. Pointing to an extreme risk of pain and suf­fer­ing, as evi­denced by Mr. Carruthers’ botched execution,…