What's New
Lethal Injection Controversy Unresolved in Missouri and Other States
Posted: September 13, 2006A federal District Court judge ruled that Missouri's proposed changes to its lethal injection process still do not meet the constitutional requirments under the Eighth Amendment. Judge Fernando Gaitan ruled on September 12 that Missouri may use a doctor in good standing to preside over executions rather than requiring a board-certified anesthesiologist, as he first ordered in the case of Michael Taylor. However, other aspects of Missouri's new protocol still do not sufficiently protect against the risk of a cruel and unusual punishment. Judge Gaitan gave the state until October 27 to submit revised protocols.
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BOOKS: "Back from the Dead" by Joan Cheever
Posted: September 12, 2006Back From The Dead: One woman’s search for the men who walked off America’s death
row is the story of 589 former death row inmates who, through a lottery of fate, were given a second chance at life in 1972 when the death penalty was abolished. Joan Cheever, a former editor of the National Law Journal, who also represented a death row inmate in Texas, traveled the country interviewing inmates who had been condemned to death but whose sentences were reduced to life when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia in 1972.
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Rwanda Likely to End Death Penalty to Bring Closure to War
Posted: September 12, 2006The Justice Minister of Rwanda, Tharcisse Karugarama, announced that the country will likely pass a law by December 2006 ending capital punishment. This move would allow Rwanda to try suspects charged with atrocities in the 1994 war who are currently in countries that refuse to extradite prisoners if they face the death penalty. Karugarama said that abolition was necessary in order to achieve a sense of closure. Unless the country abolishes the death penalty, countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland will not extradite suspects to be tried in Rwanda's national courts. Only the U.S. has extradited a suspect to Rwanda. Suspects held under United Nations auspices also cannot be sent to Rwanda if the death penalty is to be sought.
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Justice Department Reports Decrease in Violent Crime in 2005
Posted: September 10, 2006The BJS survey of crime victimization does not include homicides.
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Texas Editorials Call for Independent Investigation of Possible Wrongful Execution
Posted: September 6, 2006Two of Texas's main newspapers have called for an independent investigation into the case of Ruben Cantu, who was executed in Texas in 1993. New evidence revealed in the Houston Chronicle earlier in the year has thrown considerable doubt on the guilt of Cantu. Susan Reed, the District Attorney of Bexar County where Cantu was tried, has refused to step down as head of the county's investigation, even though, as a judge, she signed Cantu's death warrant, an apparent conflict of interest. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to require her to recuse herself.
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New Government Study Finds Over Half of Inmates Have Mental Problems
Posted: September 6, 2006According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics study released September 6, more than half of all prison and jail inmates, including 56% of state prisoners, 45% of federal prisoners, and 64% of local jail inmates have mental health problems. The study was based on reporting of symptoms by inmates rather than through medical diagnosis. Among state prisoners with mental problems, 43% had symptoms of mania, 23% had major depression, and 15% had psychotic disorders. Having mental health problems was closely correlated with violence and past criminal activity.
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Costs and Geography Contribute to Death Penalty's Arbitrariness
Posted: September 5, 2006The death penalty is rarely sought in the city of Baltimore, but in adjoining Baltimore County almost every eligible case becomes a capital case. Presently, there are 7 active death-penalty cases in Baltimore County, more than the city of Baltimore has had overall in the past 2 decades. In addition to the different philosophies of the respective State's Attorneys, the costs of the death penalty are a significant factor. Prosecutors estimate that a death penalty case costs taxpayers $500,000, just for the trial and penalty phases. Donald Giblin, one of Baltimore's prosecutors, noted:
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Executions in 2006
Posted: September 1, 2006There have been 41 executions in 2006 as of September 5. This is a pace comparable to last year's, when there were 60 executions. Eighty percent of the executions have been in the South, keeping with a pattern since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Almost half of all executions (20 of 41) have been in one state, Texas. Only about 20% of those executed had killed a black victim, even though about half of all murder victims in the U.S. are black. This underrepresentation of black-victim cases has also been a consistent pattern since the death penalty returned. No clemencies have been granted in 2006. Many executions have been put on hold due to challenges to the lethal injection process.
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Texas May Release Former Death Row Inmate
Posted: September 1, 2006Anthony Graves, who was sentenced to death in Texas in 1994, may soon be released on bail. Graves' conviction was overturned in March 2006 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit because prosecutors had withheld two pieces of important evidence from Graves' attorneys prior to his trial. One of the main witnesses against Graves, a co-defendant who participated in the crime, recanted his earlier testimony. The federal court has given Texas until September 12, 2006 to either retry Graves or to dismiss charges. Texas requested more time because it has appealed the 5th Circuit ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the request was denied.
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NEW BOOKS: Death Sentences in Missouri, 1803-2005
Posted: August 31, 2006- Read more
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Latest News
NEWS (7/20): Ohio Governor John Kasich has commuted Raymond Tibbetts’s death sentence to life without possibility of parole. Kasich said he granted the commutation because “fundamental flaws in sentencing phase of [Tibbetts’s] trial … prevented the jury from making an informed decision about whether Tibbetts deserved the death penalty." Kasich also issued a reprieve of Cleveland Jackson’s September 13 execution, rescheduling it for May 29, 2019. See Clemency.
NEWS (7/19): The California Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Steve Woodruff for the murder of a Riverside County police officer, but unanimously voted to overturn his death sentence. The court ruled that the trial judge had improperly struck a prospective juror from service based upon his statement on the jury questionnaire that he was opposed to the death penalty, without having asked the juror whether he could set aside those beliefs and follow the law.
NEWS (7/19): Montana prosecutors have dropped the death penalty against Lloyd Barrus in the murder of a sheriff's deputy. The decision comes in the wake of a June ruling by the trial judge that Barrus was mentally incompetent to stand trial. No one has been sentenced to death in Montana since 1996.
NEWS (7/18): Ohio has executed Robert Van Hook. Ohio has set 18 execution dates for 2018. This was the first of those warrants to be carried out, and the 14th execution in the United States in 2018. Three other Ohio death warrants are pending, 12 have been rescheduled for 2019 or later, one death sentence was commuted, and one execution was halted by reprieve. See Outcomes of Death Warrants in 2018.
NEWS (7/17): Texas has executed Christopher Young. He was the eighth prisoner executed by Texas so far this year. See Execution List 2018.
NEW DISCUSSIONS WITH DPIC PODCAST — Professor Carol Steiker Offers an Inside Look at the Supreme Court and the History and Future of America’s Death Penalty.
Harvard Law Professor Carol Steiker, co-author of the highly acclaimed book, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment, joins DPIC’s Robin Konrad for a provocative discussion of the past and future of America’s death penalty. Professor Steiker takes us inside the walls of the court for insights on the justices’ approaches to capital-punishment jurisprudence. She explains the relationship between lynching and the rise of the modern death penalty in the United States, discusses the plunge in death-penalty usage since the 1990s, and offers thoughts on the future prospects for capital punishment in America.
NEWS (7/12): The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit has overturned the death sentence imposed upon Pennsylvania death-row prisoner, Seifullah Abdul-Salaam, ruling that his lawyer provided ineffective representation in a one-day penalty hearing.
NEWS (7/11): A Clark County, Nevada District Court granted a temporary restraining order against the Nevada Department of Corrections that barred the state from using midazalom manufactured by the drug company Alvogen in the scheduled execution of Scott Dozier. The court also stayed Dozier's execution, which would have been the first in Nevada in more than a decade.
NEWS (7/11): The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has granted habeas corpus relief to Arizona death-row prisoner Michael White. The court ruled that his penalty-phase counsel had provided ineffective assistance by failing to challenge the prosecution's aggravating circumstance that the murder had purportedly been committed for pecuniary gain and for failing to investigate and present available mitigating evidence.
NEWS (7/9): Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has been nominated to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy caused by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy.
MID-YEAR UPDATE—As of June 30, 2018, there have been 12 executions in the United States, carried out by 4 states. 33 execution dates had been scheduled to take place in 8 states during that time period. 21 of the scheduled executions have been halted or rescheduled, including one called off in Alabama after executioneers were unable to set an intravenous execution line. 15 additional death warrants are currently pending. At the mid-year point in 2017, there had been 13 executions, carried out by 6 states. For the entire year in 2017, there were 23 executions in 8 states. See Outcomes of Death Warrants in 2018.
NEWS (7/6): Japan has secretly executed Shoko Asaharacult, founder of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, and six cult followers who were convicted of involvement in a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 that killed 13 and injured hundreds. Japan does not provide prisoners, their lawyers, or their family advance notice of their execution date or inform the public of executions until after they are carried out.
NEWS (7/6): A jury in U.S. Air Force capital court martial resentencing proceedings has sentenced former Air Force senior airman Andrew Witt to life without possibility of parole. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces—the nation's highest military court—overtuned Witt's death sentence on July 19, 2016, and remanded the case for a new sentencing hearing. With Witt's resentencing, there are now four prisoners on the U.S. Military death row. See U.S. Miltary Death Sentences.
NEWS (7/5): Air Force Col. Vance Spath, the military judge presiding over the Guantánamo military commission death-penalty proceedings in the USS Cole case, announced his retirement effective November 1. Spath had summarily convicted Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker of contempt after Baker, the chief defense counsel for the military commissions, allowed civilian Guantánamo defense lawyers to resign from the case when they discovered a listening device in their client meeting room. A federal court later reversed that conviction. In February, Spath halted all pretrial proceedings in the case pending clairification from a higher court of the extent of his authority to act in the case.
NEWS (7/2): The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit has upheld the death sentence imposed on Kevin Underwood in Oklahoma, despite the presentation of unconstitutional testimony that the victim's family wanted a death sentence to be imposed. The appeals court ruled that the constitutional violation was "harmless error."
SUPREME COURT NEWS: Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced that he is retiring from the United States Supreme Court. His replacement is expected to be nominated and confirmed this Fall.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in four significant capital cases, letting stand lower-court decisions that had denied relief to death-row prisoners.
On June 28, the Court denied petitions for certiorari filed in two Mississippi death-penalty cases. In Evans v. Mississippi, the Court declined to review a claim raised by Timothy Evans that his death sentence violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments because of the geographic arbitrariness of the death penalty in Mississippi.
In Jordan v. Mississippi, the Court denied a challenge brought by Richard Jordan that his incarceration on death row for more than four decades constituted cruel and unusual punishment when state prosecutors themselves had agreed at an earlier stage of his case that a sentence of life without parole was appropriate and more than half of the time he had spent on death row was attributable to repeated constitutional violations in three previous capital-sentencing trials. Justice Breyer dissented.
On June 26, in Tharpe v. Sellers, the Court declined to review Georgia death-row prisoner Keith Tharpe’s claim that the Georgia courts had improperly ignored a prior ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court when they refused to reconsider his claim that he had been unconstitutionally sentenced to death by a jury that included a racist white juror who used a racial epithet to describe African Americans and doubted whether black people “even had souls.”
In Reed v. Texas, the Court declined to review Texas death-row prisoner Rodney Reed’s claim that the Texas courts had violated due process in denying him DNA testing of evidence he alleged could prove his innocence. See U.S. Supreme Court.
NEWS (6/28): This date marked the 25th anniversary of the first death-row DNA exoneration. On June 28, 1993, Kirk Bloodsworth was freed from prison in Maryland. He was the 48th death-row exoneration in the modern era. Since 1973, 162
men and women in the U.S. have been exonerated after having been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. DNA has exonerated 20 of them. See Innocence.
DPIC 2017 Year End Report
Death Sentences, Executions Second Lowest in a Quarter Century
Resources
- Full text of the report.
- DPIC's Press Release.
- INFOGRAPHIC: "The Death Penalty in the U.S.".
- AUDIO: Clips.
- GRAPHICS: Individual Downloads as PNG or SVG files.
- 2017 Death Sentences by Name, Race, and County
From DPIC
"DPIC Podcasts
DPIC Podcast Series: We have begun a new set of podcasts on the death penalty in each state, each with interesting historical facts. The following are now available: Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota, Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, District of Columbia, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. Check out our podcasts now! Also listen to DPIC's podcasts on death penalty issues.
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