Death Penalty News

CONCORD, N.H. — Opponents of the death penalty turned out in big numbers in Concord again Thursday to speak against legislation to bring capital punishment back to New Hampshire. The opposition testifying Thursday included a former death row inmate. "I was convicted in 1985, wrongfully convicted in 1985 of first-degree murder, which I didn't commit," said former death row inmate Paul Hildwin. Hildwin spent three decades on death row in Florida before DNA evidence proved his innocence.

The availability of DNA testing has had a profound impact on the American criminal justice system and on the way Americans think about that system. Time and again, DNA has shown that our criminal justice system is anything but foolproof. The Innocence Project reports that between the first DNA exoneration in 1989 and April 2023, “575 wrongly convicted people have been exonerated based on DNA tests that demonstrated their innocence.” During that same time period, DNA played a key role in the exonerations of 35 people who had been convicted of a capital crime. That is part of the reason why a majority of Americans now believe that the death penalty is applied unfairly.

A growing number of Republican state lawmakers are backing efforts to repeal the death penalty, marking a notable shift in conservatives' views on the matter. 8 states have had Republican-sponsored bills to repeal the death penalty introduced during their current legislative sessions, according to the group Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty: Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Washington state. Demetrius Minor, national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, told the Washington Examiner that the Republican lawmakers behind these bills are "making a strong statement about the failures of the death penalty.” “Their actions continue the trend of GOP state legislators moving away from capital punishment,” Minor said. “They know that the death penalty does not align with their conservative principles of valuing limited government, fiscal conservatism, and life.” Some of these lawmakers acknowledged a personal shift o...

In a decision that advocates say could clear the state’s death row, the Oregon Supreme Court has overturned death-row prisoner David Ray Bartol’s death sentence because the crime he committed is no longer statutorily eligible for the death penalty. In 2019, the Oregon state legislature passed a new law that narrowly limits the crimes for which the death penalty may be imposed . The court on October 7, 2021 held without dissent that Bartol’s sentence violated the prohibition on “disproportionate punishments” contained in Article I, section 16 of the Oregon Constitution because his offense had been reclassified as non-capital. In her opinion for the court, Justice Rebecca Duncan wrote: “The enactment of SB 1013 [the new law] reflects a legislative determination that, regardless of when it was committed, the conduct that had constituted ‘aggravated murder’ does not fall within the narrow category of conduct for which the death penalty is appropriate. Given that determination, we conclude ...

It has now been ten years since Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill ending the death penalty in Illinois.  The abolition bill, signed on March 9, 2011, was the culmination of eleven years of debate after Governor George Ryan imposed a moratorium on executions in 2000 and then issued four pardons and 167 commutations, clearing the state’s death row in 2003. The Illinois moratorium, imposed following a year in which U.S. executions peaked at 98, was a catalyst for rethinking the death penalty across the country.  At that time, 38 states authorized capital punishment. One year after Ryan’s mass commutation, the New York Court of Appeals declared its death-penalty statute unconstitutional.  The court subsequently applied that decision to the rest of the prisoners on the state’s death row in 2007.  The New York legislature then opted not to correct the constitutional error, effectively abolishing the state’s death penalty. Legislatures in New Jersey (2007) and New M...

Washington D.C., Jan 21, 2020 / 06:00 pm (CNA).- The number of Republican state lawmakers opposed to capital punishment is growing, a conservative group claims, as anti-death penalty activists look forward to continued momentum from the right on this issue in 2020.  “The nation is down to only 25 states that still have an active death penalty system, of those, over a third have not used it in a decade or more,” Hannah Cox, National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, told CNA in a statement.  “We anticipate the downward trends to continue around capital punishment and expect to see more states join those that have repealed their systems over the next year.” At the national level, the parties are divided on the issue. The 2016 Republican Party platform stated that “The constitutionality of the death penalty is firmly settled by its explicit mention in the Fifth Amendment,” and that “With the murder rate soaring in our great cities, we ...

I love the end of the year. It’s a perfect time to sit back and contemplate all that’s taken place and to imagine what things will look like a year from now. Oftentimes we don’t realize just how much has changed in a year. That can be bittersweet, but it can also be empowering. In my work, the gains come slowly, and persistence is key. But an excellent way of measuring our impact is through the Death Penalty Information Center’s Year-End Report , which examines trends in capital punishment in the U.S. The year flew by in a whirlwind of testimonies, clemency appeals, articles, and speeches, and — as the report shows — those winds continued to knock down the death penalty. 2 more states took massive action against the death penalty this year. New Hampshire repealed its system outright through the legislature, the 21st to wipe capital punishment off its books. Meanwhile, California is now the 4th state — and the biggest — to have an executive moratorium. That me...

They first tried it in 2000, their efforts crashing against a promised veto by Gov. Jeanne Shaheen. They went for it again in 2009, when the Senate tabled it 13-11; in 2016 when the Senate deadlocked 12-12; and in 2018 when it fell short of a veto override in the upper chamber by two votes. But this was the year that advocates finally did it. Over the objections of Gov. Chris Sununu, New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish the death penalty on May 30, after a charged debate on the Senate floor and a multi-decade campaign. “Today, I will vote to override the veto of our governor,” said Sen. Harold French, a Franklin Republican. “Because this vote is about our state and about what kind of state we are all going to be a part of.” It was by some measures an inevitable outcome: The 2018 elections swept in 16 senators of both parties who put their opposition to the penalty on the record as early as December. But for one advocate for repeal, the vote stuck a part...

District Attorney Don Burkett, of Many, keeps a photo of Wesley Mercer near his desk and pulls it out whenever he’s frustrated. The 6-year-old is undeniably cute. He was tortured for a few days, then on March 8, 1992, held in a tub filled with scalding hot water and died. “On those bad days, I look at it to remind myself of why I do this job,” said Burkett, who prosecuted and in May 1993 sent the boy’s stepfather, Christopher Sepulvado, to death row near the back of the massive Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Sepulvado was up for execution in 2014 when a federal court's ruling eventually stayed all Louisiana death sentences because the state had run out of the drugs necessary to legally execute by lethal injection and pharmaceutical companies had largely blocked further access. Since Sepulvado is 75 and in failing health, Burkett said last week said he doesn’t think the killer's death sentence will ever be carried out. “I think he’ll die of natural ca...

Executions, new death sentences and public support for the death penalty remain low, the Death Penalty Information Center said. Executions, new death sentences and public support for the death penalty in the United States remained at their lowest levels in decades this year as half of the country has abolished the death penalty or imposed a moratorium on executions, according to the annual report of a death penalty research group released on Tuesday. The group, the Death Penalty Information Center , a nonprofit that opposes capital punishment, found that states carried out fewer than 30 executions and imposed fewer than 50 new death sentences for the fifth year in a row, continuing sharp declines since 1999, when there were nearly 100 executions. California instituted a moratorium on executions, New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish the death penalty entirely and Indiana has gone a decade with no executions, the report said. On death row: 2,656 While ex...

A gathering of anti-death penalty activists this month in New Orleans was to kick-start a movement to abolish the death penalty at the state level. But those attending are not capital punishment’s typical foes. “I’m a lifetime Republican, a cradle conservative,” E. King Alexander told Facing South. “From a small government perspective, I think the government needs to stay in its lane vis-à-vis the liberties of the people.” A public defender in Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish and a member of his state Republican Party’s Central Committee, Alexander is a part of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. The national group was launched at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference as a project of Equal Justice USA, a Brooklyn, New York-based nonprofit that works to break cycles of trauma through justice system reforms. Conservatives Concerned held its first annual national meeting from Sept. 6- 8, giving like-minded anti-death penalty advocates from across the U....

Death row’s population declined for the 17th straight year in 2017, while the duration from sentence to execution increased to 20 years, three months, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported Tuesday, continuing an overall drop in capital punishment across the U.S. The number of inmates under sentence of death fell by 94 to 2,703, a figure that would shrink further if it excluded more than 900 condemned prisoners in Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and, as of March, California, which have declared moratoriums on executions. An additional 59 federal inmates were on death row, up by one over 2016. The 23 executions in 2017 were half the number in 2010, although slightly more than the 20 carried out in 2016. Only 8 of the 32 states with capital punishment conducted executions in 2017; in May, New Hampshire abolished its death penalty. Even though the 34 new death sentences imposed in 2017 outnumbered the 23 executions, an additional 105 inmates left death row for oth...