Publications & Testimony

At the halfway point of 2022, the United States is on pace to mark the eighth consecutive year with fewer than 30 execution and fewer than 50 new death sentences. But even as the death penalty declines, a few states have attempted to ramp up executions and the United States Supreme Court has continued to impede death-row prisoners’ access to the courts and impair judicial enforcement of defendants’ constitutional rights. The low numbers of new death sentences imposed and executions carried out…

An analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center has discovered rampant prosecutorial misconduct in death penalty prosecutions. DPIC’s ongoing review of death sentences imposed and overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty statutes in 1972 has identified more than 550 prosecutorial misconduct reversals and exonerations in capital cases (click to enlarge image). That amounts to more than 5.6% of all death sentences imposed in the United States in the past…

On the 50^th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 29, 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia that struck down all existing death penalty laws, the Death Penalty Information Center released its Death Penalty Census. The census is the most comprehensive database of death sentences ever assembled, containing more than 9,700 death sentences (click to enlarge image). In the census, DPIC has attempted to identify every death sentence handed down in the U.S. from the day Furman was decided through…

Mississippi corrections officials will have unprecedented discretion in selecting how the state’s death-row prisoners will be executed under a new law that takes effect July 1, 2022. Mississippi authorizes execution by lethal injection, electrocution, firing squad, or nitrogen hypoxia. The law, which received final legislative approval March 29 and was signed by Governor Tate Reeves April 14, provides the Commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC), MDOC’s Deputy…

In a 5 – 4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the long-standing practice of using federal civil rights suits to challenge state execution methods. The Court ruled in favor of death-row prisoner Michael Nance, rejecting Georgia’s contention that such challenges must be brought in federal habeas corpus proceedings when the death-row prisoner proposes an alternative method not authorized by state law. A contrary ruling would have severely limited challenges to execution methods. Matthew…

The city of Idaho Falls, Idaho has agreed to a settlement of $11.7 million with an exoneree who spent 20 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. Christopher Tapp (pictured, center, with Stacy Tapp and Idaho Innocence Project Director Greg Hampikian at the Idaho Senate Chambers as they unanimously supported the Compensation for Wrongful Conviction Bill) was convicted in 1998 of the rape and murder of Angie Dodge based upon a false confession coerced by police who threatened him…

Tennessee executions could be on hold for years, as the state conducts an independent investigation into widespread non-compliance with its execution protocol and litigates the constitutionality of revisions expected to be made to its execution procedures. The anticipated delay, first reported by the Associated Press June 13, 2022, is a likely by-product of a decision by Governor Bill Lee to cancel all executions scheduled in the state for the remainder of 2022 and an agreement entered into by…

On the twentieth anniversary of its landmark decision in Atkins v. Virginia prohibiting the use of the death penalty against individuals with intellectual disability, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Florida case that creates a procedural loophole that allows those executions to continue. In a one-line ruling issued June 21, 2022, the Court summarily denied a petition for writ of certiorari filed on behalf of Florida death-row prisoner Joe Nixon, declining to review the state’s refusal to…

An African-American teenager who was convicted and sentenced to death in Pennsylvania on false charges that he had murdered a white woman has been exonerated, 91 years after he was executed. On June 13, 2022, Delaware County Court of Common Pleas Judge Kevin Kelly granted a motion filed jointly by lawyers for Alexander McClay Williams and the Delaware County District Attorney’s office to posthumously overturn Williams’ conviction and death sentence. (Williams is pictured with then-District…

Oklahoma legislators announced that an independent investigation revealed strong evidence of Richard Glossip’s innocence. Glossip, who came within hours of execution in 2015, is the second prisoner the Oklahoma Attorney General is seeking to execute this fall. After the investigation report was released, Glossip’s attorneys filed a motion in the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, asking that an execution date not be set so that Glossip can seek post-conviction review based on the findings.