DPIC Special Reports

The thir­teen exe­cu­tions sched­uled in Texas in the last five months of 2019 raise trou­bling ques­tions as to whether the state is exe­cut­ing the most moral­ly cul­pa­ble indi­vid­u­als for the worst of the worst crimes or the most vul­ner­a­ble pris­on­ers and pris­on­ers who were pro­vid­ed the worst legal process. Among those sched­uled for exe­cu­tion were two men with strong claims of inno­cence, two who did not direct­ly kill any­one, but were sen­tenced to death under Texas’ con­tro­ver­sial ​“law of par­ties,” and eight who exhib­it­ed sig­nif­i­cant men­tal or emo­tion­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties as…

A record 151 men and women were exon­er­at­ed across the United States in 2018, accord­ing to the National Registry of Exonerations’ 2018 annu­al report on wrong­ful con­vic­tions. The report, Exonerations in 2018, includ­ed 68 exon­er­a­tions result­ing from wrong­ful homi­cide con­vic­tions. A DPIC analy­sis of data accom­pa­ny­ing the report shows that at least five peo­ple were exon­er­at­ed in 2018 after hav­ing been wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed in cas­es that involved the mis­use or threat­ened use of the death penal­ty, includ­ing 2018 death-row exonerees Vicente Benavides and Clemente Aguirre.

For more infor­ma­tion about upcom­ing exe­cu­tions, see DPIC’s Upcoming Executions page, which is reg­u­lar­ly updat­ed on busi­ness days.Ohio had sched­uled 27 exe­cu­tions to take place between July 2017 and September 2020. The first exe­cu­tion took place July 26, 2017.On September 1, 2017, the Governor revised the dates in 19 of the 26 sched­uled exe­cu­tions, which pushed out the dates through April 2022.On February 19, 2019, Governor Mike DeWine announced that Ohio will not car­ry out any of the sched­uled exe­cu­tions until it devis­es a new exe­cu­tion pro­to­col that is approved by…