DPIC Reports
Dec 17, 2019
The death penalty has now disappeared from whole regions of the country and continues to erode in others, according to the
Read MoreInnocence
Feb 17, 2020
DNA exonerated Ryan Matthews in 2004, after he had spent five years on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for a murder he did not commit. In December 2019, he received his college degree. “I’m…
Executions Overview
Feb 14, 2020
After a five-year hiatus, Oklahoma has announced plans to resume executions by returning to the same combination of lethal-injection drugs that were part of its execution protocol during a series of botched executions in 2014 and …
Feb 13, 2020
Rocky Myers (pictured) may be innocent and intellectually disabled, and his jury voted to sentence him to life. So why is he facing execution in Alabama? In the February 2020 episode of
Innocence
Feb 13, 2020
The California Supreme Court has granted a new trial to Kenneth Earl Gay, who was sentenced to death in 1985 for the murder of a Los Angeles police officer. In…
Feb 13, 2020
The Florida Supreme Court issued opinions on February 13 denying relief to prisoners in three death penalty cases.…
Recent Legislative Activity
Feb 12, 2020
As state legislatures in Ohio and Washington contemplate the future of their death-penalty statutes, major newspapers in each of the states are advocating legislative repeal. On February 6, 2020, following …
Feb 12, 2020
On February 12, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the death sentence imposed on Charles Brownlow, Jr. in Kaufman County in April 2016. The
Mental Illness
Feb 11, 2020
Andre Thomas (pictured) is a Texas death-row prisoner riven with schizophrenia so severe that, in separate incidents, he gouged out both of his eyes and ate one of them. The U.S. Court of Appeals heard oral argume…
Feb 11, 2020
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania has stayed the execution of Jordan Clemons, which had been scheduled for March 13, 2020. As required by a law enacted by the Pennsylvania legislature in 1995, Clemon…
Race
Feb 10, 2020
Why is the death penalty pursued and imposed in some cases and not in others that, at first glance, seem facially indistinguishable? Surveying the academic literature, Daniel Medwed, the University Distinguished Professor of Law a…
