Publications & Testimony

Death sentences imposed in the United States fell by more than half over the course of the 2010s, continuing a steep nationwide decline that has seen death sentences fall by more than 89% since the peak death sentencing years of the mid 1990s. Fewer death sentences were imposed in the second half of the 2010s than in any other five-year period since capital punishment resumed in the United States in 1973. [Click here to enlarge image] A Death Penalty Information Center analysis of sentencing…

Families who have a loved one on death row, or who have experienced the execution of a loved one, suffer a variety of adverse mental health effects, including depression, anxiety, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to a new report by the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP). The report, Nobody to Talk to, describes the mental health challenges faced by family members of death row prisoners and the special difficulties those family members experience in seeking mental health…

NEWS — January 3: In Florida, a trial judge in Fort Myers accepted the jury’s recommendation and sentenced Mark Sievers to death for the murder of his wife. In Oklahoma, the court formally sentenced Byron Shepard to death for the murder of a Pottawatomie County police officer. They were the first death sentences of the new decade. Before his sentencing, Sievers told the court: ​“Although a jury found me guilty, I’m innocent of all charges as I have maintained since the day this crime took place.

At least 99 men and one woman are on death row in eight U.S. states, condemned to death by judges without the prior authorization of a jury, according to a 2019 study by researchers Michael Radelet and Ben Cohen (pictured) published in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Another 18 prisoners sentenced to death since the resumption of capital punishment in the U.S. in the 1970s, the study shows, have been executed after judges disregarded or overrode jury votes in favor of life.

In the December 2019 edition of the Discussions with DPIC podcast, Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham and Managing Director Anne Holsinger discuss DPIC’s 2019 Year End Report. The podcast explores the major themes presented in the year’s death-penalty news and developments, including innocence, declining use of capital punishment, and systemic problems revealed by the new death sentences and executions in 2019. The two major themes of the 2019 report, Dunham…

Billy Joe Wardlow (pictured) was 18 years old, when he killed 82-year-old Carl Cole during a botched attempt to steal Cole’s car so that Wardlow and his girlfriend could pursue their fantasy of running away from their abusive homes in Carson, Texas to start a new life in Montana. Wardlow, who had no prior history of violence, has regretted his action ever since. In the cover story for the Winter 2020 issue of the magazine The American Scholar, Wardlow told veteran journalist and legal…

The use of the death penalty as a political weapon was on display in late December 2019 in an extraordinary series of four unrelated cases in Pakistan and the Middle East. In Pakistan, a special tribunal tried and convicted the nation’s former leader, General Pervez Musharraf (pictured), of high treason and sentenced him to death. Days later, a Pakistani civilian court convicted a Muslim professor of blasphemy and sentenced him to death. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, after a secret trial that…

In a year of declining death-penalty usage across the United States, nowhere was the erosion of capital punishment as sustained and pronounced in 2019 as it was in the western United States. Continuing a wave of momentum from Washington’s judicial abolition of capital punishment in October 2018, one state halted executions and dismantled its death chamber, another cleared its death row, two cut back on the circumstances in which the death penalty could be sought and imposed, and the entire…

Alabama sentenced Toforest Johnson to death, his lawyers and national experts say, because of prosecutorial misconduct, false eyewitness testimony, and inadequate representation. In an amicus brief filed in a Birmingham trial court on December 12, 2019, the Innocence Project says, ​“If ever a case bore the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction, Toforest Johnson’s is it.” Johnson (pictured center) was convicted in 1999 of murdering Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputy William Hardy, who was working…

As the capital punishment trial of accused Parkland, Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz was postponed until at least the summer of 2020, the father of one of the victims of the attack has urged the prosecution to end the case now by dropping the death penalty. Michael Schulman’s son, Scott Beigel, was the track coach and a geography teacher at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (pictured). He was one of 14 students and three teachers killed in the February 14, 2018 mass shooting at the…