Death Penalty News

Weeks before calling to abolish capital punishment in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine commuted the man’s death sentence to life in prison without parole. When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine called on lawmakers to abolish the state’s death penalty last week, he wouldn’t tell reporters if he would spare any of the more than 100 people on death row. Three weeks earlier, however, DeWine quietly did just that for Gregory Lott, a man with intellectual disabilities. Lott, now 64, will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole for the death of an 82-year-old East Cleveland man he set on fire during a home burglary in 1986.

In January 2026, the Alabama Supreme Court authorized Governor Kay Ivey to set an execution date for Charles Burton, allowing the state to proceed with execution by nitrogen gas. This followed the exhaustion of his appeals, and he is now eligible for execution at any time.  MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Charles "Sonny" Burton didn't kill anyone. The state of Alabama could execute him anyway. Burton, 75, is facing execution for his role as an accomplice in a 1991 robbery at an auto parts store where customer Doug Battle was killed.  No one disputes that another man, Derrick DeBruce, shot and killed Battle. Burton, one of six men involved in the robbery, was outside the store at the time of the shooting, according to testimony. DeBruce and Burton were both sentenced to death. But DeBruce was later resentenced to life imprisonment, leaving Burton -- who neither fired the gun nor ordered anyone to be killed -- as the only person facing execution.

Amnesty International and the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN) unreservedly condemn the execution of Pannir Selvam Pranthaman in Singapore on 8 October 2025, the latest in a string of arbitrary deprivations of life in the country.  Amnesty International and ADPAN renew their call on the government of Singapore to urgently establish a moratorium on executions as a first step towards full abolition of this cruel punishment. 

On the occasion of the 23rd World Day Against the Death Penalty on 10 October 2025, Amnesty International joins the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty and other abolitionist activists and organizations in denouncing the continued use of the death penalty and encouraging actions in support of its full abolition.   Trends recorded so far in 2025 indicate that executions have significantly increased in some countries, when compared to figures registered in recent years. Among these rises, some governments have shown renewed determination to use this cruel punishment as a tool of repression and control. This has frequently happened in the context of flawed narratives intended to create a false impression of security through a display of heavy-handed responses from the state, and to score political points. These narratives have also fostered a flagrant disregard for safeguards and restrictions under international human rights law and standards that have been established ...

PHOENIX — Arizona will resume executions — perhaps as soon as early 2025, officials say. The decision by Attorney General Kris Mayes comes after Gov. Katie Hobbs dismissed, on Tuesday, the retired federal magistrate she had hired in early 2023 to review the process the state uses to put condemned people to death. Mayes said she was waiting on that report before seeking any death warrants from the Arizona Supreme Court. David Duncan has not finished his work, for which he was authorized to charge $175 an hour, up to $100,000.

WASHINGTON STATE — Fourteen years after the last death sentence was carried out in Washington, the execution chamber at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla was closed in a ceremony held Wednesday morning. Gov. Jay Inslee, who issued a moratorium on the death penalty ten years ago, said shuttering the chamber was the ‘final closure’ of the controversial issue in Washington state law.

Last week brought new evidence of crippling flaws in America’s death penalty system. The number of people exonerated and freed from death row over the last 50 years reached 200 .

When Gov. Ron DeSantis was seeking the Republican presidential nomination last year, he ratcheted up the pace of executions, overseeing six – the most in Florida in almost a decade.  But by the time DeSantis’ presidential bid ended in January, his fervor for executions had abated, continuing into a layoff that is now prompting questions about just what powered last year’s surge. 

On August 9, 2018, Steven Hale stood outside a Tennessee prison as a convicted murderer inside awaited a lethal dose of a three-drug cocktail. It was the first execution of a death row inmate in the state in nearly a decade. Hale was one of seven reporters selected by a grim lottery to witness Billy Ray Irick’s execution at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He’d written stories about Irick’s horrific rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl more than three decades earlier.

International laws and treaties impose obligations on countries that still implement the death penalty to ensure that individuals facing this punishment are granted their full rights, including the right to seek pardon. Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states: "Anyone sentenced to death shall have the right to seek pardon or commutation of the sentence. Amnesty, pardon, or commutation of the sentence of death may be granted in all cases." The Arab Charter on Human Rights, in its Article 6, confirms that every person sentenced to death has the right to seek pardon or to have the sentence commuted to a lesser penalty.

A proposed death penalty repeal bill in the Ohio legislature is drawing attention to the state’s five-year pause on executions, and leading state officials from both parties to question whether the death penalty system is working.  Ohio Attorney General David Yost summed up the situation by saying, “This system satisfies nobody. Those who oppose the death penalty want it abolished altogether, not ticking away like a time bomb that might or might not explode. Those who support the death penalty want it to be fair, timely and effective. Neither side is getting what it wants while the state goes on pointlessly burning through enormous taxpayer resources.” 

Most of planet Earth stopped carrying out executions long ago. Some of the few nations that still do so are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia — and the United States of America. Yet even here, most states have stopped killing their own people by either law or practice. Only five states have done so this year, according to new numbers from the Death Penalty Information Center. Florida is one of them. Our colleagues in killing are Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.

Last Friday, the Death Penalty Information Center issued its year-end report . The message is mixed. The report offered evidence of the substantial progress achieved by abolitionists during 2023 in their fight to end capital punishment in the United States. At the same time, it presented a bleak assessment of the Supreme Court’s current attitude toward the death penalty and documented the Court’s unwillingness to ensure fairness in capital cases.

BATON ROUGE, La. (KALB) - The Louisiana Board of Pardons has declined to move forward with the first five death row applications during administrative reviews Friday in Baton Rouge. This comes after an agreement was reached last week between the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office, district attorneys throughout the state, the Louisiana Board of Pardons and the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections to hold reviews instead of actual hearings first.

Since reaching historic highs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, use of the death penalty in America has steadily declined, with a dwindling number of jurisdictions responsible for a growing portion of executions. While capital punishment remains legal in 27 states and for the federal government – and a majority of US adults say they’re in favor it for convicted murderers – the number of jurisdictions that keep the death penalty on the books versus those that actually use it to punish the so-called “worst of the worst” illustrates critics’ complaints of how arbitrarily it is administered.

President Joe Biden made history in 2021 when he became the first president to publicly oppose the death penalty. It wasn’t a position he spoke about often but tucked into his campaign platform was a promise to work with Congress to abolish the federal death penalty through legislation and incentivize states to do the same.  In July 2020, the Trump administration ended a 17-year de facto moratorium on federal executions and killed Daniel Lewis Lee. Over the next several months, former President Donald Trump and then-Attorney General William Barr raced to execute as many people as possible before leaving office. Dustin Higgs, a Black man scheduled to be executed on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, was the thirteenth and final person to be killed. Ultimately, he died in the early hours of the following day while suffering from COVID-19, just four days before Biden’s inauguration. Like many of the people executed before him, there were extensive unresolved legal issues in Higgs’ cas...

Oklahoma death row prisoner Richard Glossip’s execution was stayed by the Supreme Court on Friday, marking the ninth time he had an execution date put on hold. Glossip has maintained his innocence throughout his 25 years of incarceration; his accuser has previously attempted to recant his testimony.  In an unprecedented move earlier this month, Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a joint motion with Glossip’s defense team to halt his May 18 execution, saying he did not receive a fair trial. 

BELLINGHAM, Wash. (AP) — Washington state has officially abolished the death penalty. Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed Senate Bill 5087 on Friday, which removes state laws that Washington’s Supreme Court determined are invalid or unconstitutional. The state’s high court struck down the death penalty in 2018, but the law remained on the books. “It’s official. The death penalty is no longer in state law,” Inslee said on Twitter after the signing. He also thanked legislators and other leaders who were part of the decade-long effort to end the practice, including Attorney General Bob Ferguson. In 2014, Inslee issued a moratorium on the death penalty. In 2018, Washington’s Supreme Court unanimously struck down the death penalty, calling it arbitrary and racially biased.

Nearly 5 years after Washington's death penalty law was ruled unconstitutional, the Legislature has voted to permanently repeal capital punishment in the state. The state House voted 58-39 on Friday to remove remaining references to the death penalty from Washington law. The measure, which was approved by the state Senate in February, now heads to Gov. Jay Inslee. The Legislature's action has no immediate effect, since a 2018 court ruling already took the death penalty off the table for prosecutors. Yet the law's formal repeal makes "a profound moral statement," state Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle), the bill's sponsor, told Axios yesterday. State executions have long been rare in Washington, with the last 1 carried out in 2010.

CHICAGO (AP) -- Rejon Taylor hoped the election of Joe Biden, the first U.S. president to campaign on a pledge to end the death penalty, would mean a more sympathetic look at his claims that racial bias and other trial errors landed him on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana. But two years on, Justice Department attorneys under Biden are fighting the Black man's efforts to reverse his 2008 death sentence for killing a white restaurateur as hard as they did under Donald Trump, who oversaw 13 executions in his presidency's final months. "Every legal means they have available they're using to fight us," said the 38-year-old's lawyer, Kelley Henry. "It's business as usual." Death penalty opponents expected Biden to act within weeks of taking office to fulfill his 2020 campaign promise to end capital punishment on the federal level and to work at ending it in states that still carry out executions. Instead, Biden has taken no steps toward fulfil...