Publications & Testimony

A new papal encyclical letter tells Catholics around the world that “[t]here can be no stepping back” from the Church’s formal opposition to the death penalty. Pope Francis’ October 3, 2020 encyclical, entitled Fratelli Tutti, rejected capital punishment as a “false answer[] that … ultimately do[es] no more than introduce new elements of destruction in the fabric of national and global society.” Citing centuries of death-penalty opposition by leading Catholic scholars and clergy and calling…

The Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) have issued new reports documenting the continuing historic decline of the death penalty across the United States. On September 29, 2020, BJS released Capital Punishment, 2018 – Statistical Tables, documenting that death row in the United States has decreased in size for 18 consecutive years from 2001 to 2018. Two days later, on October 1, 2020, LDF followed with the…

NEWS (10/1/20) — Washington, D.C.: The federal government has scheduled an eighth execution for 2020, setting a November 19 execution date for Orlando Hall. Hall’s case would be the first federal execution in more than a half-century for the killing of an African-American victim and the second consecutive execution of an African-American prisoner after the executions of five white prisoners and the sole Native American on federal death row. There are currently 55 prisoners on the federal death…

In a 5 – 4 decision, the Supreme Court declined to overturn James Erin McKinney’s Arizona death sentences. McKinney was sentenced to death in 1993 for the killings of two people in the course of a series of burglaries. McKinney’s mitigation evidence included evidence of a childhood filled with instability, abuse, and neglect. This severe childhood abuse resulted in McKinney being diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”). At the time McKinney was tried, Arizona did not allow for jury…

For second time in eight days, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has reversed course after initially rejecting a death-row prisoner’s claim of intellectual disability and has resentenced the prisoner to life. The decisions, both involving foreign nationals and both supported by local prosecutors, marked the sixth and seventh time that Texas courts have vacated death sentences imposed on intellectually disabled capital defendants since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 struck down the…

In the September 30, 2020 episode of the Discussions With DPIC podcast, Native American Rights Fund senior staff attorney Joel Williams joins Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robert Dunham for a conversation about tribal sovereignty, the death penalty, and the historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma. Williams, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, explains how 2020 has been a landmark year on the question of tribal sovereignty and the death penalty. He and…

A self-described tough-on-crime Oklahoma state representative says has serious doubts as to the reliability of the Sooner State’s death penalty. “As taxpayers and voters,” Republican State Representative Kevin McDugle (pictured) writes in a September 5, 2020 commentary in the Tulsa World, “we are all participating in this decision to kill — each of us has a finger on the needle that injects the poison. … These are life-and-death decisions that must be made with life-and-death accuracy.”

The Republic of Kazakhstan has joined the ranks of nations that have formally committed to abolishing the death penalty. On September 23, 2020, in conjunction with the 75^th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Kazakhstani President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced that the country had signed the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which commits signatory nations to abolish the death penalty. The action was taken as a step “[t]o…

The North Carolina Supreme Court has ordered that three African American death-row prisoners who had proven that their death sentences violated the state’s since repealed Racial Justice Act (RJA) must be resentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. In three decisions issued on September 25, 2020, the court ruled that North Carolina had violated constitutional principles of double jeopardy and the prohibitions against after-the-fact enhancements of punishment when the…

NEWS (9/24/20) — Ohio: The Ohio Supreme Court has upheld the conviction and death sentence of Terry Lee Froman for a September 2014 double murder in Warren County. Among other issues, the court ruled that Froman’s due process rights were not violated when he was forced to wear leg shackles throughout the trial. The court noted that while shackling is generally inappropriate, the trial court had made an individualized assessment that leg shackles were warranted and had taken precautionary steps…