Publications & Testimony

With two historic votes, the Virginia General Assembly has moved the commonwealth to the cusp of becoming the first Southern state to abolish capital punishment, approving separate bills that would end the state’s death penalty and resentence the two men on death row to life without parole. On February 3, 2021, the Virginia State Senate voted along party lines, 21 – 17, in favor of abolishing capital punishment. Two days later, three Republicans joined all but one Democrat in the Virginia House…

Lawyers for the daughter of a man executed by Tennessee have asked a state appeals court to permit DNA testing that could prove his innocence. In a virtual hearing before the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals on February 3, 2021 (see picture), former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement urged the court to order DNA testing that, he argued, could exonerate Sedley Alley. Alley, who was executed in 2006, had been convicted of rape and murder in the death of 19-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Suzanne…

The Virginia Senate moved the commonwealth one step closer to becoming the first Southern state to abolish capital punishment, voting 21 – 17 on February 3, 2021 to approve a bill that would end the state’s death penalty and resentence the two men on death row to life without parole. The party-line vote clears a major hurdle in the commonwealth’s historic effort at abolition. The bill could see a vote in the House of Delegates as soon as February 5, after a companion measure passed the House…

The Federal Bureau of Prisons spent nearly $4.7 million dollars on the first five executions carried out by the Trump administration in July and August 2020, according to redacted government financial records recently obtained by the ACLU. The government’s January 2021 disclosures in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, detailed the extraordinarily high price tag absorbed by taxpayers as a result of the administration’s choice to conduct executions during the worst global…

A majority of Ohioans support repeal of the state’s death penalty, a newly released statewide poll suggests. Fifty-four percent of Ohioans responding to an on-line poll by the Tarrance Group said they preferred some form of life in prison over the death penalty (34%) as the punishment for murder. Fifty-one percent said they supported replacing Ohio’s death penalty with a punishment of life without possibility of parole, rising to 59% when respondents were provided information about Ohio’s…

Despite being under federal court order to undertake protective measures against the spread of COVID-19, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) took no action after being alerted that two reporters who had been media witnesses to the federal executions at the Federal Correctional Complex at Terre Haute, Indiana in January 2021 had contracted COVID-19. Emails obtained by the Death Penalty Information Center (see pictures) show that Indiana Public Media reporter George Hale notified Bureau of…

Throughout January, DPIC ran an 11-part infographic series looking back on The Death Penalty in 2020. The graphics covered subjects including sentencing and execution trends, death-penalty repeal, exonerations, problematic executions, the election of reform prosecutors, and the federal execution spree, among others. You can see the entire series on the Death Penalty Information Center Facebook page at this link. Throughout January, DPIC ran our 12-part infographic series looking back on The…

NEWS (1/28/21) — California: The California Supreme Court has upheld the conviction and death sentence imposed on Salvadoran national Irving Ramirez for killing a San Leandro police officer in July 2005. Ramirez admitted to having shot the officer but argued that he was heavily intoxicated and lacked the mental state to be guilty of premeditated murder. The court rejected Ramirez’s claim that his intoxication negated the intent to kill required for first-degree murder under California law and…

From July 14, 2020 through January 16, 2021, the federal government executed thirteen prisoners. It was the most consecutive executions by a single jurisdiction since the U.S. death penalty resumed in the 1970s and the longest period of time in which an execution spree by any government went unabated while no other jurisdiction executed anyone. During that time, the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly intervened to facilitate executions, despite numerous disputed issues of material fact and…

Developments in three federal capital cases at the transition between presidential administrations illustrate the choices that the new Biden Department of Justice will face in formulating its policy on the federal death penalty. The cases, each at a critical turning point in determining whether to move forward in a potentially capital prosecution, will shed light on the strength of the DOJ leadership’s commitment to implementing the president’s pledge to end the federal death penalty. On…