Special Reports

In 2020, President Joe Biden promised to end the fed­er­al death penal­ty dur­ing his admin­is­tra­tion and his Attorney General, Merrick Garland, acknowl­edged its many long­stand­ing con­cerns as rea­sons to pause fed­er­al exe­cu­tions pend­ing an inter­nal review of Department of Justice poli­cies and prac­tices. Project 2025, the prod­uct of a polit­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, calls for President Trump to ​“obtain final­i­ty” for all fed­er­al death row pris­on­ers. Before any deci­sion about future use of the…

Missouri is one of a hand­ful of states that has con­sis­tent­ly exe­cut­ed peo­ple in the last five years. In 2023, Missouri exe­cut­ed four peo­ple. Understanding the his­tor­i­cal appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty in Missouri helps our under­stand­ing of how cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is used…

The his­tor­i­cal use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Tennessee shows a clear con­nec­tion between the extra­ju­di­cial lynch­ings of the 1800s and 1900s and the state sanc­tioned death penal­ty prac­tices of today. As one lynch­ing expert notes, “[l]ocal tra­di­tions, sit­u­a­tions, and per­son­al­i­ties must be con­sid­ered in any attempt to explain pat­terns of lynch­ing.…” This empha­sis on local­i­ty par­al­lels mod­ern death penal­ty trends in Tennessee — as well as the rest of the nation — where­in death sen­tenc­ing is heavily…

Oklahoma’s death penal­ty is at a cross­roads. On August 25, 2022, Oklahoma exe­cut­ed the first per­son in a series of 25 exe­cu­tions set to occur near­ly every month through 2024. The pro­ject­ed increase in exe­cu­tions in Oklahoma comes while the death penal­ty is in decline nation­wide; 2021 had the fewest exe­cu­tions since 1988. Furthermore, Oklahoma’s planned exe­cu­tions are sched­uled to move for­ward despite evi­dence that there are seri­ous prob­lems with Oklahoma’s death penal­ty that the state has…