Death Penalty News

The state of Oklahoma put James Coddington to death on Aug. 25, 2022, for the 1997 murder of a 73-year-old friend who refused to give him money to buy drugs. It marks the beginning of a busy period at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s execution chamber. Last month, the state announced plans to carry out the death sentence of 25 people over the next couple of years. As a scholar who has long followed the capital punishment debate in the U.S., I know that Oklahoma’s plan runs against the grain of the death penalty’s recent history. Over the past several years both the number of death sentences imposed and executions carried out across the U.S. has declined sharply . Since 2007 more states have abolished the death penalty than in any comparable 15-year period in American history. And in November 2020 America elected its first president ever to openly oppose capital punishment . Today, fewer jurisdictions are using the death penalty, but some – like Oklahoma – seem to be doubling down....

Another year ends and offers new evidence of progress in the effort to abolish America’s death penalty. Amid this progress, we still see disturbing examples of state killing. It remains incompatible with our most important political and legal values, but one can take some comfort from the significant erosion of capital punishment’s hold in this country. It now seems safe to say that the death penalty is in retreat: the United States is on the road to abolition . And it is not too early to begin thinking about what it will be like to live in a country without the death penalty and to anticipate and plan for the battles that may ensue when it is ended. This may seem a bit premature, like spiking the football in celebration of a touchdown when you are only on the five-yard line. Indeed, seeing the depths to which anti-abortion foes went this year in their efforts to undo reproductive rights for women is a reminder that hard-won rights and freedoms continually face astonishing threats. D...

Take a look back at everything that led to the fateful, controversial execution. Tuesday marked the 10-year point since the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis despite increasing suspicions of his innocence following his conviction for killing an off-duty police officer. Davis denied committing the murder throughout his prison sentence and up until he was literally on his deathbed when he sat up on the gurney to which he was strapped and looked the family of Savannah Police Officer Mark MacPhail in their eyes to repeat claims of his innocence in the 1989 killing. “I did not have a gun,” he told them before turning his attention to his soon-to-be executioners. “For those about to take my life,” Davis said to prison officials, “may God have mercy on your souls. May God bless your souls.” But according to the transcript from audio of Davis’ last moments alive, his final words were, “continue to fight this fight,” a message to his supporters and death penalty opponents who unsuccessfully ...

“The federal death penalty and the death penalty in this country are at a state of injustice and they have been since their inception. The death penalty itself is, simply put, a bad public policy – morally, economically, socially and legally,” said Abraham Bonowitz, co-director of Death Penalty Action, a national organization mobilizing opposition to federal executions. “These executions have been scheduled not because it's time, but because it's the political season and the president wants to have an execution under his belt as he gets into the campaign and the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention.” The government has scheduled executions by lethal injection for Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, with inmate Daniel Lee Lewis scheduled for execution on Monday. The Wednesday execution is currently on hold. Another execution is set for August. The federal government's death row is at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute,...

In 2009, North Carolina passed the Racial Justice Act (RJA), which allowed defendants to strike the death penalty from their cases if they could show that racial discrimination was a factor in their prosecution.  The law came as a response to a series of exonerations of Black people who were falsely convicted of crimes they did not commit by all-white or nearly all-white juries.  The legislature took a bold step to address was what suspected to be deeply troubling evidence of racism infecting the death penalty—but no one knew for sure what evidence uncovered by the RJA would find. In 2010, people on death row began filing RJA claims. Four had hearings, and the evidence uncovered was indeed stark, troubling, and clearly pointed to the systemic ways that racism infects capital cases in North Carolina. The four petitioners had death sentences reversed and were resentenced to life without parole (LWOP). But in 2013, the law was repealed by the same new legislatu...

A United Nations human rights spokesman expressed concerns on Tuesday about the Department of Justice's decision to resume federal executions, saying it was “rolling back progress." “It’s also based on the unacceptable risk of executing innocent people,” Rupert Colville said at a news briefing, according to Reuters. “And there have been reports in the United States showing, using DNA evidence, etc., that innocent people have been executed there,” he added. Colville reportedly said there is no indication the death penalty serves as a deterrent, noting that 25 U.S. states and 170 of 194 U.N. members have eliminated capital punishment. “I would also note that the decision by the U.S. attorney general very much goes against the trends in the United States as a whole, as well as against the international trend,” he said, according to Reuters. Attorney General William Barr last week published a list of 5 inmates scheduled to be executed, all of whom were convi...

Larry Krasner says the punishment is ‘really about poverty’ and race. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner—who vowed as a candidate not to seek the death penalty—has asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to declare that the sentence, as applied, violates the state’s Constitution.  “Because of the arbitrary manner in which it has been applied, the death penalty violates our state Constitution’s prohibition against cruel punishments,” states a brief filed by Krasner’s office tonight in the case Jermont Cox v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania . “It really is not about the worst offenders,” Krasner told The Appeal. “It really is about poverty. It really is about race.” The new brief is part of a broader push that started last August, when lawyers representing Cox and another death row prisoner, Kevin Marinelli, asked the state Supreme Court to weigh in on Pennsylvania’s use of the death penalty.  “Pennsylvania administers a system of capital punishment th...

The number of people on death row or facing capital resentencing in the United States has continued its 19-year decline , according to a new death-row census by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund(LDF).  The Spring 2019 edition of Death Row USA, released in early July, reports that 2,673 people in 32 states or in U.S. federal or military custody were on death rows across the U.S. as of April 1, 2019.  That total reflects a 2.6% drop from the same time in 2018 and an 18.6% decline over the course of the past decade. The decline has come at a time in which executions remain near historic lows, as more people have been resentenced to life or less or come off of death row by exoneration, clemency, or deaths other than by execution than have been added to death row through new death sentences.  Nearly 1,000 prisoners have come off death row in the past decade by means other than execution, nearly tripling the 337 executions over that same period. ...