Publications & Testimony

In the March 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Hannah Cox (pictured), National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty (CCATDP) speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the continuing movement by social and political conservatives away from capital punishment, how the death penalty is out of step with core conservative values, and the key role that conservative legislators are playing in abolition efforts across the U.S.

Sandra Lockett-Young (pictured, right, with Sister Helen Prejean), whose case established a capital defendant’s right to present a broad range of mitigating evidence concerning her character, background, and record and the circumstances of her offense, has died. Lockett had suffered a severe stroke in June 2019 from which she never recovered. She died in an Ohio hospice on February 26, 2020 at 65 years old. Then 21 years old, Lockett was sentenced to death in 1975 under an Ohio law that…

Less than two weeks after Oklahoma officials announced that the state would return to the same controversial three-drug execution protocol implicated in a series of botched executions in 2014 and 2015, the state’s death-row prisoners have asked a federal court to reactivate their lawsuit challenging the state’s execution process. The February 27, 2020 filing in the United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma called the new protocol “incomplete” and said it failed to comply…

NEWS (2/29/20): Four states and the federal government had scheduled 12 executions to take place in January or February 2020. Through February 2020, four executions had been carried out: two in Texas and one each in Georgia and Tennessee. (To enlarge map, click here.) As of February 29, 43 execution dates had been scheduled for 2020 by 7 states and the federal government. Six executions had been stayed and another halted by commutation. Eight executions had been reprieved and rescheduled…

Nathaniel Woods (pictured, left) did not shoot Alabama police officers Charles Bennett, Carlos “Curly” Owen, and Harley Chisholm III (pictured left to right, below). But because of alleged police misconduct, incompetent representation, and Alabama law allowing death verdicts based on non-unanimous jury votes, he faces execution on March 5, 2020 for their deaths. Prosecutors acknowledge that Woods’ co-defendant, Kerry Spencer, shot the officers in an incident in a drug house on June 17, 2004.

A divided U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that James McKinney (pictured), an Arizona death-row prisoner who was unconstitutionally sentenced to death by a trial judge who did not consider mitigating evidence relating to his severe Posttraumatic Stress Disorder from relentless childhood abuse, is not entitled to a jury trial to determine his sentence. On February 25, 2020, in a 5 – 4 opinion authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Court upheld the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision to reweigh the…

NEWS (2/26/20): The Colorado legislature has sent to the Governor a bill that would prospectively abolish the state’s death penalty. On February 26, 2020, one day after a marathon 12-hour debate on the floor of the House, the Colorado House of Representatives voted 38 – 27 to pass SB 20 – 100 to repeal the state’s capital punishment statute. The Senate had previously approved the legislation on January 30. Governor Jared Polis has ten days to sign the bill into law or to veto it. The Governor has…

Tennessee has set two more execution dates for 2020, directed, advocates say, at men whose cases present unresolved issues of innocence, intellectual disability, and mental competency. On February 24, 2020, the Tennessee Supreme Court granted state prosecutors’ applications for execution dates for Byron Black (pictured, left) and Pervis Payne (pictured, right). The court scheduled Black’s execution for October 8 and Payne’s for December 3, making them the fourth and fifth executions scheduled…

Vernon Madison, an Alabama death-row prisoner whose severe dementia led to a major Supreme Court decision on competency to be executed, has died in prison at the age of 69. Madison’s case twice reached the U.S. Supreme Court on questions of the limits of federal court review of death-penalty cases and whether Alabama was entitled to execute an aging, infirm prisoner whose cognitive abilities were severely compromised. Madison’s attorneys argued that a series of strokes had left him without a…