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.
Recent Legislative Activity
Oct 29, 2019
More than 250 conservative leaders from across the country have signed on to a statement expressing their opposition to capital punishment as administered across the United States and issued a “call [to] our fellow conservatives to reexamine the d…
Costs
Aug 14, 2019
The high cost of meeting its obligation to provide constitutionally-mandated effective representation for indigent defendants in capital cases continues to generate controversy in Utah’s fourth largest county. With two capital tri…
Arbitrariness
Aug 12, 2019
NEWS — August 15: Tennessee has executed Stephen Michael West after Governor Bill Lee denied his petition for clemency. West was the eleventh person executed in the United States in 2019 and the second in Tennessee.…
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…
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…
