Publications & Testimony

NEWS (12/4/20) — Nevada: The Nevada Supreme Court has overturned the death sentence imposed on Mexican foreign national Carlos Gutierrez. In a 4 – 3 ruling, the court held that Nevada had violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations when police and prosecutors failed to notify Gutierrez of his rights to consular assistance by his government. The court further held, based upon extensive mitigating evidence presented with the assistance of the Mexican government in his post-conviction…

Defendants of color and foreign nationals who are intellectually disabled are disproportionately likely to be sentenced to death, a Death Penalty Information Center analysis of cases involving intellectually disabled defendants suggests. The review of more than 130 cases involving defendants whose death sentences have been overturned because of the constitutional prohibition against executing persons with intellectual disability found that more than 80% of intellectually disabled defendants…

New COVID-19 outbreaks on the nation’s death rows have killed prisoners in Ohio and Missouri and sickened at least 11 men on Tennessee’s death row. James Frazier (pictured, left), 79, Ohio’s oldest death-row prisoner, died of the virus on November 19, 2020 after 15 years on death row. He suffered from dementia following a series of strokes, and his lawyers had recently filed a petition to bar his execution on grounds of mental incompetency. Richard “Ricky” Davis (pictured, right), 56, who…

Saying that the state lacked the ability to carry out a lethal injection, the South Carolina Supreme Court has stayed the scheduled December 4, 2020 execution of Richard Moore (pictured). With no state executions scheduled for the remainder of the year, the stay means that states will carry out fewer executions in 2020 than in any year since 1983. In an order issued November 30, the court wrote that it had “been advised the South Carolina Department of Corrections does not have, and will not…

In two long-awaited decisions that will alter the landscape of Florida’s death row, the Florida Supreme Court has limited the reach of a landmark ruling that overturned the state’s constitutional prohibition against death sentences imposed after a non-unanimous jury vote for death. The court’s January 2020 decision in State v. Poole had raised the specter that the court might rescind orders that had overturned the death sentences of more than 100 Florida death-row prisoners and granted them new…

The range of methods available to the federal government to carry out executions could be expanded under a new Department of Justice regulation published on November 27, 2020. The regulation, one of numerous last-minute changes in federal practices adopted in the lame-duck period of the Trump Administration, permits the federal government to perform executions using any form of lethal injection “or by any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed or…

NEWS (11/26/20) — Florida: A Santa Rosa County judge has sentenced Thomas Fletcher to death for murdering his cellmate in a county prison. Fletcher’s case is emblematic of recent capital sentencing trends in which death sentences have been imposed disproportionally against defendants who waived key procedural protections. Fletcher strangled his cellmate, Kenneth Davis, after Davis told Fletcher he was thinking about committing suicide. State attorney Bill Eddins told reporters that Fletcher…

For the eighth time since 2007, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted a resolution calling for a global moratorium on executions. The resolution passed on November 17, 2020 by a vote of 120 – 39 with 24 countries abstaining. The United States voted against the resolution. The 120 nations supporting the measure matched the record level of support set in 2018. For the first time, the resolution specifically identified women among the groups discriminated against in the application of the…

In the November 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Gretchen Engel (pictured, left), Executive Director of North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), joins Ngozi Ndulue (pictured, below), Senior Director of Research and Special Projects at DPIC, for a discussion of their organizations’ recent reports on race and the death penalty. This fall, DPIC released Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty. Less than a month later, CDPL…

Public support for the death penalty is at its lowest level in a half-century, with opposition higher than any time since 1966, according to the 2020 annual Gallup poll on Americans’ attitudes about capital punishment. Fifty-five percent of respondents to a national survey conducted between September 30 and October 15, 2020 told Gallup that they were “in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder,” down one percentage point from the levels reported in 2018 and 2019. The figure…