Death Penalty News

In an exclusive interview at home in Oklahoma City, Glossip describes his first days of freedom in a world he hasn’t experienced for nearly 30 years. For three decades, Richard Glossip lived on concrete. First at the Oklahoma County jail, after his arrest for murder in 1997, and then in the underground bunker housing death row inmates at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. As with the rest of his surroundings, he eventually got used to the hard, unforgiving floors, although recently he’d developed painful swelling in his legs.

Catholics and pro-life conservatives joined a broad coalition of more than 50 organizations seeking to end the death penalty in the United States amid the 2025 surge in executions. Leaders of the coalition, the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty (USCEPD), said they hope the coordinated team can abolish the death penalty in states where it is still practiced. Capital punishment is still on the books in 27 states, but just 16 have executed prisoners over the past decade. The group’s goals include working with Democrats and Republicans to pass state-level laws that end the use of capital punishment, reducing the imposition of the death penalty in jurisdictions where it remains legal, and increasing awareness about the risk of executing innocent people, the lack of fairness in the system, and the harms inflicted on everyone affected by the death penalty.

Desolate spectacle of executions begins again under Trump, in landscape of capital punishment as riven as US is as a whole David Leonard Wood. Jessie Hoffman. Aaron Gunches. Wendell Grissom. Edward Thomas James. Moises Sandoval Mendoza. So many names. So many dead men walking. Ten days, five states, six death row prisoners scheduled for execution. For a decade now, capital punishment in the US has been on the wane. Last year, for the 10th year running, there were fewer than 30 executions in America, and the number of new death sentences is also tracking at historic lows.

After nearly three decades maintaining his innocence on Oklahoma’s death row, Richard Glossip this week now has the opportunity to win his freedom after the US Supreme Court ordered he receive a new trial , finding prosecutors failed to correct false testimony that may have influenced his jury. The question now? Whether Oklahoma prosecutors want to retry the case at all. Since Glossip’s 1998 conviction as the alleged orchestrator of a murder-for-hire scheme targeting his boss, Oklahoma City motel owner Barry Van Treese, a raft of issues with his prosecution has surfaced, coinciding with a shift of political winds now at the inmate’s back.

We look at a rare victory for a death row prisoner before the U.S. Supreme Court. On Tuesday, three conservative justices joined with the three liberals to overturn the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip , who has spent nearly 30 years on Oklahoma death row and had exhausted all other appeals to stay his execution. The justices said Glossip was entitled to a new trial after errors in his original prosecution. Glossip’s conviction stems from the 1997 murder of his former boss, who was killed by another man who accused Glossip of masterminding the killing. 

“People say that executing criminals does not take away from their dignity – if it is done with dignity. But the fact of the matter is that whether you’re waiting to die by lethal injection – waiting ... for the poison to flow down your veins – or waiting for a bullet, or waiting for a rope, or waiting for gas, or waiting for the electric current – there is no difference: there is no lesser or greater dignity in dying. The practice of the death penalty is the practice of torture. And by the time people I have been with finally climb into the chair to be killed, they have died a thousand times already because of their anticipation of the final horror.” – Helen Prejean, author of the book “Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States.” _____________________________________________________________________ Twitter/X   |  Instagram   |  Telegram   | Contact Us "One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have c...

President-elect Donald Trump’s return to office is putting a spotlight on the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, which houses federal death row. In Bloomington, a small community of death row spiritual advisors is struggling to support the prisoners to whom they minister.  Ross Martinie Eiler is a Mennonite, Episcopal lay minister and member of the Catholic Worker movement, which assists the homeless. And for the past three years, he’s served as a spiritual advisor for a man on federal death row.

Professor Jimmy Gurulé, founder and director of the Notre Dame Exoneration Justice Clinic, recently attended the world premiere of “Rebel Nun,” a documentary of the life of Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., and her decades-long struggle against the death penalty.  The world premiere was held in New York City as part of the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival. The documentary was produced by Universal Pictures.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A Texas man who had long claimed his conviction more than 20 years ago was based on false testimony and questionable evidence was executed Wednesday for fatally shooting two people, including his cousin. Ivan Cantu received a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m. at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the November 2000 fatal shooting of his cousin, James Mosqueda, 27, and his cousin’s girlfriend, Amy Kitchen, 22. In final words from the execution chamber, the 50-year-old inmate said several times that he was innocent.

Sister Helen Prejean is trying to keep Texas from killing death row inmate Ivan Cantu. Prejean, the famed death penalty opponent, joined MoveOn.org in a virtual meeting last week to plead for a delay in Cantu’s execution, scheduled for Feb. 28. “Even if you’re for the death penalty, you believe in fairness,” Prejean said. “There was no fairness at this trial. All we’re asking is to delay the execution of Ivan Cantu long enough to be able to have a hearing and an inquiry into the new evidence that’s been presented.”

In less than three weeks, the execution of Texas death row inmate Ivan Cantu is scheduled, but not without a fight with the help of Martin Sheen and Sister Helen Prejean and the public policy advocacy group MoveOn.  Sister Prejean and Sheen held a press conference on Monday, Feb. 12, to raise public awareness and civil action to stop his execution. In recent weeks, their determination to reach out to the public and celebrities has produced 60,000 signatures, 4,000 letters and hundreds of calls to Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis for a call to hear new evidence and hold a new trial in Cantu's case. 

The first-ever use of nitrogen gas by Alabama to kill Kenneth Smith shows why the U.S. must end these futile, costly, deeply flawed government killings, says Sister Helen Prejean. A few nights ago convicted murderer Kenneth Smith was suffocated to death by the state of Alabama. His killing with nitrogen gas was a first. And it was fully approved by the U.S. Supreme Court, which allows death penalty states to experiment at will with different methods of execution. This is a court that steadfastly refuses to recognize that the long, dragged-out confinement and killing of conscious human beings counts as “cruel punishment.”

Nun and famed anti-death penalty advocate Sister Helen Prejean has sued Louisiana’s prison pardon board and state attorney general Jeff Landry, arguing officials illegally agreed to halt numerous appeals from death row without the required public input. “I’m suing the Louisiana Board of Pardons,” Ms Prejean, whose book inspired the film Dead Man Walking , wrote on X on Tuesday. “The Board held a secret meeting on September 29th in an attempt to thwart clemency hearings for 56 Louisiana death row prisoners. The secret meeting occurred in violation of Louisiana’s Open Meetings Law.”

In a victory last month at the Louisiana Supreme Court, Attorney General Jeff Landry successfully defended the governor’s exclusive power to grant mercy to prisoners at the recommendation of the pardon board he appoints. Now Landry, the frontrunner to become governor on Jan. 8, has stymied a bid by Gov. John Bel Edwards to exercise that power on death row. Last week, Landry maneuvered to block Edwards’ request for the board to expedite a historic stack of clemency petitions from 55 of the state’s 56 condemned prisoners.

The world’s most famous living nun on fighting the death penalty for over 40 years, “Dead Man Walking,” faith, compassion for killers, regret, fame, Taylor Swift, opera—and Scotch. There was a moment of silence as Sister Helen Prejean pondered being described as a pop culture icon. Then she let out a hoot of laughter. “What does that even mean?” she said in her raspy Southern drawl. “I don’t know what that means!” Well, it means the fame that her 1993 book and 1995 movie Dead Man Walking has brought her (Susan Sarandon won an Oscar for her role as Prejean); Jake Heggie’s opera of the same name now playing at the Met in New York (until Oct. 21); the fact she, a nun at 84, is still fighting determinedly—after accompanying six felons to the execution chamber—to rid America of the death penalty.

“What’s the news?” Sister Helen Prejean asked a reporter Tuesday afternoon as she stepped outside a Lower Ninth Ward cathedral, where an international film crew had interviewed her for hours without reprieve. Louisiana’s most prominent death-penalty abolitionist had not yet heard: Attorneys with the New Orleans-based Capital Appeal Project made a historic request that morning, filing clemency applications for 51 of the 57 people on the state’s death row . Yet her eyes conveyed no surprise behind her tortoiseshell glasses. “It’s what we have to do,” she said. Prejean, an 84-year-old Congregation of St. Joseph nun who lives in New Orleans, has advocated for more than four decades to eliminate capital punishment. She has been an outspoken voice against the practice in criminal trials, educational campaigns and non-fiction books, and has served as a spiritual adviser to men sentenced to die.

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. 

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Prominent death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean, whose book “Dead Man Walking” was turned into a movie, on Wednesday joined others calling on Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt to grant death row inmate Richard Glossip a 60-day reprieve from his scheduled execution. Prejean joined Republican Reps. Kevin McDugle and Justin Humphrey and others in asking Stitt for a 60-day delay similar to the one he granted Glossip in November to give the state Court of Criminal Appeals time to rule on claims of innocence and prosecutorial misconduct that were eventually denied. “The people of Oklahoma need to be the one to get to Gov. Stitt, who has that power to grant a reprieve,” Prejean, a spiritual advisor to Glossip said during a news conference at the state Capital.

Sister Helen Prejean, a Sister of St. Joseph, shows no signs of slowing down in her long-standing fight to end the death penalty.  At 83, she is writing her fourth book while directing her advocacy organization, Ministry Against the Death Penalty, in New Orleans. She spends a fair amount of time on the road as she continues to give talks, especially on college campuses, about the injustices she sees with capital punishment. She also continues to minister to both death-row inmates and murder victims’ families. She has accompanied six men to their executions. When asked by Catholic News Service in a Sept. 30 interview where she gets her energy, her responses all revolved around the work she does. For starters, she said she is energized by those she ministers to on death row – currently a Louisiana inmate in his 60s, Manuel Ortiz. The Salvadoran has been on death row for close to 30 years and continues to claim innocence for the sentence he received for hiring someone to murder his wi...

WASHINGTON (CNS) — The Supreme Court begins its new term Oct. 3, jumping right back into the fray with cases that take on affirmative action, voting, immigration, the environment and freedom of speech. Ketanji Brown Jackson This term will include a new member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, replacing Justice Stephen Breyer, who retired at the end of last session. It also will be the first time the public will be allowed back inside the court since the start of the pandemic. The building will will remain closed to the public — except for oral arguments — until further notice. In a Sept. 28 news release, the court announced that it will continue to provide live audio of oral arguments this term. Another change is outside. Barriers around the court since May — after protests erupted following a leak of the court’s draft opinion on its Dobbs decision — have now been removed. The investigation into that leak, ordered by Chief Justice John Roberts, is still continuing. For now, the court has...