Death Penalty News

Lawyers for Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, filed a 226-page clemen­cy peti­tion with Governor Bill Lee, ask­ing him to com­mute her death sen­tence to life in prison with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole ahead of her September 30 exe­cu­tion date. Ms. Pike’s clemen­cy peti­tion out­lines the case her team has built over decades of appeals: her actions at 18 years old can­not be sep­a­rat­ed from a child­hood marked by repeat­ed rape, sex­u­al abuse, and neglect that went unad­dressed by the adults and state sys­tems meant to pro­tect her. Once incar­cer­at­ed, Ms. Pike was diag­nosed with bipo­lar dis­or­der and post-trau­mat­ic stress disorder.

WILMINGTON, Del. — More than three decades after Jermaine “Marlow” Wright was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a case with no physical evidence tying him to the crime and evidence favorable to his defense withheld by prosecutors, a Delaware court has issued him a Certificate of Innocence and ordered his 1992 murder conviction expunged. The Death Penalty Information Center identified Wright as the 203rd person exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973 and the second person exonerated from Delaware’s death row. Superior Court Judge Calvin Scott issued the order July 23, according to the organization.

Convicted child killer Tanner Horner has now taken up residence in one of the most brutal death row prisons after being sentenced to die by a Texas jury last month. Horner is incarcerated at the Polunsky Unit, an infamously restrictive prison outside Houston where the state's death row inmates are housed in an all-solitary confinement wing and spend at least 22 hours a day in their 60-square-foot cells. The former FedEx deliveryman, 34, was booked at the notorious prison on May 5 within hours of being sentenced for the gruesome murder of Athena Strand, 7, whom he admitted strangling while delivering a Christmas gift to her home in November 2022.

Narges Mohammadi’s prison memoir recounts alleged torture, isolation and denial of medical care inside Iran’s Evin, Qarchak and Zanjan prisons. Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has detailed years of beatings, solitary confinement and alleged medical neglect in Iranian prisons in a memoir smuggled out of jail, according to a report by The Guardian. The memoir, ‘ A Woman Never Stops Fighting ’ recounts her experiences inside Iran’s Evin, Qarchak and Zanjan prisons, where she says, authorities repeatedly denied her medical treatment despite severe health complications, including pulmonary embolism, seizures and heart problems.

DPI’s ​“What to Know” series exam­ines cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment from mul­ti­ple angles, one top­ic at a time. Each install­ment pro­vides essen­tial facts and data on spe­cif­ic aspects of the death penal­ty. This install­ment looks at the costs asso­ci­at­ed with pur­suit of death sen­tences and executions. Why it mat­ters: The ques­tion at the heart of this issue is whether the assumed ben­e­fits of the death penal­ty are worth its costs and whether oth­er sys­tems might pro­vide sim­i­lar ben­e­fits at less cost. "It is a sim­ple fact that seek­ing the death penal­ty is more expen­sive. There is not one cred­i­ble study, to our knowl­edge, that presents evi­dence to the contrary." —  From An Analysis of the Economic Costs of Capital Punishment in Oklahoma, Prepared for the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, 2017

Every year, thousands of prisoners in the U.S. are placed in solitary confinement, where they endure isolation, abuse, and mental suffering . This practice might soon become rarer for some inmates in Oklahoma, thanks to the efforts of activists in the state. Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Oklahoma announced that the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester had ended the practice of indefinite solitary confinement for "the vast majority" of death row prisoners.

OSAKA, Japan — Ryuji Kobayashi, a death row inmate convicted of leading a brutal 2006 double murder that involved burying victims alive, has died in custody, prison officials said. He was 41. Officers at the Osaka Detention House discovered Kobayashi unresponsive in his cell during a routine morning patrol, with a futon cover wrapped around his neck. He was pronounced dead shortly after being transported to a hospital. While an autopsy is pending to determine the exact cause of death, the Justice Ministry indicated there were no immediate signs of a struggle or self-inflicted injury.

A bench of Justices Ashwani Kumar Mishra and Rohit Kapoor allowed the appeal filed by the two convicts and commuted their death sentence to life imprisonment. The Punjab and Haryana High Court has commuted to life imprisonment the death penalty of two men convicted for kidnapping and murdering a minor boy for ransom in 2005 on the grounds of their illegal solitary confinement and the state’s delay in deciding mercy petitions. A bench of Justices Ashwani Kumar Mishra and Rohit Kapoor allowed the appeal filed by the two convicts and commuted their death sentence to life imprisonment for the remainder of their natural lives without any commutation or premature release.

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 22 — Singapore’s use of the mandatory death penalty is facing mounting criticism, as affected families and rights groups highlight what they describe as systemic injustices, prosecutorial overreach and worsening conditions for prisoners on death row. Decisions on how to frame charges, prosecute cases, and whether to grant a certificate of substantive assistance have direct implications for prisoners like Pannir Selvam Pranthaman.

Scotty Gardner wants out of “his cave” at the Varner SuperMax Prison south of Grady, Arkansas. In messages with USA TODAY, he described the conditions of his cell as, “a walk-in closet with a shower, toilet, a sink and drain in the floor that bugs crawl in and out constantly.” He also mentioned recurring issues with black mold and toilets that constantly overflow. To get out, Gardner is asking the state to be the first inmate executed since 2017. 

Guzman said his lawyer, Israel Encinosa, has been "battling" for 10 months to be granted access to Guzman Former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman allegedly sent a letter complaining about lack of access to his lawyer and conditions in the Colorado prison he is being held in. The letter was published by journalist Jesus Garcia and addressed to judge Brian Cogan of New York's East District Court. In it, he complains about the "psychological torment" of not being able to use the phone or go outside to "take in some sun."

In a major blow to Japan’s human rights record, the country has resumed executions after nearly three years, putting Takahiro Shiraishi to death on Friday 27 June 2025. This marked the end of a two-year, 11-month hiatus – the longest pause since the Ministry of Justice began publicly disclosing the names and crimes of death row inmates in 2007. With this execution, Japan has reaffirmed its place within the shrinking group of nations that continue to execute their captive citizens.

A prison program is granting Texas' most hardened criminals 'recreational time' for limited time periods each day.  Death row inmates are being offered a rare set of privileges, allowing a select group of well-behaved prisoners to spend several hours a day outside their cells.  The program's allowances includes communal meals, TV time, prayer circles and - for the first time in decades - direct human contact. The change marks a sharp departure from decades of extreme isolation that made Texas' death row one of the harshest in the nation.

Iran has transferred French nationals Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris to undisclosed locations after they survived explosions during Israeli strikes on Tehran’s Evin prison on June 23, their family told Iran International.  “Iranian authorities don't tell [us] where they are being held,” Cécile’s sister Noémie told Iran International on Friday.  The couple were arrested in May 2022 while on a tourist trip to Iran.  Noémie said that since the Israeli strike, they have had only one consular visit, on July 1, when the family was relieved to learn that they were "at least still alive.” 

From the outside, the Tokyo Detention House looks much like the other tall, austere buildings native to Katsushika City, but its drab facade and tree-lined grounds conceal a far more sinister reality. It is here that Japan's most deplorable criminals are plucked from their cells and hanged underneath fluorescent lights in a cold, bare wood-panelled room.  There is a chillingly theatrical element to how the condemned are executed in the East Asian country - the only member of the G7 besides the US that still metes out capital punishment.  Shackled prisoners are led past a small gold statue of Kannon, a Buddhist figure associated with compassion, as they enter their sterile execution chamber. 

TOKYO — Japan on Friday executed a man dubbed the "Twitter killer" who murdered and dismembered nine people he met online, in the nation's first enactment of the death penalty since 2022. Takahiro Shiraishi, 34, was hanged for killing his young victims, all but one of whom were women, after contacting them on the social media platform now called X. He had targeted users who posted about taking their own lives, telling them he could help them in their plans, or even die alongside them. Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki said Shiraishi's crimes, carried out in 2017, included "robbery, rape, murder... destruction of a corpse and abandonment of a corpse".

His hands never trembled, not even as he slipped the noose around the necks of several condemned men. But now, years later, their faces return to him -- uninvited, every day. Currently in his 70s, a Japanese man who worked as a prison guard for many years at a detention center in eastern Japan, remains anonymous for privacy reasons. One morning in the 1990s, he was informed he was to be that day's "noose handler," assisted by four other prison officers and several staff in the task of hanging death row inmates. "I knew this was a road I'd have to go down eventually if I worked at a detention center," the man said in an interview with Kyodo News. "You don't have any power to veto the decision."

A group of federal inmates who were resentenced under the Biden administration filed a lawsuit trying to stop their move to a high-security Colorado prison. A federal judge has denied a legal attempt, for now, to prevent the U.S. government from transferring death row inmates whose sentences were commuted by then-President Joe Biden to the "Supermax" in Colorado, the highest-security federal prison in the country. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly in Washington, D.C., ruled Tuesday against issuing a preliminary injunction requested in a lawsuit brought by 21 of the 37 former death row inmates , all of whom saw their sentences changed to life without parole in December. "The Court cannot grant that relief — at least not now," Kelly wrote in his opinion, saying that the plaintiffs must first exhaust their administrative appeals within the federal Bureau of Prisons' transfer process. The decision comes as the BOP has said it would not transfer any of the plaintiff...

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and sev­er­al oth­er orga­ni­za­tions rep­re­sent­ing a group of for­mer­ly fed­er­al­ly death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers filed a fed­er­al law­suit on April 16, 2025 seek­ing to pre­vent their trans­fer to the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, known as "ADX.”  The trans­fers were threat­ened by the Department of Justice in response to President Donald Trump’s January 20th Executive Order 14164, which direct­ed Attorney General Pam Bondi to "ensure” that the pris­on­ers who received com­mu­ta­tions of their death sen­tences in the wan­ing days of the Biden Administration​ “are impris­oned in con­di­tions con­sis­tent with the mon­stros­i­ty of their crimes and the threats they pose.”