Death Penalty News

The Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a Mississippi man’s conviction and death sentence. By a vote of 5-4, the court in Pitchford v. Cain agreed with Terry Pitchford that the judge at his 2006 trial had not properly analyzed whether the prosecutor in Pitchford’s case violated the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination in jury selection. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority, in a nine-page opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Quoting a 2019 opinion in which the court threw out the conviction of Mississippi inmate Curtis Flowers in a case that involved the same prosecutor, Kavanaugh acknowledged that “‘America’s trial judges operate at the front lines of American justice’ and ‘the job of enforcing’” the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky , holding that the use of peremptory challenges (that is, challenges for any reason) to remove potential jurors based on race violates the ...

In an August 14, 2025, op-ed in the South Florida Sun Sentinel , for­mer Alabama Governor Don Siegelman revealed he has ​“lived to regret” not com­mut­ing death sen­tences while he was in office, and crit­i­cized Florida’s exe­cu­tion selec­tion process, cit­ing seri­ous con­cerns with secre­cy and racial bias. Writing about two sched­uled exe­cu­tions in Florida — Kayle Bates on August 19 and Curtis Windom on August 28 — Gov. Siegelman argues the cas­es sur­face sys­temic prob­lems in Florida’s death penalty system.

Latest appeal is over the race of the victims of capital crimes since Governor Ron DeSantis took office WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — His family in West Palm Beach remembers Kayle Bates as a polite young man with a bright future when he joined the Florida National Guard after graduating high school. His cousin Gabrielle Wise-Brice has made several trips to see him in prison. “I’ve been visiting him since I was a little girl,” said Wise-Brice. “He always checks in on me so he can know I have my head on my shoulders. He’s just been a great person.” “He was evil,” countered Frank McKeithen, the recently retired Bay County sheriff who was the lead investigator in the 1982 murder of Janet Renee White near Panama City.

Over the past two weeks, two Florida death row pris­on­ers filed fresh chal­lenges to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ deci­sions to sign his tenth and eleventh death war­rants of 2025. On July 29, 2025, Kayle Barrington Bates (also known as Maud Dib Al Sharif) brought a civ­il suit against Gov. DeSantis alleg­ing Florida’s exe­cu­tion war­rant process ​“is infect­ed with racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al arbi­trari­ness.” Included in the claim is a sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis show­ing that ​“95% of the exe­cu­tions that Governor DeSantis has autho­rized involved white victims.”

The North Carolina Supreme Court published a ruling Friday that a Black man on death row should not be given a new trial despite that he’d been sentenced to death by an all-white jury after prosecutors used a handout to strike Black people from the jury pool. Russell William Tucker was sentenced to death in 1996 for killing a security guard outside a Kmart in Forsyth County. He has since challenged that conviction, arguing that prosecutors relied on racist jury strikes to send Black jurors home and ensure that those who decided his death sentence were all white.

A federal judge has overturned the death penalty conviction of a Mississippi man, finding a trial judge didn’t give the man’s lawyer enough chance to argue that the prosecution was dismissing Black jurors for discriminatory reasons. U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills ruled Tuesday that the state of Mississippi must give Terry Pitchford a new trial on capital murder charges.

Texas, long considered the death penalty capital of the United States, has undergone a remarkable transformation in its approach to executions. And what is happening in the Lone Star State is a harbinger of the fate of capital punishment across the country . A year-end report issued on Dec. 14 by the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP) documents those trends. In 2023, Texas had many fewer death sentences and executions than in the recent past, but its death penalty system continued to be plagued by arbitrariness, discrimination and cruelty.

A report highlights the continuous failures of the state's capital punishment system, which executed 8 people this year despite a declining death row population. Despite declining death penalty usage, Texas still led the nation in executions this year, according to a new report that highlights the continuous failures of the state’s capital punishment system. Texas has the 3rd-largest death row population in the country, after California and Florida. In 2000, the Texas death row population peaked with more than 450 people facing execution. That year, the state executed 40 people.

Inside the push to persuade Cooper to commute the death sentences of 136 people before he leaves office Every night one of his neighbors was scheduled to be executed by the state of North Carolina, Glen Edward “Ed” Chapman would look up at the window slit in his cell and say to the black sky, “I’ll see you again.” Saying goodbye was hard. Chapman and his peers who were also condemned to die formed a small community within the prison system. And whenever the state executed someone, that community would shrink by one member.

Harris County, Texas, is the death penalty capital of the country. In most cases resulting in a death sentence in the past 20 years, appointed defense lawyers failed to uncover potentially life-saving evidence, the report found. Harris County, Texas, has executed more people than anywhere else in the country. In most Harris County cases ending in a death sentence over the previous 20 years, defense lawyers failed to find and present compelling evidence that could have kept their clients off of death row, according to a 2-part report published on Monday by the Wren Collective, a group of former public defenders who do criminal justice research and policy.

Louisiana law allows a person in prison to file a petition to challenge their conviction or sentence on the basis of claims like innocence, police or prosecutorial misconduct, and ineffective assistance of counsel. State law also requires that a panel of three state appellate judges must review petitions written by incarcerated people themselves because they cannot afford a lawyer. But according to an investigative report from ProPublica, judges on Louisiana’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal secretly decided not to review petitions that were not written by lawyers—and instead directed staff director Jerrold Peterson to send out cut-and-pasted denials to at least 5,000 petitions that no judge ever read.

Louisiana residents should speak out before Gov. Edwards leaves office in January 2024. Louisianans have a chance to prevent innocent people from being executed on death row. At least 190 innocent people have been exonerated from death row nationwide and 12 in Louisiana alone. There are currently 57 defendants on Louisiana’s death row, including Innocence Project client Jimmie “Chris” Duncan , who has maintained his innocence in the 1993 death of his girlfriend’s baby. Gov. John Bel Edwards, who opposes the death penalty, has the authority to grant clemency to everyone on Louisiana’s death row. Attorneys for 55 of these defendants have requested modified sentences of life without parole. To avoid further injustice, residents of Louisiana must urge the Louisiana Parole Board to hold clemency hearings now and recommend clemency to the Governor so that the Governor can commute death sentences to life in prison before he leaves office in January 2024.

A New York man who was convicted 47 years ago of a rape he didn’t commit was freed this week after new DNA testing proved his innocence and pointed to another suspect who has now confessed to the crime, authorities said. Leonard Mack was found guilty of rape and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon after being accused of raping a high school girl in Greenburgh, N.Y., in 1975, per a statement from the Innocence Project, a non-profit organization that works to vindicate the wrongly convicted. Mack, who is a Vietnam War veteran and has lived with his wife in South Carolina for nearly 21 years, spent more than seven years in state prison for the crime.

BATON ROUGE, La. — For the first time, Louisiana is on the precipice of emptying death row. Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards is using his clemency power to help advance a mass request for commutations after he publicly called on state lawmakers to stop the death penalty months ago. But time is running out. The governor leaves office in January. Emboldened by Edwards’ comments on capital punishment, all but one of the state’s 57 people on death row asked the governor in June to spare their lives by commuting their sentences to life without parole.

On August 30, 2023, the Tennessee Criminal Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s ruling that formerly death-sentenced prisoner Pervis Payne can serve his two life sentences concurrently, making him eligible to apply for parole in less than four years.  Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Paula Skahan resentenced Mr. Payne in 2022 to two life sentences with the possibility of parole after prosecutors conceded that they could not disprove Mr. Payne’s claim that he is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty. 

El programa de Asistencia Jurídica resultó producente para los connacionales en el país vecino A través de un comunicado, la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE) dio a conocer que, gracias al programa de “Asistencia Jurídica en Casos de Pena Capital en Estados Unidos”, se logró evitar o revertir la pena de muerte en 126 casos dentro del país vecino en lo que va del presente sexenio, destacando una de las mayores cifras desde su implementación.

Capital punishment opponents want Gov. Roy Cooper to commute the sentences of everyone on North Carolina’s death row before he leaves office next year. Activists will gather Aug. 19 in Raleigh to commemorate the anniversary of the state’s last execution and demand Cooper commute all incarcerated people sentenced to death before the end of his term in 2024. 

Louisiana’s death penalty saga continues. Two steps forward, one step back, on the road toward abolition. The latest step forward came last Wednesday, when Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards exercised his executive authority and ordered the state’s clemency board to hold hearings on the petitions filed by 56 death row inmates this summer. His order tees up the possibility that, before he leaves office next January, Edwards may be able to issue the largest mass commutation in this country since Illinois Gov. George Ryan emptied his state’s death row in 2003.

On August 9th, with the use of his executive authority, Governor John Bel Edwards asked the Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole to return the 56 clemency applications filed by death-sentenced prisoners in Louisiana to its docket for consideration and set them for hearings.  The Board of Pardons will now have until January 2024, when Gov. Edwards officially leaves office, to decide whether to recommend clemency for nearly all of the state’s death row prisoners. Earlier this year, Gov. Edwards expressed his opposition to capital punishment, stating that “the death penalty is so final. When you make a mistake, you can’t get it back. And we know that mistakes have been made in sentencing people to death.” 

It's the latest salvo in a battle over clemency requests filed on behalf of most Louisiana death row prisoners. Louisiana's pardon board can't waive a procedural hurdle to weigh clemency requests from death row prisoners, Attorney General Jeff Landry wrote in an opinion released Wednesday as the board sifts through a historic batch of filings in capital cases. The state's Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole asked Landry's office this week whether it can take up clemency requests filed more than a year after a judge has issued an appeal ruling in capital cases. The request to Landry's office came little more than a month after most prisoners on death row asked the board and Gov. John Bel Edwards to spare their lives.