Entries by Hayley Bedard

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,…

In a July 8, 2026 op-ed pub­lished in the Kansas Reflector, Celeste Dixon, a retired U.S. Navy reservist and National Park Service employ­ee who lives in Pawnee County, Kansas, calls on Governor Laura Kelly to com­mute the sen­tences of the nine men on Kansas’ death row to life with­out parole. Writing from per­son­al expe­ri­ence, Ms. Dixon notes that near­ly 40 years ago, her moth­er, Marguerite, was mur­dered in Texas; almost 19 years ago, the indi­vid­ual who killed her mother was…

On July 7, 2026, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee told mem­bers of the media that the state’s sched­uled exe­cu­tions will pro­ceed with­out any changes to the lethal injec­tion pro­to­col, despite the state’s failed attempt to exe­cute Tony Carruthers in May. Gov. Lee stat­ed that the exe­cu­tion team fol­lowed the prop­er pro­to­col dur­ing the attempt­ed exe­cu­tion and that the prob­lem was with locat­ing a suit­able vein for an IV line, rather than with the pro­to­col itself.​“I think, as we…

In a let­ter dat­ed June 25, 2026, a group of nine Tennessee Republican sen­a­tors called on Governor Bill Lee to com­mis­sion an inde­pen­dent review of the failed exe­cu­tion of Tony Carruthers, to order the cor­rec­tion of​“every defi­cien­cy” found in this review, and to make infor­ma­tion about the exe­cu­tion team pub­licly avail­able​“so that the Department [of Corrections’] readi­ness can be inde­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fied.” While the sen­a­tors main­tain their sup­port for the…

Florida exe­cut­ed Dusty Ray Spencer on June 25, 2026, mak­ing him the old­est per­son put to death in the state since the rein­state­ment of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in 1976. Mr. Spencer, 74, was the ninth per­son exe­cut­ed in Florida in 2026, fol­low­ing a record of 19 exe­cu­tions in 2025. The state has sched­uled two exe­cu­tions for July: Dennis Sochor, 74, is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on July 14 for the 1981 mur­der of Patricia Gifford in Broward County; Dominick Occhicone, 80, is…