Death Penalty News

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine issued execution reprieves for three death row inmates on Friday. In a statement, DeWine said he issued reprieves for Keith LaMar, Scott Group, and Davel Chinn, all of whom were set to be executed early next year. LaMar was scheduled to be executed on Jan. 13, 2027. He was convicted of aggravated murder for the deaths of five inmates during a 1993 riot at the Southern Ohio Correctional Institution in Lucasville. He received the death penalty for four of the killings. His new execution date is Jan. 13, 2030. Watch the latest NBC4 headlines in the video player above.

TEHRAN, Iran (DPN) — An Iranian protester who drew international alarm over reports of an impending death sentence has been released on bail, but he remains ensnared in the country's judicial system without a pardon or dismissal of charges, according to human rights organizations and state media. Erfan Soltani, a 26-year-old resident of Fardis, a suburb west of Tehran, was freed Saturday after his family posted bail equivalent to about $12,600. His detention stemmed from participation in anti-government protests that erupted nationwide in late 2025 and intensified into early 2026, challenging the Islamic Republic's clerical leadership amid economic woes and demands for political reforms. Soltani's case spotlighted the harsh crackdown on dissenters.

On December 5, 2025, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro issued an exe­cu­tion reprieve for Richard Roland Laird, the same day the Department of Corrections Secretary Laurel Harry signed a Notice of Execution for January 2, 2026. In issu­ing the same-day reprieve, Gov. Shapiro act­ed on his promise to main­tain an exe­cu­tion mora­to­ri­um in Pennsylvania. In February 2023, Gov. Shapiro announced he would con­tin­ue his pre­de­ces­sor Tom Wolf’s halt on exe­cu­tions, and called upon the Pennsylvania General Assembly to repeal the death penal­ty. He stat­ed: ​“When an exe­cu­tion war­rant comes to my desk, I will sign a reprieve each and every time.”

2 Filipinas, who had been on death row since 2013, were granted a reprieve when the Federal Court on Tuesday granted them a revision of their sentence, bringing it down to 30 years’ jail. A 3-member bench, led by Chief Justice Tun Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat, substituted the death penalty punishments initially given to Aisa Bello Mensong, aged 44, and Eleonor Cantor Sadullo, aged 66, with 30 years’ jail instead.

This much is undisputed: In 1994, Joe Nathan James Jr. murdered Faith Hall, a mother of two he had formerly dated; in 1999, he was sentenced to death in Jefferson County, Alabama; and he was executed on July 28, 2022. Whether James ought to have been killed was and is, by contrast, deeply disputed—Hall’s family pleaded that their mercy should spare him, and the state government acted against their wishes. Also disputed is the matter of how, exactly, the Alabama Department of Corrections took James’s life. Or it was in my mind, at least, until I saw what they had done to him, engraved in his skin. A little over a week ago, James’s body lay on a bloody shroud draped over an exam table in an Alabama morgue scarcely large enough to accommodate the three men studying the corpse. He had been dead for several days, but there was still time to discover what exactly had happened to him during the roughly three-hour period it took to—in the Department of Corrections’ telling—establish access to ...

Thirteen organisations sign open-letter in last-ditch attempt to save men who say they were tortured into confessions More than a dozen human rights groups have signed an open letter to Bahrain's king in a last-ditch attempt to commute the death sentences of two activists who were charged with killing an officer by bombing a police convoy in 2014. The signatories included Human Rights Watch and Reprieve, who maintain that Mohamed Ramadhan and Hussain Ali Moosa had not received a fair trial and were charged after the Bahraini police gained confessions from torture.  "We, the undersigned organisations, urge you to commute the death sentences of Mohamed Ramadhan and Hussain Ali Moosa, who have exhausted all legal remedies available to them after the Court of Cassation upheld their death sentences," the statement noted.  Earlier this month, a Bahraini court upheld the death sentences of the two pro-democracy activists. All avenues for the two men have ...

The UK government has announced that £21 million has been added to the Conflict, Security and Stability Fund (CSSF) – one strand of which has been linked to 350 death sentences in Pakistan. The CSSF provides funding for overseas security programmes, including several in countries where the Foreign Office has identified a high risk of human rights abuses, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt and Somaliland. In the 2018-19 financial year it was allocated £1.26 billion. Earlier this year, The Telegraph revealed that the Counter Terrorism Associated Reforms Initiative (CAPRI), which is funded through the CSSF, assists prosecutions in anti-terrorism courts in Pakistan that have handed down more than 350 death sentences in the last 5 years. CAPRI is part of the Pakistan Rule of Law programme, which between 2018 and 2019 was allocated £9.32m from the CSSF. In 2016, the then British High Commissioner to Pakistan claimed CAPRI was responsible for a tenfold increase in convic...

31 years ago, on May 20, 1987, just before midnight, I was sitting in the witness area of the Mississippi Gas Chamber watching someone die in front of me. His name was Edward Earl Johnson. I am both sad and glad that Edward’s final two weeks, right up to his agonising death, were recorded in Paul Hamann’s extraordinary BBC documentary Fourteen Days in May . Sad, because from time to time I find myself forced to relive that horror, when I watch the film at some public event; glad, because at least Edward’s senseless death has had positive repercussions – the film inspiring many to take up the battle for people in his precarious predicament. Yet it irks me beyond measure that people who should know better use their position of power to prognosticate that the justice system never executes the innocent. For example, in a case called Kansas v. March , in 2006, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia loudly proclaimed that there is not “a single case — not one — in which it is c...

There's an important new lethal-injection resource online: The Lethal Injection Resource Center's new website. The Lethal Injection Information Center is a hub for manufacturers, distributors, and stakeholders interested in preventing the misuse of medicines in lethal injections. The Lethal Injection Information Center is an initiative of the human rights organization Reprieve, which has been collaborating with pharmaceutical companies in their efforts to prevent what the industry describes as "the misuse of medicines in lethal injections." Reprieve is a company limited by guarantee in England and Wales, registered company number 5777831; and a registered charity in England and Wales, charity number 1114900. Our registered office is 10 Queen St Pl, London EC4R 1BE. Source: DPN, February 2018 ⚑ | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; conta...

Figures provided exclusively to BuzzFeed News reveal that, despite Mohammed bin Salman’s attempt to present himself as a reformer, the country's approach to the death penalty has not changed. Mujtaba al-Sweikat was 17 years old when he attended a protest against the government in Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2012. That December, on his way to visit Western Michigan University, where he was to study English and finance, he was arrested at the airport of eastern city of Dammam, hauled away and convicted after a secret trial on charges that included overseeing a dissident Facebook page and photographing anti-government protests. His sentence: death by hanging, a verdict upheld by an appellate court over the summer. The ascension of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious new Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman raised hopes for change inside and outside the conservative, oil-rich monarchy. He has announced drastic social reforms that include modernizing the nation’s religious teachings and g...

The Maldives will be ready to carry out the first executions in more than 60 years next month, President Abdulla Yameen declared Sunday amid growing international concern over the reintroduction of the death penalty. “By God’s will, when the time comes in September, when the Supreme Court concludes [cases] to the point where the death penalty can be enforced, our mechanisms and arrangements will be complete enough to do it with the advice of the Islamic council and the word of the heirs,” Yameen said at an event held to welcome new members to the ruling party. The president also reiterated his vow to reinstate capital punishment in a speech on Thursday night. Three young men are presently on death row after the Supreme Court upheld their sentences last year. Rumours of their imminent executions in late July prompted Sir Richard Branson, a British billionaire and philanthropist, to warn that the move would send the Maldives “back to the Dark Ages of human rights.” Bra...

Well-known actors including David Tennant, David Morrissey, Tobias Menzies and Olivia Colman have voiced a collection of ‘last words’ from prisoners facing the death penalty and other abuses around the world. In a short film narrated by David Morrissey (The Walking Dead), released today by international human rights organization Reprieve, the actors voice a series of statements from people affected by the death penalty. The video features the last words of prisoners like Edward Earl Johnson and Aftab Bahadur, who were executed despite strong evidence of their innocence, as well as the ‘first words’ of prisoners freed after being unjustly held on death row, or in similar lengthy detention such as at Guantanamo Bay. The film also includes the words of prisoners who are at imminent risk of execution, including Saudi juvenile Ali al-Nimr, British father of three Andy Tsege, and Irish student Ibrahim Halawa. Ali al-Nimr was sentenced to ‘crucifixion’ in Saudi Arabia following hi...