State And Federal Info
Ronnie Lee Gardner became the third person in the modern era to be executed by firing squad in 2010.
Utah was the first state to resume executions after capital punishment was reinstated in the United States in 1976, when Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad on January 17, 1977.
Utah is the only state to have executed inmates by firing squad in the modern era.
Apr 04, 2019
Citing “damning revelations” that police and prosecutors have used bribes and threats to secure testimony in a three-decades-old capital case, the Utah Supreme Court has ordered a Utah County court to conduct a hearing to determin…
Mental Illness
Apr 04, 2018
A Utah judge has excoriated the Utah Department of Corrections for practices he called “sneaky” and “deceitful” and a state prosecutor has dropped the death penalty after learning that state prison officials had withheld nearly 1,…
Apr 04, 2018
A Utah judge has excoriated the Utah Department of Corrections for practices he called “sneaky” and “deceitful” and a state prosecutor has dropped the death penalty after learning that state prison officials had withheld nearly 1,…
Recent Legislative Activity
Mar 09, 2018
In Washington and Utah, bipartisan or Republican-led efforts at death-penalty repeal fell short, a month after death-penalty proponents abandoned efforts to reinstate capital punishment in New Mexico
Costs
Feb 13, 2018
An analysis by the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice of the cost of capital punishment has found that cases in which prosecutors seek the death penalty are more costly than cases in which life without parole was the…
Costs
Nov 15, 2017
A Utah county has fired an appeals lawyer who had publicly criticized the county’s underfunding of death-penalty cases. Attorney Samuel Newton (pictured) — hired by Weber County to handle the appeal…
Costs
Aug 03, 2017
In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, released online in July, Ben Jones argues that, despite the popular conception of death-penalty abolition as a politically progressive cause, its future succ…
Costs
Jul 18, 2017
Utah is not providing sufficient funding to competently represent death-row prisoners during their appeals, according to a motion filed on behalf of Douglas Lovell, the man most recently sentenced to death in the …
Costs
Feb 10, 2017
According to a new poll, nearly two-thirds of Utah residents say they prefer some form of life sentence, rather than the death penalty, as the punishment for murder, and a majority support replacing the death penalty with a senten…
New Voices
May 18, 2016
One year after the Nebraska legislature voted to repeal the death penalty and overrode a gubernatorial veto of that measure, actions in legislatures across the country suggest that the state’s efforts signalled a growing movement against the death…
