case studies for death penalty

Federal Death Penalty

Case Summaries for Modern Federal Death Sentences

• Facebook Share
• Tweet Tweet
• Email Email

Inmates Sentenced Under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988:

Richard Tipton, James H. Roane, Jr. — All Black. Tipton, Roane, and their co-defendant Corey Johnson were members of an inner-city gang in Richmond, VA. They were sentenced to death in February 1993 for their participation in a series of drug-related murders. Execution dates were set for the three co-defendants in May 2006, but the executions were stayed because of a challenge to the lethal injection process. ( Roane v. Holder , D.C. Dist. Ct.). Johnson was executed January 14, 2021.

Sentenced Since the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994: (names in brackets had death sentences reversed, but are awaiting final disposition)

Len Davis — Black. Davis, a New Orleans police officer who was under investigation in a drug conspiracy case, was sentenced to death on two convictions in April 1996 for ordering the murder of a young black woman who had previously seen him beat a witness in an unrelated incident. A co-defendant, Paul Hardy, also black, was the triggerman in the killing. Hardy was also sentenced to death on two convictions in May 1996. The Fifth Circuit reversed the sentences for both defendants and one of the two capital convictions for each defendant. The court ordered a new sentencing hearing for both defendants. A federal jury again recommended a sentence of death for Len Davis on August 9, 2005. (Associated Press, Aug. 10, 2005). Hardy is not under a sentence of death.

Anthony Battle — Black. Battle, a federal prisoner with a history of psychiatric problems, was sentenced to death in March 1997 for the murder of a guard in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld his conviction and death sentence in 1999. A Georgia federal district court subsequently rejected a challenge to Battle’s mental competency and denied his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The Eleventh Circuit upheld the district court’s ruling in August 2005.

Aquilia Barnette — Black. Barnette was convicted of murdering a man in North Carolina in a carjacking and a woman, his former girlfriend, in Virginia. A jury sentenced him to death on February 10, 1998. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed his death sentence on May 4, 2000. Barnette was re-sentenced to death in 2002, and in December 2004, the Fourth Circuit upheld the conviction and death sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court vacated that judgment on October 3, 2005 and remanded the case back to the Fourth Circuit in light of the Court’s ruling on racial discrimination in jury selection earlier that year in Miller-El v. Dretke . The Circuit remanded the case to the district court, which, in May 2010, ruled that Barnette had not proven his claim of jury discrimination. The Fourth Circuit upheld the district court’s ruling in May 2011.

Billie Jerome Allen and Norris Holder — Both Black. Allen and Holder were convicted of the fatal shooting of a bank guard during a robbery in St. Louis, Missouri. Allen was sentenced to death by a jury on Mar. 10, 1998. In June 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Allen’s death sentence and remanded the case back to the Eighth Circuit for reconsideration in light of the Court’s ruling in Ring v. Arizona . Because his federal indictment did not include the aggravating factors necessary to support his death sentence, the 8th Circuit said Allen’s sentence should be reduced to life in prison. (February 5, 2004, St. Louis Post-Dispatch). However, in September 2004, the 8th Circuit conducted a rehearing en banc of the earlier decision and reinstated Allen’s death sentence. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 3, 2005). Holder was sentenced to death by a jury on April 3, 1998.

Richard Allen Jackson — White. Jackson was convicted in federal court on May 7, 2001 for use of a firearm on federal property (Bend Creek Recreation Area) during a felony resulting in the death of the victim. He was subsequently sentenced to death. Jackson had earlier been convicted in North Carolina state court for offenses arising from the same actions. He was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Karen Lynn Styles in 1994. That conviction was overturned and Jackson later pleaded guilty to second degree murder.

Marvin Gabrion — White. On March 16, 2002, Marvin Gabrion was sentenced to death for a 1997 murder in Michigan’s Manistee National Forest. Although Michigan does not have the death penalty, Gabrion was sentenced under the federal system because the victim was killed on federal property. Gabrion’s case was the first time since the federal death penalty was reinstated that a federal death sentence was imposed in a state that did not itself authorize capital punishment. Gabrion’s death sentence was overturned by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (Chicago Tribune, Aug. 3, 2011) because the trial judge had not allowed the defense to raise as an issue that Gabrion could not have been sentenced to death if he had been tried in a Michigan state court. The Sixth Circuit reviewed the decision en banc and in May 2013 reversed the panel. His lawyers subsequently filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus. A subsequent January 2017 pleading argued that Gabrion is mentally incompetent, and detailed “a long history of severe mental illness” that “may have deteriorated over the last 15 years while he has been housed on death row.” (J. Agar, “ Death-row inmate Marvin Gabrion ‘actively delusional,’ no help to attorneys ,” Michigan Live, January 27, 2017.)

Julius Robinson — Black. Robinson was sentenced to death on March 18, 2002, for the killings of Juan Reyes in May 1999 and Rudolph Resendez in June 1999 in Fort Worth, Texas. Both men were killed in drug related incidents. Robinson was formally sentenced by the trial judge on June 5, 2002.

Meier Jason Brown — Black. A U.S. District judge affirmed the recommendation of a jury for a death sentence against Meier Brown on November 8, 2003. Brown was convicted of the November 2002 murder of a 48-year-old white female — a Fleming, Georgia postal worker — during a robbery. Brown had agreed to plead guilty in return for a sentence of life without parole in light of Brown’s confession, but federal prosecutors sought the death sentence. (Savannah Morning News, November 8, 2003)

Chadrick Fulks and Branden Basham — Both White. A jury recommended the death sentence for the 2002 kidnapping and murder of a 44-year-old-white South Carolina woman following Fulks’ escape from a Kentucky jail. Fulks’ codefendant, Branden Basham, was tried in September 2004 for crimes committed during the escape. Fulks is the first federal death conviction in South Carolina. The judge is required to uphold the recommendation and confirm the death sentence. (The State (Columbia, SC), July 1, 2004). On November 2, 2004, a jury recommended a death sentence for Basham for the murder. The judge is required to follow the recommendation of the jury and impose a death sentence. (Associated Press, November 2, 2004).

Jeffery W. Paul — White. Paul was sentenced to death in 1997 for being an accomplice to the murder of an 82-year-old man in Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas. At the time of the offense, Paul was 18 years old. His older co-defendant, Trinity Ingel, received a life sentence despite admitting that he was the triggerman. Paul’s death sentence was vacated in 2022 after the Southern District of Indiana granted his § 2241 habeas corpus petition upon finding that the firearms conviction on which his death sentence was based was due to be vacated. He was resentenced to life imprisonment in October 2023.

Shannon Agofsky — White. Agofsky was given a death sentence on July 17, 2004 for the murder of a fellow inmate at the Beaumont Federal Penitentiary in Texas in 2001. The jury was shown a video of the attack that prison officials said was gang-related. Agofsky was originally in prison for a murder that occurred when he was 18. (Associated Press, July 18, 2004). Ronald Mikos — White. On May 23, 2005 a jury recommended a death sentence for this 56-year-old Chicago podiatrist who was convicted of fatally shooting Joyce Brannon, a white former patient, to prevent her from testifying in a federal probe of a Medicare fraud scheme in January 2002. (Chicago Tribune, May 23, 2005). In the federal system, a jury’s recommendation for either life without parole or death is binding on the judge. Edward Fields — White. On July 22, 2005, a jury in the eastern district of Oklahoma recommended a death sentence for Fields, 38, a former prison guard. Fields pleaded guilty to the murder of two white campers in the Ouachita National Forest while wearing his homemade sniper suit. There was some evidence that Fields was mentally ill. A federal judge sentenced him to death on Nov. 8, 2005. (Muskogee Phoenix, July 26, 2005; Associated Press, July 15, 2005).

Kenneth Lighty — Black. On Nov. 10, 2005, a federal jury in Maryland recommended a death sentence for Lighty for the kidnapping and murder of Eric Hayes (black), an alleged PCP dealer and son of a D.C. police lieutenant, in 2001. The kidnapping occurred in Washington, DC and the murder was committed in Maryland. Lighty was convicted on October 21. A co-defendant, James Flood was also found guilty but faces a mandatory life sentence. In April, a 3rd defendant, Lorenzo Wilson, was convicted of conspiracy to kidnap and faces a life sentence. Lighty’s death sentence was vacated by the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland on April 13, 2023 for improper jury consideration of other convictions. [Kenneth Barrett] — White. On Nov. 18, 2005, a federal jury in Muskogee, Oklahoma, recommended a death sentence for Barrett for the murder of a white police officer, David Eales, on Sept. 24, 1999. The death sentence was for intentionally killing a state law enforcement officer during a drug crime and during the officer’s performance of his official duties. Another officer was wounded. Barrett had already been convicted of first-degree manslaughter in state court for the murder of Eales, and he was given a 20-year sentence, followed by 10 years for the wounding. (Muskogee Phoenix, Nov. 21, 2005). Barrett’s death sentence was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on January 19, 2021 for ineffective assistance of counsel in the penalty phase of trial. Daryl Lawrence — Black. Convicted on Feb. 28, 2006 of the murder of a police officer, Bryan Hurst, during an attempted bank robbery in Columbus, Ohio on Jan. 6, 2005. Lawrence was also convicted of other bank robberies in Ohio. A jury recommended a sentence of death on Mar. 10, 2006. (Press Release, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern Dist. of OH, Mar. 10, 2006). His death sentence was overturned by the trial judge (e-mail from Diane Menashe, Counsel for Daryl Lawrence, on July 3, 2007). That decision was reversed by the 6th Circuit in 2009, reinstating his death sentence.

Jurijus Kadamovas and Iouri Mikhel — White. In Los Angeles, a federal jury recommended the death penalty on Feb. 13, 2007 for two men convicted of murders in a kidnapping-for-ransom scheme targeting five Russian immigrants and one Georgian immigrant. Prosecutors said the two men kidnapped affluent Russian immigrants from Los Angeles in late 2001 and early 2002 and attempted to extort money from their families and friends. Three co-conspirators pleaded guilty and testified at the trial for the government. The court formally imposed the jury’s death verdicts on March 12, 2017. (CBS News, Mar. 12, 2007 & July 25, 2019). Carlos Caro — Latinx. A jury in the Western District of Virginia recommended a death sentence for Caro on Feb. 13, 2007 for the murder of his cellmate, Robert Sandoval. Caro was serving a 30-year sentence for drug offenses. Both Caro and Sandoval were reportedly members of a prison gang called the Texas Syndicate. The murder occurred in 2003. A judge will still have to pronounce the formal sentence at a later date. (Roanoke Times, Feb. 14, 2007). UPDATE: Caro was formally sentenced to death in District Court on March 30, 2007. Thomas Hager — Black. On November 1, 2007, a jury in Alexandria, Virginia recommended a death sentence for Hager, 34, after deliberating for 2 days. Hager was convicted of the drug-related murder of Barbara White committed in 1993. Prosecutors said that Hager killed White because she had learned of the safe house where he was staying. Two associates of Hager who were also responsible for White’s murder received life sentences and testified against him. The defendant grew up in a poor area of Southeast Washington, DC, and both of his parents were drug addicts who neglected and abused their children. (Associated Press (Va. Daily Press), Nov. 1, 2007). The judge immediately imposed the death sentence on Hager.

Rejon Taylor — Black. On October 21, 2008, a jury in Chattanooga, Tennessee recommended a death sentence for Taylor after convicting him of murder, kidnapping and carjacking. The victim was Guy Luck, a white businessman who lived in Atlanta, Georgia. He was brought across state lines and murdered in Tennessee. Taylor’s attorney said he was very confident that the verdict would be overturned on appeal. The judge indicated that formal sentencing would take place in about a month. (Chattanooga Times Free Press, Oct. 22, 2008).

Daniel Troya and Ricardo Sanchez, Jr. — Both Latinx. On March 31, 2009, a jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, recommended a death sentence for Troya and Sanchez for the murder of two children on the Florida Turnpike in 2006. The defendants also were convicted of murdering the children’s parents and received life sentences for that crime. All the victims were Hispanic. The father of the children was allegedly killed because of a drug debt. The reputed kingpin of the drug operation did not receive a death sentence. The judge is required to follow the jury’s recommendation in imposing the formal sentence. (South Florida Sun Sentinel, April 1, 2009). On May 13, 2009 both Troya and Sanchez were formally sentenced to death.

Joseph Ebron — Black. On May 11, 2009, a jury convicted Ebron of the 2005 murder of Keith Davis, also black, in a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas. The District Court judge followed the jury’s recommendation and condemned Ebron to death on May 18. Both defendant and victim were said to be members of a Washington, D.C. gang. Ebron is 30 years old and has been incarcerated for most of his life since he was 15. (Beaumont Enterprise, May 19, 2009).

David Runyon — Asian. On August 27, 2009, a jury in Norfolk, Virginia, unanimously recommended a death sentence for Runyon for the murder of Cory Allen Voss, a white Naval officer, in Newport News in 2007. Runyon, a former soldier, was convicted of shooting Voss in a murder-for-hire plot organized by Voss’s wife, Catherina Voss, and her boyfriend, Michael Draven. The federal government did not seek the death penalty against the other two defendants. Catherina Voss pled guilty and received a life sentence. Draven was found guilty and faces a life sentence. Catherina hired Runyon to kill her husband in the hope of being the beneficiary of a $500,000 life insurance policy. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith will formally sentence Runyon in December. (Daily Press, Aug. 27, 2009).

Alejandro Uma ñ a — Latinx. On April 28, 2010, a jury in Charlotte, NC, unanimously recommended a death sentence for Umana, who was reputed to be a member of the gang MS-13. He was found guilty of killing 2 brothers in a Greensboro restaurant in 2007. Both victims were Latinx. Umana was one of 26 suspected MS-13 gang members indicted in Charlotte in 2008. Chief U.S. District Judge Bob Conrad is required to follow the jurors’ recommendation and impose the death penalty. (Charlotte Observer, Apri 29, 2010). Umana was formally sentenced to death on July 27, 2010.

Mark Snarr (White) and Edgar Garcia (Latinx)— On May 24, 2010, a jury in Beaumont, Texas, recommended death sentences for these two federal prison inmates for the murder of a fellow inmate, Gabriel Rhone. They also stabbed and wounded 2 corrections officers. They were convicted on May 7, 2010, of the murder that occurred in the U.S. Penitentiary in Beaumont. Both inmates were serving lengthy sentences for drug trafficking. (AOL News, May 24, 2010). According to the FBI, the presiding judge sentenced the defendants to death on the same day.

Kaboni Savage — Black. On May 31, 2013, a jury in Pennsylvania recommended the death penalty for each of 12 murders Savage committed or directed between 1988 and 2004, plus an additional death sentence related to witness retaliation. The murder victims were government witnesses, their relatives, and rivals in Savage’s drug operation. A federal judge officially imposed 13 death sentences on June 3, 2013. (Philadelphia Inquirer, June 3, 2013).

Jorge Torrez — Latinx. On April 24, 2014, a jury in Virginia recommended the death penalty for this ex-marine convicted of killing a fellow service member in 2009. Torrez allegedly committed other murders in Illinois. He instructed his attorneys not to put on mitigating evidence. (Associated Press, Apr. 24, 2014). Torrez was formally sentenced to death by the judge on May 30, 2014. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld his conviction and death sentence on direct review on August 28, 2017.

Charles Hall and Wesley Coonce — Both White. Hall and Coonce received jury verdicts of death on June 2, 2014, for the murder of a Latinx prisoner in a federal penitentiary in Missouri. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld Coonce’s conviction and death sentence on July 25, 2019 and upheld Hall’s death sentence on December 19, 2019. Hall did not raise any guilt-stage issues in his direct appeal.

Thomas Sanders — White. Sanders was sentenced to death by a federal jury on September 26, 2014, for the kidnapping and murder of a 12-year-old girl in Louisiana in 2010. Sanders also killed the girl’s mother earlier in Arizona.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — White. Convicted of 30 counts including murder related to the Boston (Mass.) Marathon bombing (2013). Three victims died in the bombing, hundreds were wounded, and a police officer was killed in an attempt to avoid arrest. A death verdict was returned by the jury on May 15, 2015, for one of the bombing deaths. Formal sentencing occurred on June 24, 2015. Tsarnaev’s death sentence was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on July 31, 2020 based upon the trial court’s failure to question jurors on the substance of the pretrial publicity to which they were exposed. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the appellate court’s decision in a 6-3 ruling.

Dylann Roof — White. Roof was sentenced to death by a jury on January 10, 2017 for the race-related murders of nine parishioners at an historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The court formally imposed the death penalty on January 11.

Christopher Cramer and Ricky Fackrell — Both White. Cramer and Fackrell received jury verdicts of death on June 13, 2018, for the murder of a White prisoner in a federal penitentiary in Texas.

Brandon Council — Black. Council was sentenced to death on October 3, 2019 by a jury in South Carolina for killing a teller and bank manager during the 2017 robbery of a CresCom bank.

Permanently Removed From Death Row:

John McCullah — White. McCullah was sentenced to death for a drug-related kidnap/murder of a Muskogee, Oklahoma auto dealership employee. The 10th Circuit granted McCullah a new penalty hearing in 1996, and in February 2000, McCullah was resentenced to life in prison.

David Ronald Chandler — White. Chandler, a marijuana grower in Alabama, was sentenced to death under the drug kingpin statute in 1991 for the murder-for-hire of a white male. Most of the government’s witnesses, including the triggerman in the killing, have recanted their testimony. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturned his death sentence in October 1999 because of ineffectiveness of counsel. In December 1999, the circuit court voted to rehear the case en banc , and by a 6-5 vote reversed the panel’s grant of relief and reinstated Chandler’s death sentence. Chandler filed a petition for writ of certiorari asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case. Sentence commuted to life by President Clinton on January 20, 2001.

Boutaem Chanthadara — Asian. Chanthadara was sentenced to death in October 1996 for the armed robbery/murder of the female proprietor of a Chinese restaurant in Wichita, Kansas. In November 2000, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit overturned Chanthadara’s death sentence and remanded his case for a new sentencing hearing. At resentencing, Chanthadara was sentenced to life in April 2002.

Paul Hardy — Black. Hardy was the triggerman in a killing in New Orleans along with a co-defendant Len Davis. Hardy and Davis were sentenced to death on two convictions in May 1996. The U.S Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the sentences for both defendants and one of the two capital convictions for each defendant. The court ordered a new sentencing hearing for both defendants. In 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Ginger Berrigan, who sentenced Hardy and Davis to death after their trial in 1996, found that Hardy is not eligible for death under a 2002 Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the execution of the intellectually disabled. (WWL-TV News, Jan. 15, 2011). Davis was resentenced to death.

Richard Thomas Stitt — Black. Stitt was convicted of ordering the murder of three people in Norfolk, Virginia. He was sentenced to death by a jury in November 1998 after a joint trial with three codefendants, who did not face the death penalty. Stitt’s death sentence was overturned by a federal District Court judge in April 2005 because of ineffectiveness of counsel . In March 2006, a panel of the U.S Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the district court’s judgment, finding that Stitt’s attorney did not render effective assistance because of a conflict of interest. (Associated Press, Mar. 25, 2006). On remand, the prosecution requested that a new capital sentencing jury be empaneled. However, the district court instead ruled that Stitt’s sentence should be reduced to life plus 65 years . (Virginian Pilot, June 17, 2007). On appeal, the 4th Circuit overturned the district court’s sentence and allowed the government to conduct a new sentencing hearing . Attorney General Eric Holder approved the seeking of the death penalty at the new sentencing trial. (Virginian Pilot, Oct. 27, 2009). The government subsequently announced that it would no longer seek the death penalty against Stitt. (Virginian-Pilot, Oct. 20, 2010).

Darryl Lamont Johnson — Black. Johnson was convicted of ordering the murder of two informants in Illinois in connection with the Gangster Disciples drug conspiracy cases. He was sentenced to death on November 17, 1997. His co-defendant was sentenced to life in prison. A federal district court in Illinois overturned Johnson’s death sentence in Dec. 2010 because jurors had not been given sufficient information about the conditions in which Johnson would have been confined if he had been sentenced to life imprisonment . In 2011, the government decided not to appeal this decision, removing Johnson from death row. On April 9, 2013, Johnson was sentenced to life without parole in District Court. The judge remarked that he had become a changed man since his conviction 16 years before. (Business Wire, Apr. 11, 2013). German Sinistera — Hispanic. In May 2000, a federal jury in Kansas City, Missouri, recommended a death sentence for Sinistera of Houston, Texas, for his role as triggerman in the murder of a drug dealer. Sinistera was a citizen of Colombia. He was convicted along with two co-defendants, Arboleda Ortiz and Plutarco Tello, who are also Colombian nationals. The jury also recommended a death sentence for Ortiz, but not for Tello. The judge sentenced Sinistera and Ortiz to death. In March 2013, Sinistera died in prison . In 2017, President Obama commuted Ortiz’s death sentence to life without parole.

David Lee Jackson — Black. Case: E.D. TX CR No. 1:05-CR-51 B. Jackson was convicted in the Eastern District of Texas for the 1999 killing of an inmate at the federal prison in Beaumont, Texas. On Nov. 13, 2006, the sentencing jury voted to impose the death penalty. The district court formally imposed the sentence on Dec. 15, 2006. At the time of the murder, Jackson had been incarcerated for a weapons violation. His co-defendant, Arzell Gully, was in prison for drug trafficking. Both men were sent to the high security federal prison in Florence, Colorado, after the homicide. Gully did not face the death penalty. Jackson, Gully, and the victim all were African American. (Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel). Jackson’s death sentence was vacated in District Court on March 25, 2013 and he was sentenced to life without parole on March 26, 2013. (Federal Capital Habeas Project).

David Paul Hammer — White. Hammer is a mentally ill prisoner who was convicted of killing a federal prison inmate at the federal penitentiary at Allenwood, Pennsylvania, where he was serving a 1200+ year Oklahoma state sentence. After initially pursuing an insanity defense, Hammer pled guilty to the murder. He was sentenced to death on July 24, 1998. Hammer then sought to discharge counsel and proceed pro se during post-trial motions. Counsel was appointed for an appeal and after counsel filed the appeal, Hammer moved pro se to dismiss the appeal, moved to withdraw the motion to dismiss, and changed his mind again. After protracted proceedings in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the court ultimately ruled that Hammer was competent to waive his appeal and that the federal death penalty statute permitted such a waiver. The federal Bureau of Prisons set an execution date for Nov. 15, 2000. Hammer then filed a clemency petition and a request to appeal. The district court stayed his execution, and directed that he file a habeas corpus challenge to his conviction and sentence on or before January 31, 2001. The district court overturned Hammer’s death sentence because the prosecution had violated its constitutional obligation to disclose exculpatory evidence, in this case withholding a number of witness statements that rebutted the government’s aggravating circumstance that the murder had been the product of “substantial planning and premeditation.” (Associated Press, Dec. 27, 2005). The government appealed, but the Third Circuit ruled that, under the federal sentencing statute, it lacked jurisdiction to review the case until Hammer had been resentenced either to life or death. On July 17, 2014,after a three-week penalty hearing, a federal district court judge in Philadelphia sentenced Hammer to life imprisonment without parole .

Angela Johnson — White. On June 21, 2005, a federal jury in Iowa recommended a death sentence for Angela Johnson (co-defendant with Dustin Honken)for her role in aiding drug kingpin Honken in 4 of the 5 murders he committed. If the sentence had been carried out, she would have been the first woman executed by the U.S. government since Bonnie Brown in December 1953. Johnson’s death sentence was overturned by the District Court on March 22, 2012 because of ineffectiveness of his penalty-phase counsel. In mid-June 2012, the DOJ announced that it would again seek the death penalty against Johnson. However, on December 17, 2014, DOJ announced that it would no longer seek death in the case. (Assoc. Press, Dec. 17, 2014).

Arboleda Ortiz — Black/Hispanic. In May 2000, a federal jury in Kansas City, Missouri, recommended a death sentence for Ortiz for his role in the murder of a drug dealer. Ortiz and two co-defendants, German Sinisterra and Plutarco Tello, are Colombian nationals. The jury recommended a death sentence for Ortiz and Sinistera, but not for Tello. The judge sentenced the two to death. Sinistera died in prison in 2013. Ortiz’s lawyers sought clemency from President Barack Obama on the grounds that Ortiz was intellectually disabled, his right to consular notification under the Vienna Convention had been violated, he did not himself commit the murder and was not in the room when it occurred, and had been denied effective assistance of counsel at trial. On January 17, 2017, President Obama commuted his death sentence to life without parole.

Ronell Wilson — Black. Wilson’s case was the first federal death sentence handed down in New York since 1954. Wilson, 24, was convicted of killing two undercover police detectives in Staten Island in 2003. The jury recommended a sentence of death on January 30, 2007. (Associated Press, February 1, 2007). The district court formally sentenced Wilson to death on March 29, 2007. Three years later, in June 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned Wilson’s death sentence because of prosecutorial misconduct: the prosecutor improperly commented on Wilson’s silence, in violation of his constitutional privilege against self-incrimination and his right to a fair trial. The government did not seek Supreme Court review of the circuit’s decision. On February 7, 2013, the District Court ruled that Wilson was not exempt from the death penalty because of mental retardation, and hence could be subject to a capital re-sentencing trial. On July 24, 2013, a jury in Brooklyn, New York, voted to resentence Wilson to death. The district court formally imposed that sentence on September 10, 2013. On March 15, 2016, the district court reviewing Wilson’s sentence found that the initial ruling on Wilson’s intellectual disability had applied an inappropriate standard for determining his intellectual functioning, in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 Hall v. Florida . Applying the correct standard, the court ruled that Wilson was intellectually disabled and ineligible for the death penalty . On June 26, 2017, the U.S. Attorney’s office announced that it would not appeal the district court’s ruling. (Associated Press, June 27, 2017).

Donald Fell — White. On July 14, 2005, a jury in Vermont recommended a death sentence for Fell, 25, for a carjacking in Vermont and subsequent murder of a woman in New York in 2000. He was convicted of carjacking and kidnapping resulting in death. The woman and her car were seized by Fell and a codefendant as they were fleeing Vermont where Fell’s mother and a friend were also killed hours earlier. The co-defendant hanged himself in prison in 2003. Prosecutors had originally arranged a plea bargain for Fell in which he would have been sentenced to life without parole, but the deal was rejected by Attorney General John Ashcroft. This was the first capital trial in Vermont in nearly 50 years. (N.Y. Times, July 15, 2005). The conviction was overturned in July 2014 because of juror misconduct. (WCAX News, July 26, 2014). In July 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that prosecutors could not admit into evidence statements made by Fell’s deceased co-defendant that attempted to shift blame for the killing to Fell. ( Vermont Digger , July 23, 2018). The parties subsequently reached a plea deal, which the district court approved on September 28, 2018, in which Fell was sentenced to life without parole. ( Vermont Digger , Sept. 28, 2018).

Azibo Aquart — Black. On June 15, 2011, a jury in New Haven, Connecticut, recommended a death sentence for Aquart’s role in a 2005 triple murder of multiple alleged rivals in the drug business by leaders of a Jamaican drug gang. All victims were black. Azikiwe Aquart (Azibo’s brother) also faced capital prosecution in the offense. A third co-defendant, who cooperated with the government, did not face capital charges. (CT Post, June 15, 2011). The court formally sentenced Aquart to death on Dec. 17, 2012. His brother was sentenced to life earlier. Aquart became the first person in Connecticut history to receive the federal death penalty. (CT Post, Dec. 18, 2012). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld his conviction but overturned his death sentence on December 20, 2018, finding that the prosecution improperly vouched for the testimony of a penalty-phase witness. The government’s petition for rehearing was denied in March 2019 and prosecutors agreed not to seek review of the grant of relief in the Supreme Court. In December 2020, the Connecticut U.S. Attorney’s office informed Aquart’s counsel that the government would no longer be seeking death in the case and, on December 22, 2020 , it notified the federal district court of that decision. ( Associated Press , January 21, 2021).

Bruce Webster — Black. Webster was charged alongside Orlando Hall in Fort Worth, Texas with the abduction, sexual assault, and beating murder of a 16-year-old black female. They were tried separately. Hall was sentenced to death in November 1995. Webster was sentenced to death in June 1996. Webster had been scheduled for execution on April 16, 2007. After Webster joined the lethal injection challenge filed by other federal death-row prisoners, his execution was stayed. On June 18, 2019, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana vacated his death sentence, finding that he was ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. That ruling was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on September 22, 2020. The appellate court’s mandate issued on November 16 and Webster’s removal from death row became final when the Department of Justice did not seek review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Joseph Duncan — White. On August 27, 2008, a jury in Idaho returned a unanimous verdict for a death sentence for Duncan after deliberating for 3 hours. Duncan had pleaded guilty to ten federal charges, including the murder and kidnapping of a young boy and the kidnapping of a young girl in May 2005. He insisted on defending himself, and offered no mitigating evidence and no closing argument in the sentencing trial. (KNDO/KNDU Web site, NBC affiliates; also AP, Aug. 27, 2008). He subsequently tried to waive his appeals and, in December 2013, the federal district court ruled that he was competent to do so. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld that ruling in 2015 and in 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Duncan’s lawyers subsequently filed a motion to set aside his sentence and conviction, which the trial court denied on March 22, 2019. The appeal of that order was pending when Duncan died of brain cancer on March 28 2021.

Sherman Lamont Fields — Black. A jury sentenced Fields to death in connection with the shooting death of his girlfriend in 2001. The murder took place during Fields’ escape from a detention center in Texas while Fields was being held on a federal weapons charge. However, the statutory basis for the death sentence was not the murder itself but that Fields had used and carried a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence (conspiracy and the escape). Fields was sentenced to lengthy prison terms on the other charges. A U.S. District Judge formalized the sentence in April 2004, and ordered Fields transferred to Terre Haute, IN. (Associated Press, April 8, 2004). In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Davis that the “crime of violence” language was unconstitutionally vague, which meant that crimes like conspiracy and escape that do not require force as an element do not constitute crimes of violence. Citing Davis , Fields filed a motion seeking to vacate some of his convictions, including the conviction carrying a death sentence. In January 2021, the district court vacated the conviction carrying a death sentence, as well as an additional non-capital conviction and sentence. Fields was resentenced on the remaining convictions on April 7, 2021. Robert Bolden — Black. On May 23, 2006, a federal jury in St. Louis, Missouri, recommended a death sentence for Bolden for the murder of a white bank security guard, Nathan Ley, during an attempted robbery in St. Louis in 2002. Two accomplices pleaded guilty to attempted bank robbery. The formal sentencing took place on August 25, 2006. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 23, 2006). Bolden is a Canadian citizen. Bolden died on death row in September 2021 of complications from diabetes and poor medical care.

Gary Sampson — White. Sampson pled guilty to the carjacking and murder of two Massachusetts men during a weeklong crime spree. A jury sentenced Sampson to death on December 23, 2003. Sampson is only the second federal case tried in Massachusetts since the federal government reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988. (Las Vegas Sun, December 23, 2003) Judge Mark L. Wolf sentenced Sampson to death, but ordered that the execution be carried out in New Hampshire, which has not carried out an execution since 1939. (Boston Globe, January 30, 2004). Judge Wolf overturned Sampson’s sentence because a juror had made significant misrepresentations during voir dire. (Boston Globe, Oct. 20, 2011). After the government appealed, the U.S Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed the district court’s reversal of sentence. (July 25, 2013). Prosecutors capitally retried Sampson. The jury re-sentenced him to death on one of the two murder charges, but did not reach a unanimous verdict on the second charge, which resulted in the imposition of a life sentence for that murder. (Associated Press, January 9, 2017) On August 16, 2017, the district court denied Sampson’s post-trial motions, affirming the death sentence imposed in his case. ( Boston Globe , August 16, 2017). Sampson died of cancer on death row December 21, 2021. ( Associated Press , December 23, 2021).

Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr. — Latinx. Convicted on August 30, 2006, of the murder of a college student, Dru Sjodin. Sjodin was kidnapped from North Dakota and her body was found in Minnesota. A jury in North Dakota recommended a death sentence on September 22. The judge formally sentenced Rodriguez to death on Feb. 8, 2007. North Dakota does not have a state death penalty and has not had an execution since 1905. The judge designated South Dakota as the place of execution. (Associated Press, Sept. 22, 2006; N.Y. Times, Feb. 9, 2007). Rodriguez’s death sentence was reversed by the U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota on September 3, 2021 (with an amended opinion issued January 3, 2022) for ineffective assistance of counsel in the penalty phase of trial for failing to investigate and present mental health mitigating evidence. That evidence included that Rodriguez had significantly impaired intellectual capacity, “suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (‘PTSD’) so severe that he sometimes has dissociative experiences,” and had deficits in functioning equivalent to those of an individual with Intellectual Disability. The district court also found that the prosecution had “presented unsupported, misleading, and inaccurate testimony regarding the [victim’s] cause of … death” that could have affected the sentencing verdict. Federal prosecutors initially filed notice that they would appeal that decision, but subsequently withdrew the appeal . On March 14, 2023, the North Dakota U.S. Attorney’s office withdrew the notice of intent to seek the death penalty in Rodriguez’s capital resentencing proceedings.

Nasih Ra’id (formerly Odell Corley) — Black. On October 29, 2004, a jury recommended a death sentence for Ra’id for the murder of two white bank employees during a robbery attempt at a Porter, Indiana bank in 2002. Ra’id’s sentence will be the first one in the history of the Northern District of Indiana federal court system. The judge is required to impose the sentence against Ra’id, who was alleged to be the triggerman in the robbery. Two co-defendants pleaded guilty and were given lesser sentences. (Indiana Herald-Argus, October 29, 2004). Mr. Ra’id died on December 1, 2023. ( Indiana Public Media , December 4, 2023)

Jury Verdict for Death Overturned Before Being Formally Imposed

George Lecco (male) and Valerie Friend (female) — Both White. On May 29, 2007, a jury in Charleston, West Virginia, recommended death sentences for both defendants for the murder of Carla Collins in order to protect their drug ring. Prosecutors maintained that Lecco arranged to have Collins killed and that Friend did the shooting in 2005. These were the first federal death verdicts in West Virginia since the federal law was reinstated in 1988. (Charleston Daily Mail, May 29, 2007). Lecco and Friend’s convictions were overturned by the federal district court in May 2009 before the judge had formally imposed the jury’s death sentence, because one of the jurors at the trial, William Griffith, had not disclosed that he was being investigated by the same U.S. Attorney’s Office that was prosecuting Lecco and Friend for allegedly possessing child pornography. (Williamson Daily News, May 7, 2009). A new trial date of October 27, 2009 was set for Friend, and the prosecution indicated that it intended to again seek the death penalty. On October 1, 2009, Friend entered a deal with the prosecution in which she pleaded guilty to a number of charges—including the murder of Collins—and agreed to cooperate against her co-defendant in exchange for being sentenced to life in prison . (Assoc. Press, Oct. 1, 2009). On May 3, 2010, a federal jury chose not to sentence Lecco to death after finding him guilty. He was sentenced to life without parole . (Charleston Gazette, May 3, 2010).

John Wayne Johnson — Black. On May 27, 2009, a jury in New Orleans, Louisiana, unanimously recommended a death sentence for Johnson for the murder of an off-duty sheriff’s deputy working as a guard during a bank robbery. There were two other accomplices in the 2004 robbery in which officer Sidney Zaffuto was killed. Johnson admitted he shot Zaffuto, but said it was unintentional. The jury found him guilty on May 19. Johnson’s attorneys planned to appeal on several grounds, including an assertion that the federal death penalty was being employed unconstitutionally in New Orleans because all 42 defendants indicted on capital offenses were either black or Hispanic. (Times-Picayune, May 27, 2009). The District Court judge delayed formal sentencing until February 3, 2010 to permit the defense more time to challenge the trial. Prior to formal sentencing, the District Court vacated Johnson’s death verdict and ordered a new penalty hearing for multiple constitutional violations including: admission of improper victim-impact evidence; a discovery violation related to this victim-impact evidence; introduction of an unadjudicated murder that the jury had found was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt; and improper government argument in the penalty phase that (a) compared the worth of the defendant and the victim, (b) compared conditions of a life sentence to the permanency of the victim’s death, and (c) pressured the jury into believing that a life sentence would be a capitulation. (Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel, May 18, 2010). On March 29, 2011, the U.S. Attorney moved to dismiss its appeal of the District Court’s order vacating Johnson’s death sentence and that motion was granted. The prosecutors subsequently withdrew their authorization to seek the death penalty and Johnson was formally sentenced to life without parole.  

Sentenced to death and executed

Timothy McVeigh — White. McVeigh was sentenced to death in June 1997 for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. The United States Supreme Court denied review on March 8, 1999. McVeigh was scheduled for execution on May 16, 2001 but was granted a 30-day stay of execution by Attorney General John Ashcroft after it was discovered that the FBI had failed to disclose more than 3,000 pages of document to McVeigh’s defense team. McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001. McVeigh’s co-defendant, Terry Nichols, was capitally prosecuted by the federal government in a separate trial. He was convicted by the jury and sentenced to life without parole. Nichols was later capitally tried in Oklahoma state court for the murders of the 161 non-federal employees in Oklahoma City. He was convicted, and again the jury sentenced him to life in prison without parole.

Juan Raul Garza — Latinx. Garza, a marijuana distributor, was sentenced to death in August 1993 in Texas for the murders of three other drug traffickers. Garza was denied review by the U.S. Supreme Court in late 1999 and was facing an execution date of August 5, 2000. The date was postponed until the Justice Department finished drafting guidelines for federal death row inmates seeking presidential clemency, which were issued in early August. Garza was offered the opportunity to apply for clemency under the new guidelines and a new execution date of Dec. 12, 2000 was set. In December, 2000, President Clinton again delayed Garza’s execution for at least six months to allow further study of the fairness of the federal death penalty. Garza was executed on June 19, 2001 .

Louis Jones — Black. Jones was sentenced to death in November 1995 in Texas for the kidnap/murder of a young white female soldier. The United States Supreme Court granted review of the case and heard arguments on February 22, 1999. The Supreme Court affirmed the conviction on June 21, 1999. Jones, a decorated Gulf War veteran who had no prior criminal record, claimed that his exposure to nerve gas in Iraq and post-traumatic stress from his combat tours contributed to his murder of Pvt. Tracie Joy McBride in Texas. President Bush refused Jones’ clemency request. Jones was executed on March 18, 2003.

Daniel Lee — White. Lee was convicted in Arkansas in May 1999 of the triple murder of a gun dealer and his family. Lee was convicted along with Chevie Kehoe in a plot to set up a whites-only nation in the Pacific Northwest. Although prosecutors considered Kehoe the mastermind of the plot, the same jury that sentenced Lee to death sentenced Kehoe to life. The court formally sentenced Lee to death on May 13, 2002. Lee was executed on July 14, 2020.

Wesley Purkey — White. A jury recommended that Purkey be sentenced to death for the 1998 kidnapping, rape, and murder of a Kansas City, Missouri, teen. While serving life in prison for another 1998 murder in Kansas, Purkey confessed to the Kansas City crime in hopes of being transferred to federal prison. Prosecutors instead chose to seek the death penalty for Purkey under the 1994 federal statute. The judge is required to follow the jury’s recommendation. (Kansas City Star, November 19, 2003) Purkey was executed on July 16, 2020.

Dustin Honken — White. On October 27, 2004 a federal jury voted to sentence Honken to death for the murder of two girls in Iowa in 1993. Honken was also given three life sentences: one for the murder of the girls’ mother, and two more for the murders of two other adults who were to have testified against Honken in a federal drug case. The children, white girls age 10 and 6, were witnesses to the murder of their mother. The judge is required to uphold the jury’s recommendation and impose the death sentence. (Des Moines Register, October 28, 2004). This is the third federal death sentence handed down in a state that does not have the death penalty in its own law. The other two were in Michigan and Massachusetts. Honken was executed on July 17, 2020. Lezmond Mitchell — Native American. Mitchell and his co-defendants (including a juvenile) allegedly got a ride from a woman and her 9 year old granddaughter in Arizona. They killed both victims and stole the car supposedly for use in an armed robbery. Each victim was stabbed at a separate location. The Attorney General authorized a capital prosecution against Mitchell under a carjacking theory — although the murders occurred on Navajo tribal land and the tribe had not “opted in” to the federal death penalty. Attorney General Ashcroft directed that the case be tried capitally without consulting the tribal government. Mitchell was found guilty on May 20, and sentenced to death on September 15, 2003. Mitchell was executed on August 26, 2020. Keith Nelson — White. Nelson was convicted of kidnapping a girl from her Kansas home and murdering her in Missouri. On November 28, 2001 a jury recommended the death penalty for Nelson, and on March 11, 2002, a federal judge imposed the death penalty. Nelson was executed August 28, 2020. William LeCroy, Jr. — White. A jury sentenced LeCroy to death in the 2001 carjacking and murder of a North Georgia woman. Attorneys for LeCroy argued that the murder took place inside the victim’s house, and thus did not fall under the 1994 federal death penalty statute. The judge is required to follow the jury recommendation. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 11, 2004). LeCroy was executed September 22, 2020.

Christopher Vialva — Black+. Vialva and his co-defendant Brandon Bernard were convicted and sentenced to death by a federal jury in Waco, TX in June 2000 for the carjacking and murder of an Iowa couple. The murder became a federal case because it occurred on a remote parcel of federal land near Fort Hood in central Texas. Vialva was 19 years old at the time of the murders, and Bernard was 18. Four younger teenagers, aged 15 and 16, also pled guilty to federal charges relating to the crime. Vialva was executed September 24, 2020. He was the first teenaged offender executed under the auspices of the federal government in 72 years. + Vialva was biracial. His mother is white; his father is from the West Indies and of African descent. Orlando Hall — Black. Hall was charged alongside Bruce Webster in Fort Worth, Texas with the abduction, sexual assault, and beating murder of a 16-year-old black female. They were tried separately. Hall was sentenced to death in November 1995. Webster was sentenced to death in June 1996. Hall was executed on November 19, 2020. Brandon Bernard — Black. A federal jury in Waco, TX, convicted Bernard and his co-defendant Christopher Vialva in June 2000, of carjacking and the murder of an Iowa couple on a remote parcel of federal land near Fort Hood in central Texas. Both were sentenced to death. Bernard was 18 years old at the time of the murders, and is the youngest offender on federal death row in more than 70 years. Vialva, who was 19-years-old at the time of his offense, was executed on September 24, 2020. Four younger teenagers also pled guilty to federal charges relating to the crime. Bernard was executed on December 10, 2020. Alfred Bourgeois — Black. On March 24, 2004 a jury recommended a death sentence for Alfred Bourgeois for the 2002 murder of his daughter at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station in Texas, based in part on the testimony of a prisoner housed with Bourgeois. The judge is required to follow the jury’s sentencing recommendation. (Department of Justice Press Release, March 24, 2004). Bourgeois was executed on December 11, 2020. Lisa Montgomery — White/Female. On Oct. 26, 2007, a jury in Kansas City, Missouri recommended a death sentence for Montgomery following her conviction for kidnapping and killing Bobbie Jo Stinnett, also white, and stealing her unborn baby. Montgomery took the baby with her to Kansas and claimed the baby was her child. (Kansas City Star, Oct. 26, 2007). Montgomery was formally sentenced to death on April 4, 2008 in U.S. District Court. (Topeka Capital-Journal, Apr. 3, 2008). She became the third woman on the federal death row. Montgomery was executed on January 13, 2021. Corey Johnson — Black. Johnson was a member of an inner-city gang in Richmond, VA. He was sentenced to death in February 1993 for his participation in a series of drug-related murders. Execution dates were set for Johnson and his two co-defendants in May 2006, but the executions were stayed because of a challenge to the lethal injection process. Johnson was executed on January 14, 2021. Dustin John Higgs — Black. Higgs was convicted in October 2000 of ordering the 1996 murder of three Maryland women after arguing with one of them in his apartment. The triggerman, Willis Mark Haynes, was convicted in May 2000 and sentenced to life plus 45 years in prison. Higgs’s case was the third death penalty prosecution in Maryland since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988, but marked the first time a jury imposed the death penalty. (Washington Post, 10/27/00). The prosecution witness who testified that Higgs ordered him to commit the killings later recanted his testimony and Higgs insisted up until the moment of the execution that he was innocent of the murders. Higgs was executed on January 16, 2021.

Note : Because of different definitions of what constitutes being “on death row,” some organizations such as the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel or the Bureau of Justice Statistics, may have a slightly different list of those on death row. Names in [ ] are defendants whose conviction or death sentence have been reversed but who still face the possibility of being resentenced to death on retrial. This list may also include prisoners who have been sentenced to death by a jury, but the judge has not yet formally imposed the sentence. These cases are marked with an asterisk (*).

See also list of federal prisoners executed since 1927.

Sentenced to death, but innocent: These are stories of justice gone wrong.

Since 1973, more than 8,700 people in the U.S. have been sent to death row. At least 182 weren’t guilty—their lives upended by a system that nearly killed them.

A version of this story appears in the March 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine.

A 63-year-old man named Kwame Ajamu lives walking distance from my house in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Ajamu was sentenced to death in 1975 for the murder of Harold Franks, a money order salesman on Cleveland’s east side. Ajamu was 17 when he was convicted.

Ajamu, then named Ronnie Bridgeman, was found guilty primarily because of the testimony of a 13-year-old boy, who said he saw Bridgeman and another young male violently attack the salesman on a city street corner. Not a shred of evidence, forensic or physical, connected Bridgeman to the slaying. He had no prior criminal record. Another witness testified that Bridgeman was not on the street corner when Franks was killed. Yet mere months after his arrest, the high school junior was condemned to die.

It would be publicly revealed 39 years later that the boy who testified against him had immediately tried to recant his statement. But Cleveland homicide detectives told the boy they would arrest and charge his parents with perjury if he changed his story, according to his later court testimony. Ajamu was released on parole in 2003 after 27 years in prison, but the state of Ohio would not declare him innocent of the murder for nearly another 12 years, when the boy’s false statement and police misconduct were revealed in a related court hearing.

I interviewed Ajamu and others who represent vastly different backgrounds but share a similar, soul-crushing burden: They were sentenced to death after being convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.

(*Figures in all captions are rounded to the nearest year and don’t include time in jail pre-sentencing.)  

LIMITED TIME OFFER

Receive up to 2 bonus issues, with any paid gift subscription!

The daily paths they travel as former death-row inmates are every bit as daunting, terrifying, and confusing as the burden of innocence that once taunted them. The post-traumatic stress faced by a wrongly convicted person who has awaited execution by the government doesn’t dissipate simply because the state frees the inmate, apologizes, or even provides financial compensation—which often is not the case.

The lesson is as charged as superbolt lightning: An innocent man or woman sentenced to die is the perfect witness against what many see as the inherent immorality and barbarity of continuing capital punishment.

It’s a particularly poignant lesson in a nation that executes people at a rate outpaced by few others—and where factors such as a defendant’s or victim’s race, low income, or inability to counter overly zealous police and prosecutors can put the accused at increased risk of a wrongful conviction that could lead to execution. Race is a particularly strong determinant: As of April 2020, Black people made up more than 41 percent of those on death row but only 13.4 percent of the U.S. population.

During the past three decades, groups such as the Innocence Project have shed light on how dangerously fallible the U.S. justice system can be, particularly in capital cases. DNA testing and scrutiny of actions by police, prosecutors, and public defenders have helped exonerate 182 people from death row since 1972, and as of December 2020 had led to more than 2,700 exonerations overall since 1989.

Each of the former death-row inmates I interviewed belongs to an organization called Witness to Innocence . Based in Philadelphia since 2005, WTI is a nonprofit led by exonerated death-row inmates. Its primary goal is to see the death penalty abolished in the U.S. by shifting public opinion on the morality of capital punishment.

During the past 15 years, WTI’s outreach targeting the U.S. Congress, state legislatures, policy advisers, and academics has been credited with helping to abolish the death penalty in several states, though it remains legal in 28 states, the federal government, and the U.S. military. In 2020, 17 people were executed in the U.S., 10 by the federal government. It was the first time more prisoners were executed by the federal government than by all of the states combined.

“I was abducted by the state of Ohio when I was 17 years old,” Ajamu began our conversation when we met on my backyard patio.

“I was a child when I was sent to prison to be killed,” Ajamu, now chairman of WTI’s board, told me. “I did not understand what was happening to me or how it could happen. At first I begged God for mercy, but soon it dawned on me that there would be no mercy coming.”

The day Ajamu arrived at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in rural Ohio, he was escorted to a cellblock filled with condemned men. At the end of death row was a room that held Ohio’s electric chair. Before the guards put him in his cell, they made a point of walking him past that room.

“One of the guards really wanted me to see that chair,” Ajamu recalled. “I’ll never forget his words: ‘That’s gonna be your hot date.’ ”

From the time Ajamu was sentenced to die until 2005—when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing juveniles violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment—the nation executed 22 people who were convicted of a crime committed when they were under age 18, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) .

The high court’s ruling countered a history of executing juveniles that began long before the United States was conceived. The first known case of a juvenile executed in the British colonies was in 1642 in the Plymouth Colony, where Thomas Granger, 17, was hanged. His alleged offense was sodomy with livestock.

In the earliest days of the nation, even younger children were subject to the harshest of all judicial penalties. Hannah Ocuish, 12, a Native American girl, was hanged in New London, Connecticut, in 1786 for murder. Two enslaved boys—a 12-year-old convicted of murder and a 13-year-old convicted of arson—were hanged in Virginia in 1787 and 1796, respectively.

For most of the next 200 years, age was ignored as a factor in sentencing. Juveniles and adults alike were tried, convicted, and executed based on their crimes, not their maturity. Available criminal records don’t cite the age of the executed regularly until around 1900. By 1987, when the U.S. Supreme Court first agreed to consider the constitutionality of the death penalty for minors, some 287 juvenile executions had been documented. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that Ohio’s death penalty law violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, as well as the 14th Amendment’s requirement of equal protection under the law, Ajamu’s death sentence was reduced to life in prison. Still, he lingered behind bars for another quarter of a century, when he was released on parole. He wouldn’t be exonerated until 2014, after a crusading reporter for a Cleveland magazine and the Ohio Innocence Project helped unravel the lie that had sent Ajamu to death row.

“There is a wide array of blunders that can cause erroneous convictions in capital cases,” said Michael Radelet, a death penalty scholar and sociologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Police officers might secure a coerced or otherwise false confession. Prosecutors occasionally suppress exculpatory evidence. Sometimes there is a well-intentioned but mistaken eyewitness identification. Most common is perjury by prosecution witnesses.”

Few opponents of capital punishment summarize the case against state-sponsored executions more bluntly than Sister Helen Prejean, co-founder of WTI and author of Dead Man Walking, the best-selling book that inspired the 1995 film of the same title, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

The plainspoken nun described how her animus toward the death penalty became personal by recalling her fear of a fairly routine dental experience she underwent years ago.

“I had to have a root canal on a Monday morning,” she told me. “The whole week before that root canal, I dreamt about it. As the appointment got closer, the more nervous I became.”

She continued, “Now imagine anticipating your scheduled appointment to be put to death. The six people that I’ve accompanied onto death row all had the same nightmare. The guards were dragging them from their cells. They cry for help and struggle. Then they wake up and realize that they are still in their cells. They realize it’s just a dream. But they know that one day the guards are really going to come for them, and it won’t be a dream. That’s the torture. It’s a torture that as of yet our Supreme Court refuses to recognize as a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.”

More than 70 percent of the world’s nations have rejected the death penalty in either law or practice , according to the DPIC. Of the places where Amnesty International has recorded recent executions, the U.S.—which has the highest incarceration rates in the world—was one of just 13 countries that held executions every one of the past five years. Americans’ support for capital punishment has dropped significantly since 1996, when 78 percent supported the death penalty for people convicted of murder. By 2018, support had fallen to 54 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

“If I were to be murdered,” wrote Prejean, “I would not want my murderer executed. I would not want my death avenged— especially by government —which can’t be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.”

Before Ray Krone was sentenced to die, his life bore no resemblance to Ajamu’s. From tiny Dover, Pennsylvania, Krone was the eldest of three children and a typical small-town American boy. Raised a Lutheran, he sang in a church choir, joined the Boy Scouts, and as a teenager was known as a fairly smart kid, a bit of a prankster. He pre-enlisted in the Air Force during high school; after graduating, he served for six years.

Having received an honorable discharge, he stayed in Arizona and went to work for the U.S. Postal Service, a job he planned to keep until retirement.

That career dream—and his life—were abruptly shattered in December 1991, when Kim Ancona, a 36-year-old bar manager, was found stabbed to death in the men’s bathroom of a Phoenix lounge that Krone frequented.

Police immediately zeroed in on Krone as a suspect after learning that he’d given Ancona, whom he knew casually, a ride to a Christmas party a few days earlier. The day after her body was discovered, Krone was ordered to provide blood, saliva, and hair samples. A dental cast of his teeth also was created. The next day he was arrested and charged with aggravated murder.

Investigators said the distinctive misalignment of Krone’s teeth matched bite marks on the victim’s body. Media reports would soon derisively refer to Krone as the “snaggletooth” killer. As was the case with Ajamu, there was no forensic evidence linking Krone to the crime. DNA was a fairly new science, and none of the saliva or blood collected at the crime scene was tested for DNA. Simpler blood, saliva, and hair tests were inconclusive. Exculpatory evidence was available but ignored, such as shoe prints found around the victim’s body that didn’t match the size of Krone’s feet or any shoes he owned.

Based on little more than the testimony of a dental analyst who said the bite marks on the victim’s body matched Krone’s misaligned front teeth, a jury found Krone guilty. He was sentenced to death.

“It’s a devastating feeling when you recognize that everything you’ve ever believed in and stood for has been taken away from you, and without just cause,” Krone told me. “I was so naive. I didn’t believe this could actually happen to me. I had served my country in uniform. I worked for the post office. I wasn’t perfect, but I had never been in trouble. I’d never even gotten a parking ticket, but here I was on death row. That’s when I realized that if it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone.”

The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office spent upwards of $50,000 on the prosecution, centered on its bite-mark theory, while the consulting dental expert for Krone’s publicly funded defense was paid $1,500. This discrepancy in resources available to prosecutors and defendants in capital cases has long been replicated across the nation, leading to predictable outcomes for defendants staked to under-resourced and often ineffective legal counsel.

Krone got a new trial in 1995, when an appeals court ruled that prosecutors had wrongly withheld a videotape of the bite evidence until the day before the trial. Again, he was found guilty. Prosecutors relied on the same dental analysts who’d helped convict Krone the first time. But this time the sentencing judge ruled that a life sentence was appropriate, not death.

You May Also Like

Innocent on death row: Hear their stories

Why are U.S. presidents allowed to pardon anyone—even for treason?

Why human bodies are medicine's most essential taboo

Krone’s mother and stepfather refused to give up on their belief in their son’s innocence. They mortgaged their house, and the family hired their own lawyer to look into the physical evidence collected during the original investigation. Over objections by the prosecution, a judge granted a request by the family’s lawyer to have an independent lab examine DNA samples, including saliva and blood from the crime scene.

In April 2002 the DNA test results showed that Krone was innocent. A man named Kenneth Phillips, who lived less than a mile from the bar where Ancona was killed, had left his DNA on clothes Ancona had been wearing. Phillips was easy to find: He already was in prison for sexually assaulting and choking a seven-year-old girl.

When Krone was released from prison four days after the DNA test results were announced, he became known as the hundredth man in the United States since 1973 who’d been sentenced to death but later proved innocent and freed.

Gary Drinkard was no choirboy. He’d had prior brushes with the law when Dalton Pace, a junk dealer, was robbed and killed in Decatur, Alabama, in August 1993.

Police arrested Drinkard, then 37, two weeks later when Beverly Robinson, Drinkard’s half sister, and Rex Segars, her partner, struck a deal with police that implicated Drinkard in the slaying. Facing unrelated robbery charges that also potentially implicated Drinkard, the couple agreed, in exchange for the charges being dropped against them, to cooperate with police and testify that Drinkard told them he’d killed Pace.

When I spoke with Drinkard, he reminded me of a weather-beaten man straight out of a Merle Haggard song. He wore coveralls and chain-smoked Newports. He spoke slowly and guardedly in a deep southern drawl. He grew exasperated only when I asked him to describe his time on death row.

“I thought they were going to kill me,” Drinkard said. That certainly seemed to be the plan. Using testimony from their star witnesses (the half sister and her partner), prosecutors hammered home the alleged confession while improperly influencing the jury with references to Drinkard’s alleged involvement in those earlier thefts. Drinkard’s public defenders, who had no experience in capital cases and very little in criminal law, mostly stood mute. They made no real attempt to introduce evidence that could have proved their client’s innocence. Drinkard was found guilty in 1995 and sentenced to death. He would spend close to six years on death row.

In 2000 the Supreme Court of Alabama ordered a new trial because of the prosecution’s introduction of Drinkard’s criminal history.

“Evidence of a defendant’s prior bad acts … is generally inadmissible. Such evidence is presumptively prejudicial because it could cause the jury to infer that, because the defendant has committed crimes in the past, it is more likely that he committed the particular crime with which he is charged,” the court wrote in granting a new trial.

Drinkard’s case had drawn the attention of the Southern Center for Human Rights, an organization that fights capital punishment. It provided him with legal counsel. At Drinkard’s 2001 retrial, his lawyers introduced evidence that indicated Drinkard was suffering from a debilitating back injury and was heavily medicated at the time of the slaying. Drinkard’s lawyers argued that he had been at home and on workers’ compensation when Pace was killed, so he couldn’t have committed the crime. A county jury found Drinkard not guilty within one hour, and he was released.

“I was not opposed to capital punishment until the state tried to kill me,” Drinkard said.

There have been more than 2,700 exonerations overall in the U.S. since 1989, the first year that DNA became a factor, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

In 1993 Kirk Bloodsworth was the first person in the nation to be exonerated from death row based on DNA evidence. Bloodsworth was arrested in 1984 and charged with raping and murdering Dawn Hamilton, a nine-year-old girl, near Baltimore, Maryland. Police were alerted to Bloodsworth, who had just moved to the area, when an anonymous tipster reported him after seeing a televised police sketch of the suspect.

Bloodsworth bore little resemblance to the suspect in the police sketch. No physical evidence linked him to the crime. He had no prior criminal record. Yet Bloodsworth was convicted and sentenced to death based primarily on the testimony of five witnesses, including an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old, who said they could place him near the murder scene. Witness misidentification is a factor in many wrongful convictions, according to the DPIC.

“Give him the gas and kill his ass,” Bloodsworth recalled people in the courtroom chanting after he was sentenced. All the while, he wondered how he could be sentenced to die for a ghastly crime he hadn’t committed.

He was granted a second trial nearly two years later, after it was shown on appeal that prosecutors had withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from his defense, namely that police had identified another suspect but failed to pursue that lead. Again, Bloodsworth was found guilty. A different sentencing judge handed Bloodsworth two life sentences, rather than death.

“I had days when I was giving up hope. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison. And then I saw a copy of Joseph Wambaugh’s book,” Bloodsworth said.

That 1989 book, The Blooding, describes the then emerging science of DNA testing and how law enforcement had first used it to both clear suspects and solve a rape and murder case.

Bloodsworth wondered whether that science could somehow clear his name.

When he asked whether DNA evidence could be tested to prove that he was not at the crime scene, he was told the evidence had been destroyed inadvertently. That wasn’t true. The evidence, including the girl’s underwear, later was found in the courthouse. Prosecutors, sure of their case, agreed to release the items.

Once the items were tested, usable DNA was detected—none of it Bloodsworth’s. He was freed, and six months later, in December 1993, Maryland’s governor granted him a full pardon. It would be almost another decade before the actual killer was charged. The DNA belonged to a man named Kimberly Shay Ruffner, who had been released from jail two weeks before the girl’s murder. For a time Ruffner, who was given a 45-year sentence for an attempted rape and attempted murder soon after Bloodsworth’s arrest, and Bloodsworth were housed in the same prison. Ruffner pleaded guilty to Hamilton’s murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

Today Bloodsworth is the executive director of WTI and a tireless campaigner against capital punishment. The Innocence Protection Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2004, established the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Grant Program to help defray the cost of DNA testing after conviction.

“I was poor and had only been in the Baltimore area for 30 days when I was arrested,” said Bloodsworth, now 60. “When I tell people my story and how easy it is to be convicted of something of which you’re innocent, it often causes them to rethink the way the criminal justice system works. It doesn’t require much of a stretch to believe that innocent people have been executed.”

Sabrina Butler discovered that Walter, her nine-month-old son, had stopped breathing shortly before midnight on April 11, 1989. An 18-year-old single mother, Butler responded with urgent CPR. When the child could not be revived after several minutes, she raced him to a hospital in Columbus, Mississippi, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Less than 24 hours later she was charged with murder.

Walter had serious internal injuries when he died. Butler told police investigators she believed that the injuries were caused by her efforts to revive him. Police doubted her story, and after several hours of interrogation, without a lawyer present, she signed a statement that said she’d struck her baby in the stomach after he wouldn’t stop crying. Eleven months later Butler was convicted of murder and sentenced to die.

Butler’s defense team called no witnesses. A medical expert might have testified that Walter’s injuries were consistent with the clumsy CPR of a desperate mother. A neighbor—who was called as a witness during a subsequent trial—could have provided helpful testimony of Butler’s attempts to save her son’s life. Instead Butler’s court-appointed lawyers, including one who specialized in divorce law, neither called witnesses nor put Butler on the witness stand to support her case.

“Here I was, this young Black child in a room full of white adults,” Butler, now Sabrina Smith, recalled. “I did not understand the proceedings. All that I had been told by my attorneys was to sit quietly and look at the jury. When I realized my defense wasn’t going to call any witnesses to help prove my innocence, I knew my life was over.”

Butler’s conviction and sentence were set aside in August 1992, after Mississippi’s supreme court ruled that the prosecutor had improperly commented on her failure to testify at trial. A new trial was ordered.

The second trial, with better lawyers, working pro bono, resulted in exoneration. A neighbor testified about Butler’s frantic attempts to revive her child. A medical expert testified that the child’s injuries could have resulted from the CPR efforts. Evidence also was introduced indicating that Walter had a preexisting kidney condition that likely contributed to his sudden death. Butler was released after spending five years in prison, the first half of that on death row.

Less than two years after her exoneration, Butler, the first of just two American women ever to be exonerated from death row, received a summons for jury duty.

“I was so appalled,” she told me. “I went downtown and spoke to the court administrator. I explained to him that the state of Mississippi had tried to kill me. I told him I was quite certain that I would not make a good juror.” She was dismissed.

A question that frequently confounds exonerees and the general public alike is whether a consistent formula exists for compensating the falsely convicted, especially those sentenced to die. The short answer is no. A small number of exonerees have been compensated for millions of dollars depending on the laws of the state that convicted them, but many receive little or nothing.

Few death-row exonerees more closely follow the issue of compensation than Ron Keine, who lives in southeastern Michigan. Keine has made it part of his life’s mission to improve the plight of the wrongly convicted, who often reenter society with meager survival skills. He wasn’t always so benevolent.

Growing up in Detroit, Keine ran with a rough crowd. He’d been shot and stabbed before he turned 16. At age 21, he and his closest friend, who both belonged to a notorious motorcycle club, decided to drive a van across the U.S.

The extended open-road party was going as planned until he and four others were arrested in 1974 in Oklahoma and extradited to New Mexico, where they were charged with the murder and mutilation of a 26-year-old college student in Albuquerque. A motel housekeeper reported that the group raped her and that she then saw the group kill the student at the same motel.

The problem with the story should have been readily apparent. The bikers weren’t in Albuquerque when William Velten, Jr., the student, was killed. They were partying in Los Angeles and had a dated traffic citation to prove it. The housekeeper later recanted her story.

In September 1975 a drifter, Kerry Rodney Lee, confessed to killing Velten, possibly because he felt guilty knowing that four men were on death row for his crime. The gun used in Velten’s slaying matched a gun stolen from the father of Lee’s girlfriend. Based on this evidence, Keine and his biker friends were granted new trials and the prosecutor decided not to indict them. Lee was convicted in May 1978 of murdering Velten.

“When I was on death row, I knew I was innocent, but I still came within nine days of my first scheduled execution date,” said Keine, now 73. “I didn’t have a voice. So when I got out, I decided I was going to spend my life being a thorn” in the side of the criminal justice system. “I decided that I was going to go from dead man walking to dead man talking.”

Keine, who founded several successful small businesses after his exoneration, has testified before state legislators seeking to overturn capital punishment laws. Having received only a $2,200 settlement from the county that put him on death row, he has been vocal in calling for a system of compensation for others wrongly sentenced to death.

“When people get off death row, they feel like a piece of shit,” he said. “They don’t have any self-worth—no self-esteem, and they usually don’t have two nickels in their pocket. We try to build them up. We try and help them find the resources they need to survive.”

Related Topics

• CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
• LAW AND LEGISLATION

A German werewolf's 'confessions' horrified 1500s Europe

Who gets to claim the ‘world’s richest shipwreck’?

Who are the real queens of 'Six'?

Why we reported on life after death row for the exonerated

Exclusive: This is how you solve one of history's greatest cold cases

• History & Culture
• Photography
• Environment
• Paid Content

History & Culture

• Mind, Body, Wonder
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Your US State Privacy Rights
• Children's Online Privacy Policy
• Interest-Based Ads
• About Nielsen Measurement
• Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
• Nat Geo Home
• Attend a Live Event
• Book a Trip
• Inspire Your Kids
• Shop Nat Geo
• Visit the D.C. Museum
• Learn About Our Impact
• Support Our Mission
• Advertise With Us
• Customer Service
• Renew Subscription
• Manage Your Subscription
• Work at Nat Geo
• Sign Up for Our Newsletters
• Contribute to Protect the Planet

Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2024 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

The Case Against the Death Penalty

The American Civil Liberties Union believes the death penalty inherently violates the constitutional ban against cruel and unusual punishment and the guarantees of due process of law and of equal protection under the law. Furthermore, we believe that the state should not give itself the right to kill human beings – especially when it kills with premeditation and ceremony, in the name of the law or in the name of its people, and when it does so in an arbitrary and discriminatory fashion.

Capital punishment is an intolerable denial of civil liberties and is inconsistent with the fundamental values of our democratic system. The death penalty is uncivilized in theory and unfair and inequitable in practice. Through litigation, legislation, and advocacy against this barbaric and brutal institution, we strive to prevent executions and seek the abolition of capital punishment.

The ACLU’s opposition to capital punishment incorporates the following fundamental concerns:

The death penalty system in the US is applied in an unfair and unjust manner against people, largely dependent on how much money they have, the skill of their attorneys, race of the victim and where the crime took place . People of color are far more likely to be executed than white people, especially if thevictim is white

The death penalty is a waste of taxpayer funds and has no public safety benefit. The vast majority of law enforcement professionals surveyed agree that capital punishment does not deter violent crime; a survey of police chiefs nationwide found they rank the death penalty lowest among ways to reduce violent crime. They ranked increasing the number of police officers, reducing drug abuse, and creating a better economy with more jobs higher than the death penalty as the best ways to reduce violence. The FBI has found the states with the death penalty have the highest murder rates.

Innocent people are too often sentenced to death. Since 1973, over 156 people have been released from death rows in 26 states because of innocence. Nationally, at least one person is exonerated for every 10 that are executed.

INTRODUCTION TO THE “MODERN ERA” OF THE DEATH PENALTY IN THE UNITED STATES

In 1972, the Supreme Court declared that under then-existing laws “the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty… constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.” ( Furman v. Georgia , 408 U.S. 238). The Court, concentrating its objections on the manner in which death penalty laws had been applied, found the result so “harsh, freakish, and arbitrary” as to be constitutionally unacceptable. Making the nationwide impact of its decision unmistakable, the Court summarily reversed death sentences in the many cases then before it, which involved a wide range of state statutes, crimes and factual situations.

But within four years after the Furman decision, several hundred persons had been sentenced to death under new state capital punishment statutes written to provide guidance to juries in sentencing. These statutes require a two-stage trial procedure, in which the jury first determines guilt or innocence and then chooses imprisonment or death in the light of aggravating or mitigating circumstances.

In 1976, the Supreme Court moved away from abolition, holding that “the punishment of death does not invariably violate the Constitution.” The Court ruled that the new death penalty statutes contained “objective standards to guide, regularize, and make rationally reviewable the process for imposing the sentence of death.” ( Gregg v. Georgia , 428 U.S. 153). Subsequently 38 state legislatures and the Federal government enacted death penalty statutes patterned after those the Court upheld in Gregg. Congress also enacted and expanded federal death penalty statutes for peacetime espionage by military personnel and for a vast range of categories of murder.

Executions resumed in 1977. In 2002, the Supreme Court held executions of mentally retarded criminals are “cruel and unusual punishments” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. Since then, states have developed a range of processes to ensure that mentally retarded individuals are not executed. Many have elected to hold proceedings prior to the merits trial, many with juries, to determine whether an accused is mentally retarded. In 2005, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution forbid imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed, resulting in commutation of death sentences to life for dozens of individuals across the country. As of August 2012, over 3,200 men and women are under a death sentence and more than 1,300 men, women and children (at the time of the crime) have been executed since 1976 .

ACLU OBJECTIONS TO THE DEATH PENALTY

Despite the Supreme Court’s 1976 ruling in Gregg v. Georgia , et al, the ACLU continues to oppose capital punishment on moral, practical, and constitutional grounds:

Capital punishment is cruel and unusual . It is cruel because it is a relic of the earliest days of penology, when slavery, branding, and other corporal punishments were commonplace. Like those barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society. It is unusual because only the United States of all the western industrialized nations engages in this punishment. It is also unusual because only a random sampling of convicted murderers in the United States receive a sentence of death.

Capital punishment denies due process of law. Its imposition is often arbitrary, and always irrevocable – forever depriving an individual of the opportunity to benefit from new evidence or new laws that might warrant the reversal of a conviction, or the setting aside of a death sentence.

The death penalty violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection . It is applied randomly – and discriminatorily. It is imposed disproportionately upon those whose victims are white, offenders who are people of color, and on those who are poor and uneducated and concentrated in certain geographic regions of the country.

The death penalty is not a viable form of crime control. When police chiefs were asked to rank the factors that, in their judgment, reduce the rate of violent crime, they mentioned curbing drug use and putting more officers on the street, longer sentences and gun control. They ranked the death penalty as least effective . Politicians who preach the desirability of executions as a method of crime control deceive the public and mask their own failure to identify and confront the true causes of crime.

Capital punishment wastes limited resources . It squanders the time and energy of courts, prosecuting attorneys, defense counsel, juries, and courtroom and law enforcement personnel. It unduly burdens the criminal justice system, and it is thus counterproductive as an instrument for society’s control of violent crime. Limited funds that could be used to prevent and solve crime (and provide education and jobs) are spent on capital punishment.

Opposing the death penalty does not indicate a lack of sympathy for murder victims . On the contrary, murder demonstrates a lack of respect for human life. Because life is precious and death irrevocable, murder is abhorrent, and a policy of state-authorized killings is immoral. It epitomizes the tragic inefficacy and brutality of violence, rather than reason, as the solution to difficult social problems. Many murder victims do not support state-sponsored violence to avenge the death of their loved one. Sadly, these victims have often been marginalized by politicians and prosecutors, who would rather publicize the opinions of pro-death penalty family members.

Changes in death sentencing have proved to be largely cosmetic. The defects in death-penalty laws, conceded by the Supreme Court in the early 1970s, have not been appreciably altered by the shift from unrestrained discretion to “guided discretion.” Such so-called “reforms” in death sentencing merely mask the impermissible randomness of a process that results in an execution.

A society that respects life does not deliberately kill human beings . An execution is a violent public spectacle of official homicide, and one that endorses killing to solve social problems – the worst possible example to set for the citizenry, and especially children. Governments worldwide have often attempted to justify their lethal fury by extolling the purported benefits that such killing would bring to the rest of society. The benefits of capital punishment are illusory, but the bloodshed and the resulting destruction of community decency are real.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS NOT A DETERRENT TO CAPITAL CRIMES

Deterrence is a function not only of a punishment’s severity, but also of its certainty and frequency. The argument most often cited in support of capital punishment is that the threat of execution influences criminal behavior more effectively than imprisonment does. As plausible as this claim may sound, in actuality the death penalty fails as a deterrent for several reasons.

A punishment can be an effective deterrent only if it is consistently and promptly employed. Capital punishment cannot be administered to meet these conditions .

The proportion of first-degree murderers who are sentenced to death is small, and of this group, an even smaller proportion of people are executed. Although death sentences in the mid-1990s increased to about 300 per year , this is still only about one percent of all homicides known to the police . Of all those convicted on a charge of criminal homicide, only 3 percent – about 1 in 33 – are eventually sentenced to death. Between 2001-2009, the average number of death sentences per year dropped to 137 , reducing the percentage even more. This tiny fraction of convicted murderers do not represent the “worst of the worst”.

Mandatory death sentencing is unconstitutional. The possibility of increasing the number of convicted murderers sentenced to death and executed by enacting mandatory death penalty laws was ruled unconstitutional in 1976 ( Woodson v. North Carolina , 428 U.S. 280).

A considerable time between the imposition of the death sentence and the actual execution is unavoidable, given the procedural safeguards required by the courts in capital cases. Starting with selecting the trial jury, murder trials take far longer when the ultimate penalty is involved. Furthermore, post-conviction appeals in death-penalty cases are far more frequent than in other cases. These factors increase the time and cost of administering criminal justice.

We can reduce delay and costs only by abandoning the procedural safeguards and constitutional rights of suspects, defendants, and convicts – with the attendant high risk of convicting the wrong person and executing the innocent. This is not a realistic prospect: our legal system will never reverse itself to deny defendants the right to counsel, or the right to an appeal.

Persons who commit murder and other crimes of personal violence often do not premeditate their crimes.

Most capital crimes are committed in the heat of the moment. Most capital crimes are committed during moments of great emotional stress or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, when logical thinking has been suspended. Many capital crimes are committed by the badly emotionally-damaged or mentally ill. In such cases, violence is inflicted by persons unable to appreciate the consequences to themselves as well as to others.

Even when crime is planned, the criminal ordinarily concentrates on escaping detection, arrest, and conviction. The threat of even the severest punishment will not discourage those who expect to escape detection and arrest. It is impossible to imagine how the threat of any punishment could prevent a crime that is not premeditated. Furthermore, the death penalty is a futile threat for political terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh, because they usually act in the name of an ideology that honors its martyrs.

Capital punishment doesn’t solve our society’s crime problem. Threatening capital punishment leaves the underlying causes of crime unaddressed, and ignores the many political and diplomatic sanctions (such as treaties against asylum for international terrorists) that could appreciably lower the incidence of terrorism.

Capital punishment has been a useless weapon in the so-called “war on drugs.” The attempt to reduce murders in the drug trade by threat of severe punishment ignores the fact that anyone trafficking in illegal drugs is already risking his life in violent competition with other dealers. It is irrational to think that the death penalty – a remote threat at best – will avert murders committed in drug turf wars or by street-level dealers.

If, however, severe punishment can deter crime, then permanent imprisonment is severe enough to deter any rational person from committing a violent crime.

The vast preponderance of the evidence shows that the death penalty is no more effective than imprisonment in deterring murder and that it may even be an incitement to criminal violence. Death-penalty states as a group do not have lower rates of criminal homicide than non-death-penalty states. Use of the death penalty in a given state may actually increase the subsequent rate of criminal homicide. Why? Perhaps because “a return to the exercise of the death penalty weakens socially based inhibitions against the use of lethal force to settle disputes…. “

In adjacent states – one with the death penalty and the other without it – the state that practices the death penalty does not always show a consistently lower rate of criminal homicide. For example, between l990 and l994, the homicide rates in Wisconsin and Iowa (non-death-penalty states) were half the rates of their neighbor, Illinois – which restored the death penalty in l973, and by 1994 had sentenced 223 persons to death and carried out two executions . Between 2000-2010, the murder rate in states with capital punishment was 25-46% higher than states without the death penalty.

On-duty police officers do not suffer a higher rate of criminal assault and homicide in abolitionist states than they do in death-penalty states. Between 1976 and 1989, for example, lethal assaults against police were not significantly more or less frequent in abolitionist states than in death-penalty states. Capital punishment did not appear to provide officers added protection during that time frame. In fact, the three leading states in law enforcement homicide in 1996 were also very active death penalty states : California (highest death row population), Texas (most executions since 1976), and Florida (third highest in executions and death row population). The South, which accounts for more than 80% of the country’s executions, also has the highest murder rate of any region in the country. If anything, the death penalty incited violence rather than curbed it.

Prisoners and prison personnel do not suffer a higher rate of criminal assault and homicide from life-term prisoners in abolition states than they do in death-penalty states. Between 1992 and 1995, 176 inmates were murdered by other prisoners. The vast majority of those inmates (84%) were killed in death penalty jurisdictions. During the same period, about 2% of all inmate assaults on prison staff were committed in abolition jurisdictions . Evidently, the threat of the death penalty “does not even exert an incremental deterrent effect over the threat of a lesser punishment in the abolitionist states.” Furthermore, multiple studies have shown that prisoners sentenced to life without parole have equivalent rates of prison violence as compared to other inmates.

Actual experience thus establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the death penalty does not deter murder. No comparable body of evidence contradicts that conclusion.

Furthermore, there are documented cases in which the death penalty actually incited the capital crimes it was supposed to deter. These include instances of the so-called suicide-by-execution syndrome – persons who wanted to die but feared taking their own lives, and committed murder so that the state would kill them. For example, in 1996, Daniel Colwell , who suffered from mental illness, claimed that he killed a randomly-selected couple in a Georgia parking lot so that the state would kill him – he was sentenced to death and ultimately took his own life while on death row.

Although inflicting the death penalty guarantees that the condemned person will commit no further crimes, it does not have a demonstrable deterrent effect on other individuals. Further, it is a high price to pay when studies show that few convicted murderers commit further crimes of violence. Researchers examined the prison and post-release records of 533 prisoners on death row in 1972 whose sentences were reduced to incarceration for life by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Furman. This research showed that seven had committed another murder. But the same study showed that in four other cases, an innocent man had been sentenced to death. (Marquart and Sorensen, in Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 1989)

Recidivism among murderers does occasionally happen, but it occurs less frequently than most people believe; the media rarely distinguish between a convicted offender who murders while on parole, and a paroled murderer who murders again. Government data show that about one in 12 death row prisoners had a prior homicide conviction . But as there is no way to predict reliably which convicted murderers will try to kill again, the only way to prevent all such recidivism is to execute every convicted murderer – a policy no one seriously advocates. Equally effective but far less inhumane is a policy of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS UNFAIR

Constitutional due process and elementary justice both require that the judicial functions of trial and sentencing be conducted with fundamental fairness, especially where the irreversible sanction of the death penalty is involved. In murder cases (since 1930, 88 percent of all executions have been for this crime), there has been substantial evidence to show that courts have sentenced some persons to prison while putting others to death in a manner that has been arbitrary, racially biased, and unfair.

Racial Bias in Death Sentencing

Racial discrimination was one of the grounds on which the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in Furman . Half a century ago, in his classic American Dilemma (1944), Gunnar Myrdal reported that “the South makes the widest application of the death penalty, and Negro criminals come in for much more than their share of the executions.” A study of the death penalty in Texas shows that the current capital punishment system is an outgrowth of the racist “legacy of slavery.” Between 1930 and the end of 1996, 4,220 prisoners were executed in the United States; more than half (53%) were black .

Our nation’s death rows have always held a disproportionately large population of African Americans, relative to their percentage of the total population. Comparing black and white offenders over the past century, the former were often executed for what were considered less-than-capital offenses for whites, such as rape and burglary. (Between 1930 and 1976, 455 men were executed for rape, of whom 405 – 90 percent – were black.) A higher percentage of the blacks who were executed were juveniles; and the rate of execution without having one’s conviction reviewed by any higher court was higher for blacks. (Bowers, Legal Homicide 1984; Streib, Death Penalty for Juveniles 1987)

In recent years, it has been argued that such flagrant racial discrimination is a thing of the past. However, since the revival of the death penalty in the mid-1970s, about half of those on death row at any given time have been black . More striking is the racial comparison of victims . Although approximately 49% of all homicide victims are white, 77% of capital homicide cases since 1976 have involved a white victim.

Between 1976 and 2005 , 86% of white victims were killed by whites (14% by other races) while 94% of black victims were killed by blacks (6% by other races). Blacks and whites are murder victims in almost equal numbers of crimes – which is a very high percentage given that the general US population is 13% black. African-Americans are six times as likely as white Americans to die at the hands of a murderer, and roughly seven times as likely to murder someone. Young black men are fifteen times as likely to be murdered as young white men.

So given this information, when those under death sentence are examined more closely, it turns out that race is a decisive factor after all.

Further, studies like that commissioned by the Governor of Maryland found that “black offenders who kill white victims are at greater risk of a death sentence than others, primarily because they are substantially more likely to be charged by the state’s attorney with a capital offense.”

The classic statistical study of racial discrimination in capital cases in Georgia presented in the McCleskey case showed that “the average odds of receiving a death sentence among all indicted cases were 4.3 times higher in cases with white victims.” (David C. Baldus et al., Equal Justice and the Death Penalty 1990) In 1987 these data were placed before the Supreme Court in McCleskey v. Kemp and while the Court did not dispute the statistical evidence, it held that evidence of an overall pattern of racial bias was not sufficient. Mr. McCleskey would have to prove racial bias in his own case – a virtually impossible task. The Court also held that the evidence failed to show that there was “a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias….” (481 U.S. 279) Although the Supreme Court declared that the remedy sought by the plaintiff was “best presented to the legislative bodies,” subsequent efforts to persuade Congress to remedy the problem by enacting the Racial Justice Act were not successful. (Don Edwards & John Conyers, Jr., The Racial Justice Act – A Simple Matter of Justice, in University of Dayton Law Review 1995)

In 1990, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported to the Congress the results of its review of empirical studies on racism and the death penalty. The GAO concluded : “Our synthesis of the 28 studies shows a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty after the Furman decision” and that “race of victim influence was found at all stages of the criminal justice system process…”

Texas was prepared to execute Duane Buck on September 15, 2011. Mr. Buck was condemned to death by a jury that had been told by an expert psychologist that he was more likely to be dangerous because he was African American. The Supreme Court stayed the case, but Mr. Buck has not yet received the new sentencing hearing justice requires.

These results cannot be explained away by relevant non-racial factors, such as prior criminal record or type of crime, as these were factored for in the Baldus and GAO studies referred to above. They lead to a very unsavory conclusion: In the trial courts of this nation, even at the present time, the killing of a white person is treated much more severely than the killing of a black person . Of the 313 persons executed between January 1977 and the end of 1995, 36 had been convicted of killing a black person while 249 (80%) had killed a white person. Of the 178 white defendants executed, only three had been convicted of murdering people of color . Our criminal justice system essentially reserves the death penalty for murderers (regardless of their race) who kill white victims.

Another recent Louisiana study found that defendants with white victims were 97% more likely to receive death sentences than defendants with black victims. [1]

Both gender and socio-economic class also determine who receives a death sentence and who is executed. Women account for only two percent of all people sentenced to death , even though females commit about 11 percent of all criminal homicides. Many of the women under death sentence were guilty of killing men who had victimized them with years of violent abuse . Since 1900, only 51 women have been executed in the United States (15 of them black).

Discrimination against the poor (and in our society, racial minorities are disproportionately poor) is also well established. It is a prominent factor in the availability of counsel.

Fairness in capital cases requires, above all, competent counsel for the defendant. Yet “approximately 90 percent of those on death row could not afford to hire a lawyer when they were tried.”) Common characteristics of death-row defendants are poverty, the lack of firm social roots in the community, and inadequate legal representation at trial or on appeal. As Justice William O. Douglas noted in Furman , “One searches our chronicles in vain for the execution of any member of the affluent strata in this society”(408 US 238).

Failure of Safeguards

The demonstrated inequities in the actual administration of capital punishment should tip the balance against it in the judgment of fair-minded and impartial observers. “Whatever else might be said for the use of death as a punishment, one lesson is clear from experience: this is a power that we cannot exercise fairly and without discrimination.”(Gross and Mauro, Death and Discrimination 1989)

Justice John Marshall Harlan, writing for the Court in Furman , noted “… the history of capital punishment for homicides … reveals continual efforts, uniformly unsuccessful, to identify before the fact those homicides for which the slayer should die…. Those who have come to grips with the hard task of actually attempting to draft means of channeling capital sentencing discretion have confirmed the lesson taught by history…. To identify before the fact those characteristics of criminal homicides and their perpetrators which call for the death penalty, and to express these characteristics in language which can be fairly understood and applied by the sentencing authority, appear to be tasks which are beyond present human ability.” (402 U.S. 183 (1971))

Yet in the Gregg decision, the majority of the Supreme Court abandoned the wisdom of Justice Harlan and ruled as though the new guided-discretion statutes could accomplish the impossible. The truth is that death statutes approved by the Court “do not effectively restrict the discretion of juries by any real standards, and they never will. No society is going to kill everybody who meets certain preset verbal requirements, put on the statute books without awareness of coverage of the infinity of special factors the real world can produce.”

Evidence obtained by the Capital Jury Project has shown that jurors in capital trials generally do not understand the judge’s instructions about the laws that govern the choice between imposing the death penalty and a life sentence. Even when they do comprehend, jurors often refuse to be guided by the law. “Juror comprehension of the law… is mediocre. The effect [of this relative lack of comprehension of the law]… is to reduce the likelihood that capital defendants will benefit from the safeguards against arbitrariness built into the… law.”

Even if the jury’s sentencing decision were strictly governed by the relevant legal criteria, there remains a vast reservoir of unfettered discretion: the prosecutor’s decision to prosecute for a capital or lesser crime, the court’s willingness to accept or reject a guilty plea, the jury’s decision to convict for second-degree murder or manslaughter rather than capital murder, the determination of the defendant’s sanity, and the governor’s final clemency decision, among others.

Discretion in the criminal justice system is unavoidable. The history of capital punishment in America clearly demonstrates the social desire to mitigate the harshness of the death penalty by narrowing the scope of its application. Whether or not explicitly authorized by statutes, sentencing discretion has been the main vehicle to this end. But when sentencing discretion is used – as it too often has been – to doom the poor, the friendless, the uneducated, racial minorities, and the despised, it becomes injustice.

Mindful of such facts, the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association (including 20 out of 24 former presidents of the ABA) called for a moratorium on all executions by a vote of 280 to 119 in February 1997 . The House judged the current system to be “a haphazard maze of unfair practices.”

In its 1996 survey of the death penalty in the United States, the International Commission of Jurists reinforced this point. Despite the efforts made over the past two decades since Gregg to protect the administration of the death penalty from abuses, the actual “constitutional errors committed in state courts have gravely undermined the legitimacy of the death penalty as a punishment for crime.” (International Commission of Jurists, Administration of the Death Penalty in the United States 1996)

In 2009, the American Law Institute (ALI), the leading independent organization in the U.S. producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize and improve the law, removed capital punishment from its Model Penal Code. The ALI, which created the modern legal framework for the death penalty in 1962, indicated that the punishment is so arbitrary, fraught with racial and economic disparities, and unable to assure quality legal representation for indigent capital defendants, that it can never be administered fairly.

Thoughtful citizens, who might possibly support the abstract notion of capital punishment, are obliged to condemn it in actual practice.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS IRREVERSIBLE

Unlike any other criminal punishments, the death penalty is irrevocable. Speaking to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1830, years after having witnessed the excesses of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette said, “I shall ask for the abolition of the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me.” Although some proponents of capital punishment would argue that its merits are worth the occasional execution of innocent people, most would hasten to insist that there is little likelihood of the innocent being executed.

Since 1900, in this country, there have been on the average more than four cases each year in which an entirely innocent person was convicted of murder. Scores of these individuals were sentenced to death. In many cases, a reprieve or commutation arrived just hours, or even minutes, before the scheduled execution. These erroneous convictions have occurred in virtually every jurisdiction from one end of the nation to the other. Nor have they declined in recent years, despite the new death penalty statutes approved by the Supreme Court.

Disturbingly, and increasingly, a large body of evidence from the modern era shows that innocent people are often convicted of crimes – including capital crimes – and that some have been executed.

In 2012, a new report in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review chronicled the horrifying case of Carlos DeLuna, a man executed in Texas in 1989 for a murder that it was “common knowledge” had been committed by another man. [2] DeLuna’s story demonstrates so many of the factors that can go wrong in a capital case: faulty eyewitness identification, prosecutorial misconduct, police misconduct, a botched crime scene, destroyed DNA evidence, a poor person represented by ineffective by an ineffective inexperienced defense attorney overmatched by a professional prosecutor, and insufficient oversight from the bench. [3] In its case against DeLuna, the State presented no blood or DNA evidence, no crime scene fingerprints, and no proof of hair or fibers from the victim having been found on the defendant. He was convicted largely based on eyewitness testimony made from the back of a police car in a dimly lit lot near the crime scene. Meanwhile, a violent criminal named Carlos Hernandez—a man who not only shared DeLuna’s name, but also looked like him—repeatedly boasted about how he had committed the murder and gotten away with it. [4] These disturbing facts about DeLuna’s case, brought to light more than two decades after his execution, refute the claim, made by some proponents of capital punishment, that the United States has never executed an innocent person. [5]

Consider this additional handful of cases of innocent people sentenced to die – some executed and some spared:

• In 2011, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, a Black man who was almost certainly innocent of the murder of a white off-duty police officer. The circumstances of his execution raised an international outcry, for good reason. Davis was convicted based on eyewitness testimony, since there was no murder weapon or physical evidence presented by the prosecution. Seven of the nine eyewitnesses recanted or contradicted their trial testimony, many of them saying they were pressured or threatened by police at the time. Troy Davis came close to execution three previous times, because of the difficulty of getting any court to listen to new evidence casting doubt on his conviction. After passage of a federal law in 1996, petitioners are very limited in their ability to appeal death sentences, and courts routinely refuse to hear new testimony, even evidence of innocence. When Troy Davis finally did get a hearing on his evidence, the judge required “proof of innocence” – an impossibly high standard which he ruled that Mr. Davis did not meet. Despite the overwhelming call for clemency, supposed to be the “fail-safe” of the death penalty system, the Georgia Board of Pardons refused to commute the sentence to life and Mr. Davis was executed. Only one day after Troy Davis was executed, two men were freed by the special Innocence Commission of North Carolina after a decade apiece in prison. The two men had actually pled guilty to a crime they did not commit, because they were threatened with the death penalty.
• In Texas in 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for the arson-murder of his three children. Independent investigations by a newspaper, a nonprofit organization using top experts in the field of fire science, and an independent expert hired by the State of Texas all found that accident, not arson was the cause of the fire. There simply was no reliable evidence that the children were murdered. Yet even with these reports in hand, the state of Texas executed Mr. Willingham. Earlier this year, the Texas Forensic Science Commission was poised to issue a report officially confirming these conclusions until Texas Governor Rick Perry replaced the Commission’s chair and some of its members. Cameron Todd Willingham, who claimed innocence all along, was executed for a crime he almost certainly did not commit. As an example of the arbitrariness of the death penalty, another man, Ernest Willis, also convicted of arson-murder on the same sort of flimsy and unscientific testimony, was freed from Texas death row six months after Willingham was executed.
• In 1985, in Maryland, Kirk Bloodsworth was sentenced to death for rape and murder, despite the testimony of alibi witnesses. In 1986 his conviction was reversed on grounds of withheld evidence pointing to another suspect; he was retried, re-convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. In 1993, newly available DNA evidence proved he was not the rapist-killer, and he was released after the prosecution dismissed the case. A year later he was awarded $300,000 for wrongful punishment. Years later the DNA was matched to the real killer.
• In Mississippi, in 1990, Sabrina Butler was sentenced to death for killing her baby boy. She claimed the child died after attempts at resuscitation failed. On technical grounds her conviction was reversed in 1992. At retrial, she was acquitted when a neighbor corroborated Butler’s explanation of the child’s cause of death and the physician who performed the autopsy admitted his work had not been thorough.
• In 1990, Jesse Tafero was executed in Florida. He had been convicted in 1976 along with his wife, Sonia Jacobs, for murdering a state trooper. In 1981 Jacobs’ death sentence was reduced on appeal to life imprisonment, and 11 years later her conviction was vacated by a federal court. The evidence on which Tafero and Jacobs had been convicted and sentenced was identical; it consisted mainly of the perjured testimony of an ex-convict who turned state’s witness in order to avoid a death sentence. Had Tafero been alive in 1992, he no doubt would have been released along with Jacobs. Tafero’s execution went horribly wrong, and his head caught on fire during the electrocution.
• In Alabama, Walter McMillian was convicted of murdering a white woman in 1988. Despite the jury’s recommendation of a life sentence, the judge sentenced him to death. The sole evidence leading the police to arrest McMillian was testimony of an ex-convict seeking favor with the prosecution. A dozen alibi witnesses (all African Americans, like McMillian) testified on McMillian’s behalf that they were together at a neighborhood gathering, to no avail. On appeal, after tireless efforts by his attorney Bryan Stevenson, McMillian’s conviction was reversed by the Alabama Court of Appeals. Stevenson uncovered prosecutorial suppression of exculpatory evidence and perjury by prosecution witnesses, and the new district attorney joined the defense in seeking dismissal of the charges.
• In 1985, in Illinois, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez were convicted of abduction, rape, and murder of a young girl and were sentenced to death. Shortly after, another man serving a life term in prison for similar crimes confessed that he alone was guilty; but his confession was inadmissible because he refused to repeat it in court unless the state waived the death penalty against him. Awarded a new trial in 1988, Cruz was again convicted and sentenced to death; Hernandez was also re-convicted, and sentenced to 80 years in prison. In 1992 the assistant attorney general assigned to prosecute the case on appeal resigned after becoming convinced of the defendants’ innocence. The convictions were again overturned on appeal after DNA tests exonerated Cruz and implicated the prisoner who had earlier confessed. In 1995 the court ordered a directed verdict of acquittal, and sharply criticized the police for their unprofessional handling of the case. Hernandez was released on bail and the prosecution dropped all charges.
• In 1980 in Texas a black high school janitor, Clarence Brandley, and his white co-worker found the body of a missing 16-year-old white schoolgirl. Interrogated by the police, they were told, “One of you two is going to hang for this.” Looking at Brandley, the officer said, “Since you’re the nigger, you’re elected.” In a classic case of rush to judgment, Brandley was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The circumstantial evidence against him was thin, other leads were ignored by the police, and the courtroom atmosphere reeked of racism. In 1986, Centurion Ministries – a volunteer group devoted to freeing wrongly convicted prisoners – came to Brandley’s aid. Evidence had meanwhile emerged that another man had committed the murder for which Brandley was awaiting execution. Brandley was not released until 1990. (Davies, White Lies 1991)

This sample of freakish and arbitrary innocence determinations also speaks directly to the unceasing concern that there are many more innocent people on death rows across the country – as well as who have been executed. Several factors seen in the above sample of cases help explain why the judicial system cannot guarantee that justice will never miscarry: overzealous prosecution, mistaken or perjured testimony, race, faulty police work, coerced confessions, the defendant’s previous criminal record, inept and under-resourced defense counsel, seemingly conclusive circumstantial evidence, and community pressure for a conviction, among others. And when the system does go wrong, it is often volunteers from outside the criminal justice system – journalists, for example – who rectify the errors, not the police or prosecutors. To retain the death penalty in the face of the demonstrable failures of the system is unacceptable, especially since there are no strong overriding reasons to favor the death penalty.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS BARBARIC

Prisoners are executed in the United States by any one of five methods; in a few jurisdictions the prisoner is allowed to choose which one he or she prefers:

The traditional mode of execution, hanging , is an option still available in Delaware, New Hampshire and Washington. Death on the gallows is easily bungled: If the drop is too short, there will be a slow and agonizing death by strangulation. If the drop is too long, the head will be torn off.

Two states, Idaho and Utah, still authorize the firing squad . The prisoner is strapped into a chair and hooded. A target is pinned to the chest. Five marksmen, one with blanks, take aim and fire.

Throughout the twentieth century, electrocution has been the most widely used form of execution in this country, and is still utilized in eleven states, although lethal injection is the primary method of execution. The condemned prisoner is led – or dragged – into the death chamber, strapped into the chair, and electrodes are fastened to head and legs. When the switch is thrown the body strains, jolting as the voltage is raised and lowered. Often smoke rises from the head. There is the awful odor of burning flesh. No one knows how long electrocuted individuals retain consciousness. In 1983, the electrocution of John Evans in Alabama was described by an eyewitness as follows:

“At 8:30 p.m. the first jolt of 1900 volts of electricity passed through Mr. Evans’ body. It lasted thirty seconds. Sparks and flames erupted … from the electrode tied to Mr. Evans’ left leg. His body slammed against the straps holding him in the electric chair and his fist clenched permanently. The electrode apparently burst from the strap holding it in place. A large puff of grayish smoke and sparks poured out from under the hood that covered Mr. Evans’ face. An overpowering stench of burnt flesh and clothing began pervading the witness room. Two doctors examined Mr. Evans and declared that he was not dead.

“The electrode on the left leg was re-fastened. …Mr. Evans was administered a second thirty second jolt of electricity. The stench of burning flesh was nauseating. More smoke emanated from his leg and head. Again, the doctors examined Mr. Evans. [They] reported that his heart was still beating, and that he was still alive. At that time, I asked the prison commissioner, who was communicating on an open telephone line to Governor George Wallace, to grant clemency on the grounds that Mr. Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The request …was denied.

“At 8:40 p.m., a third charge of electricity, thirty seconds in duration, was passed through Mr. Evans’ body. At 8:44, the doctors pronounced him dead. The execution of John Evans took fourteen minutes.” Afterwards, officials were embarrassed by what one observer called the “barbaric ritual.” The prison spokesman remarked, “This was supposed to be a very clean manner of administering death.”

The introduction of the gas chamber was an attempt to improve on electrocution. In this method of execution the prisoner is strapped into a chair with a container of sulfuric acid underneath. The chamber is sealed, and cyanide is dropped into the acid to form a lethal gas. Execution by suffocation in the lethal gas chamber has not been abolished but lethal injection serves as the primary method in states which still authorize it. In 1996 a panel of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California (where the gas chamber has been used since 1933) ruled that this method is a “cruel and unusual punishment.” Here is an account of the 1992 execution in Arizona of Don Harding, as reported in the dissent by U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens:

“When the fumes enveloped Don’s head he took a quick breath. A few seconds later he again looked in my direction. His face was red and contorted as if he were attempting to fight through tremendous pain. His mouth was pursed shut and his jaw was clenched tight. Don then took several more quick gulps of the fumes.

“At this point Don’s body started convulsing violently…. His face and body turned a deep red and the veins in his temple and neck began to bulge until I thought they might explode. After about a minute Don’s face leaned partially forward, but he was still conscious. Every few seconds he continued to gulp in. He was shuddering uncontrollably and his body was racked with spasms. His head continued to snap back. His hands were clenched.

“After several more minutes, the most violent of the convulsions subsided. At this time the muscles along Don’s left arm and back began twitching in a wavelike motion under his skin. Spittle drooled from his mouth.

“Don did not stop moving for approximately eight minutes, and after that he continued to twitch and jerk for another minute. Approximately two minutes later, we were told by a prison official that the execution was complete.

“Don Harding took ten minutes and thirty one seconds to die.” ( Gomez v. U.S. District Court , 112 S.Ct. 1652)

The latest mode of inflicting the death penalty, enacted into law by more than 30 states, is lethal injection , first used in 1982 in Texas. It is easy to overstate the humaneness and efficacy of this method; one cannot know whether lethal injection is really painless and there is evidence that it is not. As the U.S. Court of Appeals observed, there is “substantial and uncontroverted evidence… that execution by lethal injection poses a serious risk of cruel, protracted death…. Even a slight error in dosage or administration can leave a prisoner conscious but paralyzed while dying, a sentient witness of his or her own asphyxiation.” ( Chaney v. Heckler , 718 F.2d 1174, 1983).

Its veneer of decency and subtle analogy with life-saving medical practice no doubt makes killing by lethal injection more acceptable to the public. Journalist Susan Blaustein, reacting to having witnessed an execution in Texas, comments:

“The lethal injection method … has turned dying into a still life, thereby enabling the state to kill without anyone involved feeling anything…. Any remaining glimmers of doubt – about whether the man received due process, about his guilt, about our right to take life – cause us to rationalize these deaths with such catchwords as ‘heinous,’ ‘deserved,’ ‘deterrent,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘painless.’ We have perfected the art of institutional killing to the degree that it has deadened our natural, quintessentially human response to death.”

Botched Lethal Injections

Nor does execution by lethal injection always proceed smoothly as planned. In 1985 “the authorities repeatedly jabbed needles into … Stephen Morin, when they had trouble finding a usable vein because he had been a drug abuser.” In 1988, during the execution of Raymond Landry, “a tube attached to a needle inside the inmate’s right arm began leaking, sending the lethal mixture shooting across the death chamber toward witnesses.”

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the current method of lethal injection used is constitutional, several people have suffered because of this form of execution. In Ohio, Rommel Broom was subjected to 18 attempts at finding a vein so that he could be killed by lethal injection. The process to try to execute him took over two hours. Finally, the governor had to stop the execution and grant the inmate a one week reprieve. Mr. Broom has not been executed because he is challenging the state’s right to hold a second execution attempt. Nor was he the only Ohio inmate so maltreated. During his 2006 execution Joseph Clark screamed, “it don’t work” and requested to take something by mouth so the torture would end when his executioners took thirty minutes to find a vein. Christopher Newton’s execution took over two hours – so long that he had to be given a bathroom break.

Lethal Injection Protocol Issues

Most lethal injections in the United States use a “cocktail” consisting of three drugs that sequentially render an inmate unconscious, cause paralysis and cease breathing, and stop an inmate’s heart. [6] But in 2011, the sole American manufacturer of sodium thiopental, a vital part of the three-drug cocktail, decided to discontinue production, forcing states to adapt their lethal injection methodology. [7] Some states have replaced the three-drug cocktail with a single substance, [8] while others have replaced thiopental in the three-drug sequence with another anesthetic. [9] Both three-drug and single-drug executions raise vital concerns: the three-drug cocktail’s paralyzing sedative may mask the inmate’s pain and suffering, while the single-drug method takes about 25 minutes to end a life (if there are no complications), compared with the ten-minute three-drug process. [10]

Although the Supreme Court held in 2008 that Kentucky’s three-drug lethal injection procedure did not violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, [11] it is unclear whether states’ adapted procedures pass muster. Indeed, in February 2012, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals admonished the Arizona Department of Corrections, stating that its approach to execution “cannot continue” and questioning the “regularity and reliability” of protocols that give complete discretion to the corrections director to determine which and how many drugs will be used for each execution. [12] In Georgia, the state Supreme Court stayed the execution of Warren Hill hours before he was scheduled to die in July 2012 in order to review the Department of Corrections’ new single-drug lethal injection procedure. [13] The Missouri Supreme Court imposed a temporary moratorium on executions in August 2012, declaring that it would be “premature” to set execution dates for death row inmates given a pending lawsuit about whether the state’s lethal injection procedures are humane. The state had amended its injection protocol to use a single drug, propofol, which advocates say causes severe pain upon injection. [14]

Although similar suits are pending in other states, [15] not all protocol-based challenges have succeeded; in Texas and Oklahoma, executions have continued despite questions about the potential cruelty of lethal injection and the type or number of chemicals used. [16]

Regardless of whether states use one or three drugs for an execution, all of the major lethal injection drugs are in short supply due to manufacturers’ efforts to prevent the use of their products for executions [17] and European Union restrictions on the exportation of drugs that may be used to kill. [18] As a result, some state executioners have pursued questionable means of obtaining the deadly chemicals from other states and foreign companies, including a pharmaceutical wholesaler operating out of the back of a London driving school. [19] These backroom deals—which, astoundingly, have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—are now the subject of federal litigation that could impact the legitimacy of the American death penalty system. In March 2012, six death row inmates argued that the FDA had shirked its duty to regulate lethal substances and raised concerns about the “very real risk that unapproved thiopental will not actually render a condemned prisoner unconscious.” [20] A federal district judge agreed and ordered the FDA to confiscate the imported thiopental, but the agency has appealed. [21]

Witnessing the Execution

Most people who have observed an execution are horrified and disgusted. “I was ashamed,” writes sociologist Richard Moran, who witnessed an execution in Texas in 1985. “I was an intruder, the only member of the public who had trespassed on [the condemned man’s] private moment of anguish. In my face he could see the horror of his own death.”

Revulsion at the duty to supervise and witness executions is one reason why so many prison wardens – however unsentimental they are about crime and criminals – are opponents of capital punishment. Don Cabana, who supervised several executions in Missouri and Mississippi reflects on his mood just prior to witnessing an execution in the gas chamber:

“If [the condemned prisoner] was some awful monster deemed worthy of extermination, why did I feel so bad about it, I wondered. It has been said that men on death row are inhuman, cold-blooded killers. But as I stood and watched a grieving mother leave her son for the last time, I questioned how the sordid business of executions was supposed to be the great equalizer…. The ‘last mile’ seemed an eternity, every step a painful reminder of what waited at the end of the walk. Where was the cold-blooded murderer, I wondered, as we approached the door to the last-night cell. I had looked for that man before… and I still had not found him – I saw, in my grasp, only a frightened child. [Minutes after the execution and before] heading for the conference room and a waiting press corps, I… shook my head. ‘No more. I don’t want to do this anymore.'” 1996)

Recently, Allen Ault, former executioner for the State of Georgia, wrote , “The men and women who assist in executions are not psychopaths or sadists. They do their best to perform the impossible and inhumane job with which the state has charged them. Those of us who have participated in executions often suffer something very much like posttraumatic stress. Many turn to alcohol and drugs. For me, those nights that weren’t sleepless were plagued by nightmares.”

For some individuals, however, executions seem to appeal to strange, aberrant impulses and provide an outlet for sadistic urges. Warden Lewis Lawes of Sing Sing Prison in New York wrote of the many requests he received to watch electrocutions, and told that when the job of executioner became vacant. “I received more than seven hundred applications for the position, many of them offering cut-rate prices.” (Life and Death in Sing Sing 1928)

Public executions were common in this country during the 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the last ones occurred in 1936 in Kentucky, when 20,000 people gathered to watch the hanging of a young African American male. (Teeters, in Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 1960)

Delight in brutality, pain, violence and death may always be with us. But surely we must conclude that it is best for the law not to encourage such impulses. When the government sanctions, commands, and ceremoniously carries out the execution of a prisoner, it lends support to this destructive side of human nature.

More than two centuries ago the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria, in his highly influential treatise On Crimes and Punishment (1764), asserted: “The death penalty cannot be useful, because of the example of barbarity it gives men.” Beccaria’s words still ring true – even if the death penalty were a “useful” deterrent, it would still be an “example of barbarity.” No society can safely entrust the enforcement of its laws to torture, brutality, or killing. Such methods are inherently cruel and will always mock the attempt to cloak them in justice. As Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg wrote, “The deliberate institutionalized taking of human life by the state is the greatest conceivable degradation to the dignity of the human personality.”(Boston Globe, August 16, 1976)

Death Row Syndrome

Capital appeals are not only costly; they are also time-consuming. The average death row inmate waits 12 years between sentencing and execution, and some sit in anticipation of their executions on death row for up to 30 years. [22] For these prisoners, most of whom are housed in solitary confinement, this wait period may cause “Death Row Phenomenon” or “Death Row Syndrome.” Although the terms are often used interchangeably, “Death Row Phenomenon” refers to the destructive consequences of long-term solitary confinement [23] and the inevitable anxiety that results from awaiting one’s own death, while “Death Row Syndrome” refers to the severe psychological illness that often results from Death Row Phenomenon. [24]

In solitary confinement, inmates are often isolated for 23 hours each day without access to training or educational programs, recreational activities, or regular visits. Such conditions have been demonstrated to provoke agitation, psychosis, delusions, paranoia, and self-destructive behavior. [25] To inflict this type of mental harm is inhumane, but it also may prove detrimental to public safety. When death row inmates successfully appeal their sentences, they are transferred into the general inmate population, and when death row inmates are exonerated, they are promptly released into the community. [26] Death Row Syndrome needlessly risks making these individuals dangerous to those around them.

Neither Death Row Syndrome nor Death Row Phenomenon has received formal recognition from the American Psychiatric Association or the American Psychological Association. [27] In 1995, however, Justices Stevens and Breyer, in a memorandum regarding the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari to death row inmate Clarence Lackey, highlighted the “importance and novelty” of the question “whether executing a prisoner who has already spent some 17 years on death row violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.” [28] Further, as some scholars and advocates have noted, the mental deterioration symptomatic of Death Row Syndrome may render an inmate incompetent to participate in their own post-conviction proceedings. [29]

Death Row Syndrome gained international recognition during the 1989 extradition proceedings of Jens Soering, a German citizen arrested in England and charged with committing murder on American soil. [30] Soering argued, and the European Court of Human Rights agreed, that extraditing him to the United States would violate Article 3 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. [31] The Court explained that, in the United States, “the condemned prisoner has to endure for many years the conditions on death row and the anguish and mounting tension of living in the ever-present shadow of death” such that extraditing Soering would violate protections against “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” [32] Similar conclusions have been reached by the United Kingdom’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the Canadian Supreme Court. [33]

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS UNJUSTIFIED RETRIBUTION

Justice, it is often insisted, requires the death penalty as the only suitable retribution for heinous crimes. This claim does not bear scrutiny, however. By its nature, all punishment is retributive. Therefore, whatever legitimacy is to be found in punishment as just retribution can, in principle, be satisfied without recourse to executions.

Moreover, the death penalty could be defended on narrowly retributive grounds only for the crime of murder, and not for any of the many other crimes that have frequently been made subject to this mode of punishment (rape, kidnapping, espionage, treason, drug trafficking). Few defenders of the death penalty are willing to confine themselves consistently to the narrow scope afforded by retribution. In any case, execution is more than a punishment exacted in retribution for the taking of a life. As Nobel Laureate Albert Camus wrote, “For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.” (Reflections on the Guillotine, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death 1960)

It is also often argued that death is what murderers deserve, and that those who oppose the death penalty violate the fundamental principle that criminals should be punished according to their just desserts – “making the punishment fit the crime.” If this rule means punishments are unjust unless they are like the crime itself, then the principle is unacceptable: It would require us to rape rapists, torture torturers, and inflict other horrible and degrading punishments on offenders. It would require us to betray traitors and kill multiple murderers again and again – punishments that are, of course, impossible to inflict. Since we cannot reasonably aim to punish all crimes according to this principle, it is arbitrary to invoke it as a requirement of justice in the punishment of murder.

If, however, the principle of just deserts means the severity of punishments must be proportional to the gravity of the crime – and since murder is the gravest crime, it deserves the severest punishment – then the principle is no doubt sound. Nevertheless, this premise does not compel support for the death penalty; what it does require is that other crimes be punished with terms of imprisonment or other deprivations less severe than those used in the punishment of murder.

Criminals no doubt deserve to be punished, and the severity of the punishment should be appropriate to their culpability and the harm they have caused the innocent. But severity of punishment has its limits – imposed by both justice and our common human dignity. Governments that respect these limits do not use premeditated, violent homicide as an instrument of social policy.

Murder Victims Families Oppose the Death Penalty

Some people who have lost a loved one to murder believe that they cannot rest until the murderer is executed. But this sentiment is by no means universal. Coretta Scott King has observed, “As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder and assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder.” (Speech to National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Washington, D.C., September 26, 1981)

Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, daughter of the slain Senator Robert Kennedy, has written:

“I was eight years old when my father was murdered. It is almost impossible to describe the pain of losing a parent to a senseless murder.…But even as a child one thing was clear to me: I didn’t want the killer, in turn, to be killed. I remember lying in bed and praying, ‘Please, God. Please don’t take his life too.’ I saw nothing that could be accomplished in the loss of one life being answered with the loss of another. And I knew, far too vividly, the anguish that would spread through another family – another set of parents, children, brothers, and sisters thrown into grief.”(Foreword to Gray and Stanley, A Punishment in Search of A Crime 1989)

Across the nation, many who have survived the murder of a loved one have joined Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation or Murder Victims Families for Human Rights, in the effort to replace anger and hate toward the criminal with a restorative approach to both the offender and the bereaved survivors.

Groups of murder victims family members have supported campaigns for abolition of the death penalty in Illinois, Connecticut, Montana and Maryland most recently.

Barbara Anderson Young, the sister of James Anderson, who was allegedly run over by a white teenager in Mississippi in 2011, who reportedly wanted to hurt him because he was Black, wrote a letter to the local prosecutor on behalf of their family indicating the family’s opposition to the death penalty, which is “deeply rooted in our religious faith, a faith that was central in James’ life as well.” The letter also eloquently asks that the defendant be spared execution because the death penalty “historically has been used in Mississippi and the South primarily against people of color for killing whites.” It continues, “[e]xecuting James’ killers will not help balance the scales. But sparing them may help to spark a dialogue that one day will lead to the elimination of capital punishment.”

Lawrence Brewer, convicted of the notorious dragging death of James Byrd in Texas, was executed in 2011. Members of Mr. Byrd’s family opposed the death penalty, despite the racist and vicious nature of the killing. Of Brewer’s remorseless – he said he had no regrets the day he was executed – Byrd’s sister, Betty Boatner, said, “If I could say something to him, I would let him know that I forgive him and then if he still has no remorse, I just feel sorry for him.” Byrd’s daughter shared that she didn’t want Brewer to die because “it’s easy . . .(a)ll he’s going to do it go to sleep” rather than live every day with what he did and perhaps one day recognize the humanity of his victim. James Byrd’s son, Ross, points out “You can’t fight murder with murder . . .(l)ife in prison would have been fine. I know he can’t hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn’t what we want.”

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT COSTS MORE THAN INCARCERATION

It is sometimes suggested that abolishing capital punishment is unfair to the taxpayer, on the assumption that life imprisonment is more expensive than execution. If one takes into account all the relevant costs, however, just the reverse is true. “The death penalty is not now, nor has it ever been, a more economical alternative to life imprisonment.”) A murder trial normally takes much longer when the death penalty is at issue than when it is not. Litigation costs – including the time of judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and court reporters, and the high costs of briefs – are mostly borne by the taxpayer. The extra costs of separate death row housing and additional security in court and elsewhere also add to the cost. A 1982 study showed that were the death penalty to be reintroduced in New York, the cost of the capital trial alone would be more than double the cost of a life term in prison. (N.Y. State Defenders Assn., “Capital Losses” 1982)

The death penalty was eventually reintroduced in New York and then found unconstitutional and not reintroduced again, in part because of cost.

In Maryland, a comparison of capital trial costs with and without the death penalty for the years concluded that a death penalty case costs “approximately 42 percent more than a case resulting in a non-death sentence.” In 1988 and 1989 the Kansas legislature voted against reinstating the death penalty after it was informed that reintroduction would involve a first-year cost of more than $11 million. 59 Florida, with one of the nation’s most populous death rows, has estimated that the true cost of each execution is approximately $3.2 million, or approximately six times the cost of a life-imprisonment sentence.” (David von Drehle, “Capital Punishment in Paralysis,” Miami Herald, July 10, 1988)

A 1993 study of the costs of North Carolina’s capital punishment system revealed that litigating a murder case from start to finish adds an extra $163,000 to what it would cost the state to keep the convicted offender in prison for 20 years. The extra cost goes up to $216,000 per case when all first-degree murder trials and their appeals are considered, many of which do not end with a death sentence and an execution.

In 2011 in California, a broad coalition of organizations called Taxpayers for Justice put repeal of the death penalty on the ballot for 2012 in part because of the high cost documented by a recent study that found the state has already spent $4 billion on capital punishment resulting in 13 executions. The group includes over 100 law enforcement leaders, in addition to crime-victim advocates and exonerated individuals. Among them is former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, whose office pursued dozens of capital cases during his 32 years as a prosecutor. He said, “My frustration is more about the fact that the death penalty does not serve any useful purpose and it’s very expensive.” Don Heller, a Republican and former prosecutor, wrote “I am convinced that at least one innocent person may have been executed under the current death penalty law. It was not my intent nor do I believe that of the voters who overwhelmingly enacted the death penalty law in 1978. We did not consider that horrific possibility.” Heller emphasized that he is not “soft on crime,” but that “life without parole protects public safety better than a death sentence.” Additionally, he said the money spent on the death penalty could be better used elsewhere, as California cuts funding for police officers and prosecutors. “Paradoxically, the cost of capital punishment takes away funds that could be used to enhance public safety.” [34]

From one end of the country to the other public officials decry the additional cost of capital cases even when they support the death penalty system. “Wherever the death penalty is in place, it siphons off resources which could be going to the front line in the war against crime…. Politicians could address this crisis, but, for the most part they either endorse executions or remain silent.” The only way to make the death penalty more “cost effective” than imprisonment is to weaken due process and curtail appellate review, which are the defendant’s (and society’s) only protection against the most aberrant miscarriages of justice. Any savings in dollars would, of course, be at the cost of justice : In nearly half of the death-penalty cases given review under federal habeas corpus provisions, the murder conviction or death sentence was overturned .

In 1996, in response to public clamor for accelerating executions, Congress imposed severe restrictions on access to federal habeas corpus and also ended all funding of the regional death penalty “resource centers” charged with providing counsel on appeal in the federal courts. (Carol Castenada, “Death Penalty Centers Losing Support Funds,” USA Today, Oct. 24, 1995) These restrictions virtually guarantee that the number and variety of wrongful murder convictions and death sentences will increase. The savings in time and money will prove to be illusory.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS LESS POPULAR THAN THE ALTERNATIVES

It is commonly reported that the American public overwhelmingly approves of the death penalty. More careful analysis of public attitudes, however, reveals that most Americans prefer an alternative; they would oppose the death penalty if convicted murderers were sentenced to life without parole and were required to make some form of financial restitution. In 2010, when California voters were asked which sentence they preferred for a first-degree murderer, 42% of registered voters said they preferred life without parole and 41% said they preferred the death penalty. In 2000, when voters were asked the same question, 37% chose life without parole while 44% chose the death penalty . A 1993 nationwide survey revealed that although 77% of the public approves of the death penalty, support drops to 56% if the alternative is punishment with no parole eligibility until 25 years in prison. Support drops even further, to 49%, if the alternative is no parole under any conditions. And if the alternative is no parole plus restitution, it drops still further, to 41% . Only a minority of the American public would favor the death penalty if offered such alternatives.

INTERNATIONALLY, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS WIDELY VIEWED AS INHUMANE AND ANACHRONISTIC

An international perspective on the death penalty helps us understand the peculiarity of its use in the United States. As long ago as 1962, it was reported to the Council of Europe that “the facts clearly show that the death penalty is regarded in Europe as something of an anachronism….” 1962)

Today, either by law or in practice, all of Western Europe has abolished the death penalty. In Great Britain, it was abolished (except for cases of treason) in 1971; France abolished it in 1981. Canada abolished it in 1976. The United Nations General Assembly affirmed in a formal resolution that throughout the world, it is desirable to “progressively restrict the number of offenses for which the death penalty might be imposed, with a view to the desirability of abolishing this punishment.” By mid-1995, eighteen countries had ratified the Sixth Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights, outlawing the death penalty in peacetime.

Underscoring worldwide support for abolition was the action of the South African constitutional court in 1995, barring the death penalty as an “inhumane” punishment. Between 1989 and 1995, two dozen other countries abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Since 1995, 43 more abolished it. All told, 71% of the world’s nation’s have abolished the death penalty in law or practice; only 58 of 197 retain it .

International Law

A look at international trends and agreements sheds light on the peculiarity of the United States’ continued imposition of capital punishment. Today, over 140 nations have abolished the death penalty either by law or in practice and, of the 58 countries that have retained the death penalty, only 21 carried out known executions in 2011. [35] Furthermore, capital punishment has compelled the United States to abstain from signing or ratifying several major international treaties and perhaps to violate international agreements to which it is a party:

In 1989, the General Assembly adopted the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), one of the UN’s primary human rights treaties. [36] Parties to the Protocol must take all necessary measures to abolish the death penalty and protect their citizens’ right not to be executed, although signatories may reserve the right to apply the death penalty for serious military criminals during wartime. [37] The United States has yet to join the 35 signatories or 75 parties to the Protocol, trailing behind the world’s leading democracies in the protection of human rights.

Although the Second Protocol to the ICCPR is the only worldwide instrument calling for death penalty abolition, there are three such instruments with regional emphases. Adopted by the Council of Europe in 1982 and ratified by eighteen nations by mid-1995, the Sixth Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) provides for the abolition of capital punishment during peacetime. In 2002, the Council adopted the Thirteenth Protocol to the ECHR, which provides for the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances, including times of war or imminent threat of war. In 1990, the Organization of American States adopted the Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights to Abolish the Death Penalty, which provides for total abolition but allows states to reserve the right to apply the death penalty during wartime. [38]

The United States has ratified the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR), an international treaty setting forth a framework for consular relations among independent countries. Under Article 36 of the VCCR, local authorities are obligated to inform all detained foreigners “without delay” of their right to request consular notification of their detention and their right to demand and access opportunities to communicate with their consular representatives. [39] Local authorities have repeatedly disregarded this obligation, resulting in the International Court of Justice holding in 2004 that states had violated the VCCR by failing to inform 51 named Mexican nationals of their rights. All 51 were sentenced to death. When the State of Texas refused to honor this judgment and provide relief for the 15 death-row inmates whose VCCR rights it had violated, President George W. Bush sought to intervene on the prisoners’ behalf, taking the case to the United States Supreme Court. The Court denied the President’s appeal, and Texas has gone on to execute inmates whose VCCR rights it had failed to honor.

In 1994, the United States signed the United Nations (UN) Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). [40] The treaty, which has now been ratified or signed by 176 nations, outlaws the imposition of physical or psychological abuse on people in detention. While it does not explicitly prohibit capital punishment, the treaty does forbid the intentional infliction of pain. Since 1976, however, more than 20 executions in the United States have involved prolonged, painful, or shocking errors, such as an inmate’s head catching fire or a lengthy and torturous search for a vein suitable for lethal injection. Additionally, accidents aside, our methods of execution—lethal injection, electrocution, firing squad, gas chamber, and hanging—may be inherently painful. The CAT also forbids the infliction of pain and suffering “based on discrimination of any kind,” [41] yet racial inequality is endemic to our death rows .

Also in 1994, the United States ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), a treaty intended to protect against racial discrimination, whether intentional or resulting from seemingly neutral state policies. To meet its obligations as a party to ICERD, the United States must take steps to review and amend policies and procedures that create or perpetuate racial discrimination, including capital punishment. [42]

Once in use everywhere and for a wide variety of crimes, the death penalty today is generally forbidden by law and widely abandoned in practice, in most countries outside the United States. Indeed, the unmistakable worldwide trend is toward the complete abolition of capital punishment. In the United States, opposition to the death penalty is widespread and diverse. Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant religious groups are among the more than 50 national organizations that constitute the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

The Case Against the Death Penalty was first published by the ACLU as a pamphlet in 1973. The original text was written by Hugo Adam Bedau, Ph.D., who also contributed to several subsequent editions of the pamphlet. This version was most recently revised by the ACLU in 2012.

[1] Glenn L. Pierce & Michael L. Radelet, Death Sentencing in East Baton Rouge Parish, 1990-2008 , 71 La. L. Rev. 647, 671 (2011), available at http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/PierceRadeletStudy.pdf .

[2] Liebman et. al, Los Tocayos Carlos , 43 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 711, 1104 (2012).

[3] See Andrew Cohen, Yes, America, We Have Executed an Innocent Man , Atlantic, May 14, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/yes-america-we-have-executed-an-innocent-man/257106/ .

[4] See id.

[5] See id. ; Carlos DeLuna Case: The Fight to Prove an Innocent Man Was Executed , PBS Newshour, May 24, 2012, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june12/deathpenalty_05-24.html .

[6] A Three-Drug Cocktail , WashingtonPost.com, Sep. 26, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2007/09/26/GR2007092600116.html ; see also Victoria Gill, The Search for a Humane Way to Kill , BBC News, Aug. 7, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19060961 .

[7] See Carol J. Williams, Maker of Anesthetic Used in Executions is Discontinuing Drug, L.A. Times, Jan. 22, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/22/local/la-me-execution-drug-20110122 ; John Schwartz, Death Penalty Drug Raises Legal Questions , N.Y. Times, Apr. 13, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/us/14lethal.html?pagewanted=all .

[8] See Brandi Grissom, Texas Will Change its Lethal Injection Protocol , Tex. Tribune, July 10, 2012, www.texastribune.org/texas-dept-criminal-justice/death-penalty/texas-changing-its-lethal-injection-protocol/ ; Rob Stein, Ohio Executes Inmate Using New, Single-Drug Method for Death Penalty , Wash. Post, Mar. 11, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/10/AR2011031006250.html ; David Beasley, Georgia Delays Execution Amid Drug Protocol Change , Reuters, July, 17, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/17/us-usa-execution-georgia-idUSBRE86G14L20120717 ; Rhonda Cook & Bill Rankin, State Changes Lethal Injection Protocol, Reschedules Execution , Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 17, 2012, http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/state-changes-lethal-injection-1479424.html ; Steve Eder, A Texas First: Single-Drug Used to Execute Inmate , WSJ Law Blog, http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/07/19/a-texas-first-single-drug-used-to-execute-inmate/ ; Idaho Switches Execution Protocol to Single-Drug Lethal Injection , Spokesman.com, May 18, 2012, http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/boise/2012/may/18/idaho-switches-execution-protocol-single-drug-lethal-injection/ .

[9] See Carol J. Williams, California’s New Lethal Injection Protocol Tossed By Judge, L.A. Times, Dec. 17, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/17/local/la-me-executions-20111217 ; Kathy Lohr, New Lethal Injection Drug Raises Concerns , NPR, Jan. 29, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/01/29/133302950/new-lethal-injection-drug-raises-concerns ; Steve Eder, Virginia Adds New Drug for Lethal Injections , WSJ Law Blog, July 27, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/07/27/virginia-adds-new-drug-for-lethal-injections/ .

[10] Laura Vozzella, Virginia opts for One-Drug Lethal Injection Protocol , Wash. Post, July 27, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/virginia-opts-for-one-drug-lethal-injection-protocol/2012/07/27/gJQA8jxiEX_story.html .

[11] See Linda Greenhouse, Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injection for Execution , N.Y. Times, Apr. 17, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/us/16cnd-scotus.html?pagewanted=all .

[12] See Michael Kiefer, State is Sued Again Over Its Lethal-Injection Procedure , USA Today, Feb. 7, 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/USCP/PNI/Valley%20&%20State/2012-02-07-PNI0207met–executionsART_ST_U.htm ; Court Gives Arizona Warning About Execution Protocol , Associated Press, Feb. 28, 2012, available at http://www.azcentral.com/community/pinal/articles/2012/02/28/20120228arizona-moorman-execution-death-row-inmate-lawyers-seek-stays.html . Notably, however, the panel did not halt Arizona’s scheduled executions. Id.

[13] David Beasley, Georgia Inmate Gets Stay Hours Before Scheduled Execution , Reuters, July 23, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/23/us-usa-execution-georgia-idUSBRE86M1F720120723 .

[14] Steve Eder, Missouri Executions on Hold Amid Concerns About New Drug , Aug. 15, 2012, WSJ Law Blog, http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/08/15/missouri-executions-on-hold-amid-concerns-about-new-drug/ .

[15] Melissa Anderson, ACLU Challenges Montana’s Lethal Injection Protocol , KXLH.com, Aug. 1, 2012, http://www.kxlh.com/news/aclu-challenges-montana-s-lethal-injection-protocol/ .

[16] See Eder, supra note 3; Steve Olfason, Oklahoma to Execute Man Who Killed Ex-Girlfriend and Her Two Kids , Chicago Tribune, Aug. 14, 2012, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-08-14/news/sns-rt-us-usa-execution-oklahomabre87d0s8-20120814_1_jerry-massie-method-of-lethal-injection-three-drug-protocol ; Steve Eder, Oklahoma Execution Set After Lethal Injection Challenge Fails , Aug. 13, 2012, WSJ Law Blog, http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/08/13/oklahoman-set-for-executution-after-lethal-injection-challenge-fails/ .

[17] See Grissom, supra note 3; Ed Pilkington, Texas Executions Threatened As Stocks of Death Penalty Drug Run Low , Guardian, Feb. 14, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/14/texas-executions-threatened-stocks-run-low ; John Schwartz, Seeking Execution Drug, States Cut Legal Corners , N.Y. Times, Apr. 13, 2011,

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/us/14lethal.html?pagewanted=all ; Kiefer, supra note 7.

[18] EU Imposes Strict Controls on ‘Execution Drug’ Exports, BBC News, Dec. 20, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16281016 ; Matt McGrath, FDA Goes to Court to Secure Drugs for Lethal Injections , BBC World, June 1, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18253578 .

[19] See Jeremy Pelofsky, U.S. Wants Lawsuit Over Execution Drug Dismissed , Reuters, Apr. 20, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/20/us-usa-execution-lawsuit-idUSTRE73J7MH20110420 ; Michael Kiefer, Execution Drugs: Arizona Inmate Lawsuit Seeks FDA Policing , Ariz. Republic, Feb. 3, 2011, http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2011/02/02/20110202arizona-execution-drug-fda-lawsuit-brk02-ON.htm l; Kevin Johnson, Lawsuit Seeks to Block Imports of Key Execution Drug , USA Today, Feb. 2, 2011, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/02/lawsuit-seeks-to-block-imports-of-key-execution-drug/1#.UA2pmKBCzGc ; Ryan Gabrielson, Lethal Injection Drug Tied to London Wholesaler , California Watch, Jan. 7, 2011, http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/lethal-injection-drug-tied-london-wholesaler-7888 ; Ryan Gabrielson, California Lethal Injection: Prison Officials Refuse to Hand Over Lethal Injection Drug , California Watch, May 30, 2012, available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/30/california-lethal-injection_n_1556155.html .

[20] Pelofsky, supra note 14.

[21] See Raymond Bonner, FDA’s Immoral Stance on Lethal Injection Drugs , Bloomberg, July 29, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-29/fda-s-immoral-stance-on-lethal-injection-drugs.html .

[22] See Elizabeth Rapaport , A Modest Proposal: The Aged of Death Row Should be Deemed Too Old to Execute, 77 Brook. L. Rev. 1089 (Spring 2012); Michael J. Carter, Wanting to Die: The Cruel Phenomenon of “Death Row Syndrome”, Alternet, Nov. 7, 2008, http://www.alternet.org/rights/106300/waiting_to_die%3A_the_cruel_phenomenon_of_%22death_row_syndrome%22/ ; Dr. Karen Harrison and Anouska Tamony, Death Row Phenomenon, Death Row Syndrome, and Their Affect [sic.] on Capital Cases in the U.S. , Internet Journal of Criminology 2010, available at http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/Harrison_Tamony_%20Death_Row_Syndrome%20_IJC_Nov_2010.pdf .

[23] See Stop Solitary – The Dangerous Overuse of Solitary Confinement in the United States, ACLU.org, https://www.aclu.org/stop-solitary-dangerous-overuse-solitary-confinement-united-states-0 .

[24] See Harrison and Tamony, supra note 25.

[25] See Carter, supra note 25; Death Penalty Information Center, Time on Death Row (2006), at http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/time-death-row .

[26] See id.

[27] Amy Smith, Not “Waiving” But Drowning: The Anatomy of Death Row Syndrome and Volunteering for Execution , 17 B.U. Pub. Int. L.J. 237, 243, available at http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/pilj/vol17no2/documents/17-2SmithArticle.pdf .

[28] Lackey v. Texas, 115 S. Ct. 1421, 1421 (1995) (Stevens, J., concurring in the denial of certiorari).

[29] Stephen Blank, Killing Time: The Process of Waiving Appeal – The Michael Ross Death Penalty Cases , 14 J.L. & Pol’y 735, 738-39 (2006).

[30] Soering v. UK , App. No. 14038/88, 11 Eur. H.R. Rep. 439 (1989), available at http://eji.org/eji/files/Soering%20v.%20United%20Kingdom.pdf .

[31] See David Wallace-Wells, What is Death Row Syndrome? , Slate, Feb. 1, 2005, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2005/02/what_is_death_row_syndrome.html ; Smith supra note 30.

[32] Smith supra note 30. (quoting Soering , 11 Eur. H. R. Rep. at 475-76).

[33] Id. at 239.

[34] Carol J. Williams, Death Penalty: Exhaustive Study Finds Death Penalty Costs California $184 Million a Year , L.A. Times, June 20, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/20/local/la-me-adv-death-penalty-costs-20110620 .

[35] Figures on the Death Penalty , Amnesty International, http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty/numbers .

[36] UN General Assembly, Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Aiming at the Abolition of the Death Penalty , Dec. 15, 1989, A/RES/44/128, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3ae6b3a70.html [accessed 15 August 2012] [ hereinafter Second Optional Protocol].

[37] See Pierre Desert, Second Optional Protocol: Frequently Asked Questions , World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, June 27, 2008, http://www.worldcoalition.org/Second-Optional-Protocol-Frequently-Asked-Questions.html ; Pierre Desert, Second Optional Protocol: The Only Global Treaty Aiming at the Abolition of the Death Penalty , World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, June 24, 2008, www.worldcoalition.org/UN-Protocol-the-only-global-treaty-aiming-at-the-abolition-of-the-death-penalty.html ; Second Optional Protocol, supra note 21.

[38] Desert, Second Optional Protocol: Frequently Asked Questions , supra note 22.

[39] Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, Mar. 19, 1967, 596 U.N.T.S. 261, available at http://untreaty.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/9_2_1963.pdf .

[40] United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Dec. 10, 1984, 1465 U.N.T.S. 85, available at http://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/UNTS/Volume%201465/v1465.pdf .

[41] Richard C. Dieter, Introduction: Ford Foundation Symposium, Nov. 12, 1998, available at http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/us-death-penalty-and-international-law-us-compliance-torture-and-race-conventions .

[42] International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Mar. 7, 1966, 660 U.N.T.S. 195, available at http://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/UNTS/Volume%20660/v660.pdf .

Related Issues

• Capital Punishment

Stay Informed

Every month, you'll receive regular roundups of the most important civil rights and civil liberties developments. Remember: a well-informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny.

By completing this form, I agree to receive occasional emails per the terms of the ACLU’s privacy statement.

Five death penalty cases to follow in the US this year

There are an estimated 2,905 people on death row in the US. Here are five particularly controversial cases.

The United States has put to death more than 1,446 people since 1976, according to the Washington, DC-based Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). 

Texas leads the country in the number of executions carried out during that 41-year period, killing at least 540 people. Oklahoma and Virginia are tied for second with 112 executions each. 

Keep reading

Land day: what happened in palestine in 1976, ‘pure veg fleet’: how indian food app zomato sparked a caste, purity debate, the global magnitsky act: make it make sense, joe, video captures unarmed palestinians killed by israeli forces in gaza.

Meanwhile, public opinion on the death penalty seems to have been gradually changing. In September 2016, the Pew Research Center found that support for the death penalty was at its lowest in 41 years. 

Since 1973, at least 157 people have been exonerated and released from death row. But the DPIC says that, as of July 2016, 2,905 people remain on death row. 

The following are some of the cases where legal teams or campaigners are hoping to have death sentences overturned. 

In 1995, Duane Buck broke into the home of his ex-girlfriend, Debra Gardner, in Houston, Texas, after they broke up. Armed with two guns, he shot and killed Gardner and her friend Kenneth Butler while Gardner’s three children were in the home. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death in 1997. 

Although Buck, now 53, never contested his guilt, the decision to deliver a capital punishment verdict rather than a life sentence has been thrown into question after a review of the racially charged testimony of an expert witness during the sentencing trial. 

Psychologist Walter Quijano, who was introduced by Buck’s own defence, testified that Buck would be dangerous in the future because he is African American.

READ MORE: Infographic – Breaking down the death penalty

In six other trials, Quijano testified to juries that black and Hispanic defendants were more likely to commit future crimes – the justification for sentencing them to death rather than life in prison.

In 2000,  Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, who is now a US senator, reviewed those cases and admitted that Quijano’s race-based testimony in those seven trials was “inappropriate”. 

Two years later, the other six death row inmates were granted new sentencing hearings, but Buck was not.

On February 22, 2017, the US Supreme Court ruled six-to-two in favour of granting Buck a chance at a new sentencing. 

Jeffrey Wood 

Jeffrey Wood, 43, was sentenced to death by a Texas court on March 3, 1996. His death sentence stems from the state’s so-called Law of Parties.

During the early morning hours of January 2, 1996, then 22-year-old Wood and Daniel Reneau parked outside a Texaco petrol station in Kerrville, his hometown in central Texas.

While Wood waited outside, Reneau shot dead the station attendant and took off with an estimated $11,350 from the safe and cash register. Reneau was executed in 2002.

The Texas penal code defines a person as “criminally responsible for an offence committed by the conduct of another” if the individual acts “with intent to promote or assist the commission of the offence, he solicits, encourages, directs, aids or attempts to aid the other person to commit the offence”.

READ MORE: Does a Texas man who killed no one deserve death row?

According to the DPIC, at least 10 people have been killed for their role as accomplices in murders since 1979. Five of those were in Texas.

Relatives and defenders of Wood, who reportedly has an IQ of 80, say he suffers from intellectual disability and emotional impairment. 

On August 19, 2016, the Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas granted Wood a stay of execution and decided a state district court should re-examine the validity of testimony provided by Dr James Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist who testified that Wood was likely to be violent in the future despite never having examined him.

Grigson, who died in 2004, was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians for providing testimony against people he had never examined.

He was known as “Dr Death” for testifying against people facing the death penalty. 

Terry Williams 

When he was 17 years old, Williams killed 50-year-old Herbert Hamilton in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was January 1984, and he reportedly lured Hamilton, who had allegedly repeatedly sexually abused the teen, and stabbed and beat him with a baseball bat until he died.

Six months later, Williams, then 18, and his friend Marc Draper lured Amos Norwood to a cemetery, where they beat him to death with a tyre iron. They later stole his car and took off to Atlantic City, New Jersey. 

After surrendering himself to the police in July 1984, Williams was eventually convicted of third-degree murder in the death of Hamilton and was sentenced to 27 years. For Norwood’s death, however, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. 

Williams, however, had been repeatedly raped as a child, and Norwood and Williams were allegedly among the perpetrators. Several others accused Norwood of sexually abusing them while they were young boys. 

Many of those involved in his original trial have publicly changed their minds since Williams was sentenced to death. Five jurors signed statements saying they wouldn’t have voted for capital punishment if they had known of the evidence of sexual abuse. 

READ MORE: Surviving death row

In 2012, Norwood’s wife Mamie signed a declaration that she did not want Williams to be executed for her late husband’s murder. 

A lower court in Pennsylvania found that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office had suppressed evidence that Norwood had sexually abused Williams. 

In the 1980s, however, Ronald Castille was district attorney and personally approved the decision to pursue capital punishment against Williams.

Castille later became Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice and refused to recuse himself from consideration of the inmate’s death penalty – despite the lower court’s finding that the district attorney’s office had suppressed evidence under Castille. 

On June 9, 2016, the US Supreme Court ruled in a five-to-three vote that Williams’ constitutional rights had been violated. 

Willie Jerome Manning 

Willie Jerome Manning, 48, was convicted at two separate trials of two unrelated murders that took place in 1992 and 1993. He received two death penalty sentences. On death row for more than two decades, he has always maintained his innocence. 

Manning was found guilty of the December 1992 killing of students Jon Steckler, 19, and Tiffany Miller, 22, in Starkville, Mississippi. He was later sentenced to death. 

Five weeks after the killing of Steckler and Miller, 90-year-old Emmoline Jimmerson and her 60-year-old daughter, Albertha Jordan, were murdered during an attempted robbery. They were both beaten with an iron before their throats were slashed. A court also convicted Manning of their murders and eventually dealt him a second death sentence. 

In 2011, a key witness recanted his testimony that he had witnessed Manning entering Jimmerson’s apartment and filed affidavits that his testimony was false and the result of coercion. 

In 2013, Manning was given an execution date for the Steckler-Miller case. He came within hours of dying before the court granted him a stay of execution. 

In 2015, the Mississippi Supreme Court granted Manning a new trial for the Jimmerson-Jordan murders. He was exonerated and the charges were dropped. 

Still on death row for the Steckler-Miller case, Manning has attempted to challenge hair and DNA evidence presented in his first trial. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) has admitted that its forensic expert had made mistakes in testimony during the Steckler-Miller trial, and the US Department of Justice has told the prosecutor that “testimony containing erroneous statements regarding microscopic hair comparison analysis was used” against Manning.

If the forensic evidence eventually comes back in Manning’s favour, he will be the first person to be exonerated for two separate death sentences. 

Kerry Lyn Dalton 

In March 1995, Kerry Lyn Dalton was sentenced to death for the murder of Irene Louise May in a trailer park in Live Oak Springs, California, more than seven years earlier. She was 28 years old and reportedly struggling with drug addiction at the time she was said to have killed May. 

May’s body, however, has never been located, and Dalton was primarily convicted based on confessions the prosecution alleges she gave to other people. 

Victoria Ann Thorpe, Dalton’s sister, wrote a book about the trial and has campaigned for Dalton’s exoneration on the grounds that she was convicted on hearsay and there was neither a body nor a crime scene. 

Dalton has yet to have an appeal heard, although her sister says it is prepared and they have been waiting for years. 

Women make up less than two percent of the total death row population, according to DPIC. 

The Case That Made Texas the Death Penalty Capital

In an excerpt from his new book, ‘let the lord sort them,’ marshall project staff writer maurice chammah explains where a 1970s legal team fighting the death penalty went wrong..

The town of Cuero, halfway between San Antonio and the Gulf Coast, was small enough that a child’s disappearance would be noticed quickly. In August 1973, a little after dusk, the grandmother of 10-year-old Wendy Adams arrived to pick her up at the pool in the town park. Her clothes were still in a locker. “The child was obedient,” her grandmother later recalled, “and I knew that if she had changed her plans she would have called me.” She alerted the woman behind the park concession stand, who happened to also be the wife of the local police chief. A search began.

Witnesses had seen Adams in the back of a dark blue pickup truck, speeding down the road, screaming for help as her long, blonde hair billowed in the wind. A group of adolescent girls said a 22-year-old cotton mill worker named Jerry Jurek had tried to chase them down in the same truck earlier that day. Late that night, the police picked up Jurek at his parents’ house, and brought him, shoeless and shirtless, to the local jail. Among the arresting officers was Ronnie Adams, the father of the missing girl.

Jurek initially denied involvement, but eventually confessed. He said he’d been drinking and invited Adams to go “riding around” with him. She climbed into his truck and he drove to a bridge just outside of town. “Wendy told me that I shouldn't be drinking, and that I was just like my brother who drinks a lot,” he said in a written confession. “I got mad at her and jerked her off the truck and grabbed Wendy around her throat and choked her to death; she tried to talk to me to get me to stop but I wouldn't listen.” Sheriff’s deputies found her body floating face down in the river below the bridge.

Prosecutors remained suspicious about whether Jurek was telling them the whole truth, and they continued to press him. He gave a second confession. “I did not tell the truth about the conversation I had with Wendy at the river…and I now herein wish to correct that statement,” reads his second confession, using oddly formal language. “I asked her if she had ever had sex before and she said yes. I asked her if she wanted to have sex with me but she said no and started screaming and yelled ‘help’ and ‘please don't kill me.’ So I started choking her.” Jurek was charged with “murder in the course of kidnapping and attempted rape.” Prosecutors decided to seek the death penalty.

This all might have amounted to a straightforward small-town murder case, one of thousands every year resolved through a plea deal or a short trial, and Jurek might have faded into the rising wave of mass incarceration. But one year earlier, the Supreme Court had struck down every death penalty law in the country. State legislators across the U.S. raced to write new laws, and by May 1973, Texas had one on the books. As one of the first death sentences under the new law, Jurek’s case would become a test case, playing a key role in both the nationwide rise of the death penalty and Texas’s place at the center. Since 1972, Texas has carried out more than 500 of the country’s roughly 1,500 executions. The case of Jerry Jurek—and the many what-might-have-beens along his path through the legal system—helps explain why.

Shortly before his trial, Jurek was appointed two attorneys: George Middaugh, a part-time lawyer who also ran a lumber mill, and Emmett Summers III, who had finished law school three months before the murder. Summers had grown up with Jurek’s older brother and knew the Adams family, too. The more experienced attorneys in town didn’t want to be associated with such a horrible crime, he recalled years later, but “a young guy like me could get away with it.” Middaugh “was certainly not a criminal law expert,” Summers continued, “but it was not like anyone else was beating down the door to do it.” (Middaugh died in 2011.)

At Jurek’s five-day trial, his lawyers repeatedly cast suspicion on the two confessions, the first of which had been made after Jurek had spent a night, as Summers recalled, “virtually naked in this cold jail cell.” Jurek had scored 66 on the verbal portion of an IQ test, indicating an intellectual disability. And yet his first confession had him putting strangely mature words in the mouth of a 10-year-old, and his second confession used phrases like “herein” and “my prior statement.” The pathologist who examined Adams’ body found evidence of strangulation, but not of rape.

As Middaugh saw it, his client had no obvious motive to give a second confession, but the prosecutors did have a motive to get one. Shortly before the crime, he told the jury, the Texas legislature had decided that someone could only get the death penalty if they committed a second crime along with the murder, like rape or kidnapping. (It also allowed death if the victim was younger than 6, but Adams was 10.) The second confession implied rape and also removed the mention of Adams climbing into the truck by choice.

Middaugh suggested that the prosecutors had come to a realization. “Oh my god,” he said in court, mimicking their thought process. “The law’s been changed and we don’t have this boy accused of kidnapping anybody or raping anybody and we can’t get the death penalty.”

Middaugh’s suspicions didn’t sway the jury, which found Jurek guilty of murder “in the course of committing or attempting to commit kidnapping and/or forcible rape.” They didn’t need to specify.

The trial then moved into its second phase. The Texas Legislature had written that if jurors were going to sentence someone to death, they needed to decide “whether there is a probability that the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society.” In other words, the jury had to predict the future.

The longtime district attorney of DeWitt County, Wiley Cheatham, brought to the stand a series of community members who said Jurek had a “bad” reputation. He’d been accused in the past, though not convicted, of sexually assaulting several other children. A psychiatrist who had met with Jurek described him as “sociopathic, exhibiting a number of antisocial traits.” Jurek’s father testified that his son had worked—pumping gas, and on oil and construction crews—and gave most of his paycheck to support the family. Neither side presented an especially rich picture, and the jury sided with the prosecution.

Jurek went to death row. Soon after, Middaugh was disbarred over an unrelated ethics issue. So it fell to Emmett Summers—still less than a year out of law school—to prepare Jurek’s appeal. He knew he could not responsibly do this alone, so he looked for help, and he learned that the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), which had grown out of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,* was offering assistance to any lawyer with a death row client, regardless of that client’s race. The LDF was eager to swoop in, knowing that the Jurek case might be crucial to the fate of the Texas law, shaping the course of hundreds of future cases. Although Summers continued to be bothered by Jurek’s confessions, the Texas law as a whole, rather than the details of Jurek’s case in particular, became the focal point of his defense, folded into the LDF’s larger, national strategy.

The architect of the LDF’s effort against the death penalty was Anthony Amsterdam. Although not as well-known today as other LDF legends like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, this Jewish law professor was, in his heyday, considered a genius and a workaholic, the sort of person who dictated legal briefs from memory, cited case law by page number, and made his colleagues wonder whether he ever slept. It was Amsterdam who, in 1972, had stood before the Supreme Court and convinced the justices to strike down the entire country’s death penalty laws. (He declined an interview with me, but gave one to Evan Mandery for the 2013 book “A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America” ). He had a particular skill in pulling listeners through dense legal arguments and then rhetorically slamming the brakes. “The figures are perfectly plain,” he said at one such point in the oral argument. “Georgia executes Black people.” Influenced by his arguments, several justices wrote that the death penalty had become cruel and unusual because it was handed down in an arbitrary way, akin to being “struck by lightning.”

Anthony Amsterdam, center, a Stanford University law professor, led a team of lawyers in 1972 to convince the Supreme Court that the death penalty in America should be abolished.

But as the new laws came into effect and the test cases worked their way through the system, Amsterdam led a team of lawyers who divided up the states, planning how to convince the court that all these new laws violated the Constitution as well—and, by extension, that the death penalty in America should be abolished forever.

The Texas law went to Peggy Davis. She had little in common with Jurek, an impoverished, White, intellectually disabled cotton mill worker who’d spent his whole life in rural Texas. Davis came from a middle-class Black family and had become an academic star: In addition to law, she’d studied philosophy and psychoanalysis and even jazz singing before joining the LDF. She was excited to work with Amsterdam, who was one of her personal heroes, and she got to work studying the Texas law, which was a bit of an anomaly.

Most of the new death penalty laws produced by the states fell into two broad categories. Some states set aside a handful of specific crimes—murder of a police officer, for example—and made the death penalty automatic. Other states held a sort of second trial over punishment, in which the jury would hear lawyers present cases for and against death, and consider specific “aggravating” factors (the defendant killed for money, killed lots of people, etc.) and “mitigating” factors (the defendant had no history of violence, suffered from mental illness, etc.).

The Texas law was a hybrid: There was a second trial, but the jury only had to answer three questions: Was the murder deliberate? Was it unprovoked? And might the defendant be a “continuing threat to society”? In most murder cases, the first two questions were already assumed to be yes based on the guilty verdict, so it was the third question, known as the “future dangerousness” question, that mattered most.

Peggy Davis was in charge of researching Texas law in the Legal Defense Fund's efforts against the death penalty in the Supreme Court in 1976.

Because she’d studied psychology, Davis knew there was a whole area of academic literature on predicting who would commit crimes, and she felt it could not be done responsibly. Although Jurek was White, Davis suspected the emphasis on dangerousness would be used to tag Black defendants as especially deserving of death, since they were often perceived, consciously or not, to be more dangerous.

Another problem with the Texas law was that it gave the jury little opportunity to consider evidence that might sway them towards mercy and away from a death sentence—evidence like Jurek’s intellectual disability, or his work ethic, or his love for his family members. But in Texas, because the jury only had to answer three limited questions, they were unable to truly take account of such evidence.

In early 1976, the Supreme Court agreed to hear five cases from five states as a way of ruling on the entire range of death penalty laws that had been passed around the country. Many of the justices’ own clerks were convinced Anthony Amsterdam would lose: surely the court would uphold at least one of the new laws. But there was plenty of room for a partial victory; the court might keep one kind of law while striking down others.

Amsterdam and his team had a difficult strategic choice to make. They could focus on attacking the harsher laws from North Carolina and Louisiana that doled out automatic death penalties and say they restricted the juries’ ability to consider mitigating evidence. The problem with this strategy was that it might nudge the justices to see the laws out of Florida and Georgia, which did allow jurors to weigh evidence more broadly, as acceptable. Amsterdam would in effect be helping to send prisoners in those two states to their executions.

On the other hand, Amsterdam could push the court to strike down all the laws. If he was successful, the death penalty might disappear from the U.S. for good. This was risky: if the court rejected his reasoning, they might uphold all of the new state laws.

Part of the problem was that Amsterdam and the LDF were representing people on death row across numerous states. In order to fight for all of them at the same time, he had to take an all-or-nothing approach. Jerry Jurek was in a way at the center of this legal and intellectual conundrum. If Jurek had his own lawyer, who was looking only to save just his life, the best argument may well have been that the Texas law was too harsh, that the jury who sentenced Jurek had therefore never been given a robust opportunity to weigh whether, given his mental limitations, he perhaps deserved mercy. Might this mean that one lawyer shouldn’t be representing five defendants with five different sets of interests and potential legal strategies? There is no evidence that Amsterdam and his colleagues ever considered this question as they took the more sweeping approach.

Jurek, living in a prison cell 1,600 miles away from the LDF office, could hardly have known he was at the center of this question. Davis, though she was responsible for his case at the LDF, was unable to visit him. “There were conversations about whether you attack the death penalty overall, or whether you attack just the case and do what’s best for Jerry,” Summers, his local lawyer, recalled. Given his mental limitations, “Jerry would not have been able to participate in the conversation.”

As Amsterdam set his strategy for the argument, he relied on Davis and one of her colleagues. They rehearsed arguments, Amsterdam smoking a cigar and working out how to make himself appear reasonable to the justices. Still, Amsterdam did not let the younger lawyers seriously challenge his plans. Not that they would have. “I didn’t feel like I could disagree with Tony,” Davis later said. “He was a phenomenon.”

On the day oral arguments began, in March 1976, dark rain clouds veiled the Supreme Court building. Jerry Lane Jurek v. Texas was argued first, but Amsterdam’s opening was not about Jurek or Texas: he made sweeping arguments about all of the death penalty laws across the country. (A full recording is online .) One justice asked Amsterdam if he thought the death penalty to be cruel and unusual “no matter how serious the offense and no matter how completely a fair trial he may have been given.” Amsterdam said yes. Throughout the argument, the justices continued to give Amsterdam opportunities to compromise—to say some state laws were better than others, or to say that the death penalty could perhaps be preserved for the occasional airplane hijacking or presidential assassination. But he wouldn’t bite.

Instead, Amsterdam argued that every single one of the new laws involved too much human decision-making—prosecutors deciding who to charge, jurors deciding who to sentence, governors deciding whose sentences to commute—and that as a result executions would remain arbitrary.

As an example, he brought up the future dangerousness question in Texas. “The thing that is most devastating is that you can’t even challenge the jury’s finding because the question to which it responds is so meaningless,” Amsterdam said, noting that Jurek had been sentenced to die on the testimony of a few community members who just didn’t seem to like him.

Opening Statement

Justice Lewis Powell Jr. wrote down that he found Amsterdam’s views on the Texas law “fairly persuasive.” But as the argument continued and Amsterdam continued to talk abstractly about all the laws, Powell added to his notes, Amsterdam is “not interested in the fairness of procedure in a particular case.”

Another justice pointed out that human decision-making existed throughout the criminal justice system, not just in death penalty cases. Amsterdam responded, “Our argument is essentially that death is different.” He continued, “Death is final, death is irremediable. ... It goes beyond this world. It is a legislative decision to do something and we know not what we do.”

After he finished, he was followed by John Hill, the attorney general of Texas, who pounded Amsterdam as an extremist who was trying to foist his personal opposition to capital punishment on the American people. He pointed out that among 60 reported cases from Texas, the jury had found that 12 defendants would not be a future danger and spared their lives.

After Hill came Robert Bork, the conservative legal scholar. Years later, during his own confirmation hearings for a spot on the Supreme Court, his views would be tagged as too extreme, but for now he was simply representing a majority of Americans—66 percent according to an April 1976 poll—who supported executions. He jumped on the weakest part of Amsterdam’s argument: By saying that human decisions were a problem, he explained, Amsterdam was actually implying the solution would be a law that totally removes human decisions, that is “so rigid and automatic and insensitive that it would be morally reprehensible.”

Then Bork made his most sweeping argument, that the death penalty was a sign of a healthy democracy at work: “These five cases are about democratic government, the right of various legislatures of the United States, to choose or reject—according to their own moral sense and that of their people—the death penalty.”

Amsterdam returned for a final argument. Justice Powell asked him to pick between the five laws: Which would be the most fair in handing out the death penalty?

“None of them is close enough so that I can give a meaningful answer,” Amsterdam said.

More than 30 years later, speaking with the historian Evan Mandery, Amsterdam noted that at this moment he might have chosen to change course completely, and trying to turn the justices against one law in particular, the law that pretended to give juries a choice but restricted that choice so much that it was practically mandatory—the one from Texas.

“Now I know what it’s like to hear Jesus Christ,” William Brennan fumed to his clerks once he returned to his chambers. Brennan was one of the court’s most liberal justices, and he hated the death penalty, but he was angry at Amsterdam for giving up so many opportunities to appear pragmatic. Still, when the justices gathered two days later, Brennan told his colleagues he’d vote to strike down all five laws and keep the death penalty from returning. Thurgood Marshall agreed. At the other extreme were four justices whose support for the death penalty was firm and who wanted to uphold all the laws: Chief Justice Burger, along with Justices Byron White, Harry Blackmun and William Rehnquist.

Associate Justices William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell, shown here shortly after they joined the court in 1972, were tasked several years later with deciding whether new state death penalty laws violated the Constitution.

That left three whose votes were still in question: Lewis Powell, who had challenged Amsterdam during the arguments, along with John Paul Stevens and Potter Stewart. They were all willing to accept the Georgia and Florida laws, but were troubled by the “mandatory” laws in North Carolina and Louisiana. They saw how Texas, with its three questions and talk of future dangerousness, fell awkwardly between the two approaches, and Stevens and Stewart expressed ambivalence about it. Still, the Texas law appeared to command a majority, as did all of the laws except the one in North Carolina.

But all was not settled; Powell was having second thoughts. One of his law clerks had been arguing it was necessary to preserve an element of mercy in the system and believed that both the Louisiana and Texas laws, like the one in North Carolina, restricted that mercy too much. She thought the Texas law was effectively a “mandatory” death penalty.

Powell reached out to Stevens and Stewart. They met for lunch, and their conversation, held at a popular D.C. restaurant called The Monocle, is lost to history . But the issues they must have discussed remain unresolved to this day. The justices seemed to want to let juries make individual decisions about each defendant, while also ensuring their decisions, in aggregate, were not arbitrary. Most Americans are familiar with the idea that ‘the punishment must fit the crime,’ suggesting that two different people who commit the same crime must suffer the same consequences. Many Americans also believe in mercy, that judges and juries should be able to show leniency based on what they learn about the individual person before them. But how should we respond when their decisions fall along lines of race and gender and class that trouble us? In Mandery’s elegant formulation, “a person cannot be both unique and equal.”

The justices emerged with a plan: all three would oppose the Louisiana law and uphold the Texas one. On a Friday morning in July, the court announced that the death penalty would return, upholding the laws in Florida, Georgia, and Texas, and striking down those in Louisiana and North Carolina.

Become a Member

The overall message was that juries should be allowed to choose whether a specific person should receive the death penalty, considering the particulars of the crime (Did the defendant seem especially cruel while committing it? Did he show remorse right away?) and of the defendant (What was his childhood like? Had he struggled with poverty or addiction or mental illness?). Defendants should be treated, in Stewart’s words, as “uniquely individual human beings.” In an early draft of the decision striking down the mandatory law in North Carolina, Stewart wrote that jurors should be able to consider “the frailty of human actors,” but he cut the phrase and replaced it with something a bit more poetic and sweeping: “the diverse frailties of humankind.”

The three justices believed the questions devised by the Texas legislature would allow the jury to weigh these factors. Ironically, it was Rehnquist, a conservative who approved of all the laws, who disagreed. He thought his colleagues were fooling themselves by believing the Texas law would really give juries the opportunity to juries to consider the “diverse frailties of humankind.” The Texas law, he thought, was going to turn out to be just as unwavering as the ‘mandatory’ laws his colleagues had voted to strike down.

In many ways, Rehnquist was proven right by history. Although Florida and Georgia’s laws also proved to have flaws, and the death penalty systems in those states were later challenged for arbitrariness and racial disparities, it was Texas that built the country’s dominant conveyor belt to death row. Texas prosecutors grew adept at using the future dangerousness question to scare jurors into handing out death sentences. They enlisted forensic psychiatrists—one with the nickname “ Dr. Death ”—to make scientifically bogus predictions that defendants would kill again if not sentenced to death.

In 1989, the Supreme Court finally ruled that the state’s law needed to be rewritten, and it was tweaked to allow juries to more fully consider mitigation evidence. But scholars have argued that the continuing emphasis on future dangerousness tends to push jurors away towards picking the death penalty. In 2013, the American Bar Association declared jurors could interpret the concept of future dangerousness “so broadly that a death sentence would be deemed warranted in virtually every capital murder case.” And LDF attorney Peggy Davis’ prediction about race bore out too: By 2000, seven cases had emerged in which an expert witness explicitly predicted that defendants would be dangerous because of their race.

Right after the court ruled, Amsterdam wrote up a request for the justices to reconsider their petitions. Such “petitions for rehearing” are seldom granted, but it was one more opportunity to argue that the Texas law was too harsh, and that Jurek had not been given a robust opportunity to present a case to spare his life. Davis pushed her boss to take this route. She had not slept well in the days after the decision. “Over and over again, during the last week I have thought: What kind of rehearing petition would I write if I represented only Jerry Lane Jurek?” she wrote to Amsterdam in a memo. “And every time I think about that I am troubled because I think that a much stronger attack on the Texas statute could be made.” She thought the Texas law was “unconscionably mandatory” and would not allow a jury to consider the “diverse frailties of humankind” mentioned by the court. Amsterdam did write in his petition that the Texas law was “Draconian” and “forbids the consideration of any but the narrowest factors of mitigation,” but he didn’t fully separate the Jurek case from the others.

Shortly after Justice John Paul Stevens retired, in 2010, he gave an interview and said that after 35 years on the court, there was only a single decision he regretted: Jurek v. Texas. “I think upon reflection, we should have held the Texas statute...to fit under the mandatory category and be unconstitutional,” he told his former colleague Sandra Day O’Connor. “In my judgment we made a mistake on that case.”

Scholars were rough on Amsterdam, calling his legal strategy “ a cautionary tale about cause lawyering ” and his attitude “ tone deaf to the changing tune of the country .” Executions resumed in 1977, ending a decade-long hiatus brought about by the legal battles.

But Davis did not need to worry: Jurek survived. Even after she left the LDF, in 1977, the organization kept fighting his case. A couple of years later, judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that his confessions could not have been truly voluntary, especially because Jurek’s “verbal intelligence is limited” and he was “less likely to be able to understand his right to remain silent.” His death sentence was thrown out, and the same year lethal injections began, in 1982, he pled guilty in exchange for a life sentence.

Though his name was attached to one of the most significant moments in the country’s legal history, Jerry Jurek began living out his quiet life in a Texas prison. As his hair turned gray and wispy, he continued to slick it back into the style of his youth. He worked in a prison kitchen—avoiding the dayroom because the televisions and loud fans and shouting prisoners stressed him out—talked to his cellmate, and wrote letters with doodles of cartoon dogs along the bottom of the page. He spoke with a clipped, wised-up drawl, though his mind had departed significantly from reality. “Mine is the one that got everyone off death row,” he recalled incorrectly, during a 2015 interview. He maintained that he was totally innocent of killing Wendy Adams, and was the victim of a conspiracy between his lawyers and multiple local authorities. He said there is a missing document that will prove it, if only someone will go find it in a town called “Eldorado.” “If everything goes right,” he said, “I might be out of here pretty soon.”

Every so often, Jurek would come up for parole, and Brandi Adams Garza, his victim’s little sister, would write a letter to the parole board describing the toll the murder took on her family; her father quit his job as a police officer, and her mother suffered a mental breakdown. “I think that the death penalty was appropriate to start with and, had it been followed through with,” Garza told the Victoria Advocate , “it would have eliminated a lot of stress on my dad, my family, myself, my brother.”

As the death penalty system ground into motion in the late 1970s, the LDF realized its work was only beginning. Every case would now be a smaller battle in a bigger war of attrition. Hundreds of men and women sentenced to death would need lawyers to attack those sentences one by one and stave off execution. Sometimes, their cases would end up back at the Supreme Court, which would be tasked with deciding not whether the death penalty as a whole was constitutional, but rather whether one element of a trial violated a defendant’s rights. The court would go on to rule in ways that both helped and hurt death row prisoners, but the overall effect would be to further entrench the punishment.

There would be a lot of relationships like the one between lawyer Davis and client Jurek. Often the racial dynamic would be flipped, with White lawyers and Black clients. The lawyers would develop arguments and study arcane legal precedents while their clients sat in death row cells for years and years, waiting for the day they might lose their cases and their lives. And what haunted Peggy Davis would haunt the many lawyers who would come after her. They would wonder, as she had wondered: What else could be done?

Adapted from “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty,” published by Crown on Jan. 26, 2021.

Rachel Siegel contributed reporting.

Excerpt has been updated to reflect that while the Legal Defense Fund is an outgrowth of the NAACP, it had become a separate organization by the time of the events.

Our reporting has real impact on the criminal justice system

Our journalism establishes facts, exposes failures and examines solutions for a criminal justice system in crisis. If you believe in what we do, become a member today.

Maurice Chammah Twitter Email is a staff writer whose book, “ Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty ”, won the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Book Award. A former Fulbright and H.F. Guggenheim fellow, he has reported on a range of criminal justice subjects, including jail conditions, sheriffs, wrongful convictions, and art by incarcerated people.

Stay up to date on our reporting and analysis.

• Follow us on Facebook
• Follow us on Twitter
• Criminal Justice
• Environment
• Politics & Government
• Race & Gender

Expert Commentary

The research on capital punishment: Recent scholarship and unresolved questions

2014 review of research on capital punishment, including studies that attempt to quantify rates of innocence and the potential deterrence effect on crime.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Alexandra Raphel and John Wihbey, The Journalist's Resource January 5, 2015

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/criminal-justice/research-capital-punishment-key-recent-studies/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Over the past year the death penalty has again come into focus as a major public policy and political issue, catalyzed by several high-profile events.

The botched execution of convicted murderer and rapist Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in 2014 was seen as a potential turning point in the debate, bringing increased attention to the mechanisms by which persons are executed. That was followed by a number of other closely scrutinized cases, and the year ended with few executions relative to years past. On December 31, 2014, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley commuted the sentences of the remaining four prisoners on death row in that state. In 2013, Maryland became the 18th state to abolish the death penalty after Connecticut in 2012 and New Mexico in 2009.

Meanwhile, polling data suggests some softening of public attitudes, though the majority Americans continue to support capital punishment. Gallop noted in October 2014 that the level of public support (60%) is at its lowest in 40 years. A Washington Post -ABC News poll in mid-2014 found that more Americans support life sentences, rather than the death penalty, for convicted murderers. Further, recent polls from the Pew Research Center indicate that only a bare majority of Americans now support capital punishment, 55%, down from 78% in 1996.

Scholarly research sheds light on a number of important aspects of this issue:

False convictions

One key reason for the contentious debate is the concern that states are executing innocent people. How many people are unjustly facing the death penalty? By definition, it is difficult to obtain a reliable answer to this question. Presumably if judges, juries, and law enforcement were always able to conclusively determine who was innocent, those defendants would simply not be convicted in the first place. When capital punishment is the sentence, however, this issue takes on new importance.

Some believe that when it comes to death-penalty cases, this is not a huge cause for concern. In his concurrent opinion in the 2006 Supreme Court case Kansas v. Marsh , Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that the execution error rate was minimal, around 0.027%. However, a 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the figure could be higher. Authors Samuel Gross (University of Michigan Law School), Barbara O’Brien (Michigan State University College of Law), Chen Hu (American College of Radiology) and Edward H. Kennedy (University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine) examine data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Justice relating to exonerations from 1973 to 2004 in an attempt to estimate the rate of false convictions among death row defendants. (Determining innocence with full certainty is an obvious challenge, so as a proxy they use exoneration — “an official determination that a convicted defendant is no longer legally culpable for the crime.”) In short, the researchers ask: If all death row prisoners were to remain under this sentence indefinitely, how many of them would have eventually been found innocent (exonerated)?

Interestingly, the authors also note that advances in DNA identification technology are unlikely to have a large impact on false conviction rates because DNA evidence is most often used in cases of rape rather than homicide. To date, only about 13% of death row exonerations were the result of DNA testing. The Innocence Project , a litigation and public policy organization founded in 1992, has been deeply involved in many such cases.

Death penalty deterrence effects: What do we know?

A chief way proponents of capital punishment defend the practice is the idea that the death penalty deters other people from committing future crimes. For example, research conducted by John J. Donohue III (Yale Law School) and Justin Wolfers (University of Pennsylvania) applies economic theory to the issue: If people act as rational maximizers of their profits or well-being, perhaps there is reason to believe that the most severe of punishments would serve as a deterrent. (The findings of their 2009 study on this issue, “Estimating the Impact of the Death Penalty on Murder,” are inconclusive.) In contrast, one could also imagine a scenario in which capital punishment leads to an increased homicide rate because of a broader perception that the state devalues human life. It could also be possible that the death penalty has no effect at all because information about executions is not diffused in a way that influences future behavior.

In 1978 — two years after the Supreme Court issued its decision reversing a previous ban on the death penalty ( Gregg v. Georgia ) — the National Research Council (NRC) published a comprehensive review of the current research on capital punishment to determine whether one of these hypotheses was more empirically supported than the others. The NRC concluded that “available studies provide no useful evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment.”

Researchers have subsequently used a number of methods in an effort to get closer to an accurate estimate of the deterrence effect of the death penalty. Many of the studies have reached conflicting conclusions, however. To conduct an updated review, the NRC formed the Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty, comprised of academics from economics departments and public policy schools from institutions around the country, including the Carnegie Mellon University, University of Chicago and Duke University.

In 2012, the Committee published an updated report that concluded that not much had changed in recent decades: “Research conducted in the 30 years since the earlier NRC report has not sufficiently advanced knowledge to allow a conclusion, however qualified, about the effect of the death penalty on homicide rates.” The report goes on to recommend that none of the reviewed reports be used to influence public policy decisions on the death penalty.

Why has the research not been able to provide any definitive answers about the impact of the death penalty? One general challenge is that when it comes to capital punishment, a counter-factual policy is simply not observable. You cannot simultaneously execute and not execute defendants, making it difficult to isolate the impact of the death penalty. The Committee also highlights a number of key flaws in the research designs:

• There are both capital and non-capital punishment options for people charged with serious crimes. So, the relevant question on the deterrent effect of capital punishment specifically “is the differential deterrent effect of execution in comparison with the deterrent effect of other available or commonly used penalties.” None of the studies reviewed by the Committee took into account these severe, but noncapital punishments, which could also have an effect on future behaviors and could confound the estimated deterrence effect of capital punishment.
• “They use incomplete or implausible models of potential murderers’ perceptions of and response to the capital punishment component of a sanction regime”
• “The existing studies use strong and unverifiable assumptions to identify the effects of capital punishment on homicides.”

In a 2012 study, “Deterrence and the Dealth Penalty: Partial Identificaiton Analysis Using Repeated Cross Sections,” authors Charles F. Manski (Northwestern University) and John V. Pepper (University of Virginia) focus on the third challenge. They note: “Data alone cannot reveal what the homicide rate in a state without (with) a death penalty would have been had the state (not) adopted a death penalty statute. Here, as always when analyzing treatment response, data must be combined with assumptions to enable inference on counterfactual outcomes.”

However, even though the authors do not arrive at a definitive conclusion, the National Research Council Committee notes that this type of research holds some value: “Rather than imposing the strong but unsupported assumptions required to identify the effect of capital punishment on homicides in a single model or an ad hoc set of similar models, approaches that explicitly account for model uncertainty may provide a constructive way for research to provide credible albeit incomplete answers.”

Another strategy researchers have taken is to limit the focus of studies on potential short-term effects of the death penalty. In a 2009 paper, “The Short-Term Effects of Executions on Homicides: Deterrence, Displacement, or Both?” authors Kenneth C. Land and Hui Zheng of Duke University, along with Raymond Teske Jr. of Sam Houston State University, examine monthly execution data (1980-2005) from Texas, “a state that has used the death penalty with sufficient frequency to make possible relatively stable estimates of the homicide response to executions.” They conclude that “evidence exists of modest, short-term reductions in the numbers of homicides in Texas in the months of or after executions.” Depending on which model they use, these deterrent effects range from 1.6 to 2.5 homicides.

The NRC’s Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty commented on the findings, explaining: “Land, Teske and Zheng (2009) should be commended for distinguishing between periods in Texas when the use of capital punishment appears to have been erratic and when it appears to have been systematic. But they fail to integrate this distinction into a coherently delineated behavioral model that incorporates sanctions regimes, salience, and deterrence. And, as explained above, their claims of evidence of deterrence in the systematic regime are flawed.”

A more recent paper (2012) from the three authors, “The Differential Short-Term Impacts of Executions on Felony and Non-Felony Homicides,” addresses some of these concerns. Published in Criminology and Public Policy , the paper reviews and updates some of their earlier findings by exploring “what information can be gained by disaggregating the homicide data into those homicides committed in the course of another felony crime, which are subject to capital punishment, and those committed otherwise.” The results produce a number of different findings and models, including that “the short-lived deterrence effect of executions is concentrated among non-felony-type homicides.”

Other factors to consider

The question of what kinds of “mitigating” factors should prevent the criminal justice system from moving forward with an execution remains hotly disputed. A 2014 paper published in the Hastings Law Journal , “The Failure of Mitigation?” by scholars at the University of North Carolina and DePaul University, investigates recent executions of persons with possible mental or intellectual disabilities. The authors reviewed 100 cases and conclude that the “overwhelming majority of executed offenders suffered from intellectual impairments, were barely into adulthood, wrestled with severe mental illness, or endured profound childhood trauma.”

Two significant recommendations for reforming the existing process also are supported by some academic research. A 2010 study by Pepperdine University School of Law published in Temple Law Review , “Unpredictable Doom and Lethal Injustice: An Argument for Greater Transparency in Death Penalty Decisions,” surveyed the decision-making process among various state prosecutors. At the request of a state commission, the authors first surveyed California district attorneys; they also examined data from the other 36 states that have the death penalty. The authors found that prosecutors’ capital punishment filing decisions remain marked by local “idiosyncrasies,” meaning that “the very types of unfairness that the Supreme Court sought to eliminate” beginning in 1972 may still “infect capital cases.” They encourage “requiring prosecutors to adhere to an established set of guidelines.” Finally, there has been growing support for taping interrogations of suspects in capital cases, so as to guard against the phenomenon of false confessions .

Related reading: For an international perspective on capital punishment, see Amnesty International’s 2013 report ; for more information on the evolution of U.S. public opinion on the death penalty, see historical trends from Gallup .

Keywords: crime, prisons, death penalty, capital punishment

About the Authors

Alexandra Raphel

John Wihbey

Read our research on: Abortion | Podcasts | Election 2024

Regions & Countries

Most americans favor the death penalty despite concerns about its administration, 78% say there is some risk of innocent people being put to death.

Pew Research Center conducted this study to better understand Americans’ views about the death penalty. For this analysis, we surveyed 5,109 U.S. adults from April 5 to 11, 2021. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses, and its methodology .

The use of the death penalty is gradually disappearing in the United States. Last year, in part because of the coronavirus outbreak, fewer people were executed than in any year in nearly three decades .

Yet the death penalty for people convicted of murder continues to draw support from a majority of Americans despite widespread doubts about its administration, fairness and whether it deters serious crimes.

More Americans favor than oppose the death penalty: 60% of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, including 27% who strongly favor it. About four-in-ten (39%) oppose the death penalty, with 15% strongly opposed, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

The survey, conducted April 5-11 among 5,109 U.S. adults on the Center’s American Trends Panel, finds that support for the death penalty is 5 percentage points lower than it was in August 2020, when 65% said they favored the death penalty for people convicted of murder.

While public support for the death penalty has changed only modestly in recent years, support for the death penalty declined substantially between the late 1990s and the 2010s. (See “Death penalty draws more Americans’ support online than in telephone surveys” for more on long-term measures and the challenge of comparing views across different survey modes.)

Large shares of Americans express concerns over how the death penalty is administered and are skeptical about whether it deters people from committing serious crimes.

Nearly eight-in-ten (78%) say there is some risk that an innocent person will be put to death, while only 21% think there are adequate safeguards in place to prevent that from happening. Only 30% of death penalty supporters – and just 6% of opponents – say adequate safeguards exist to prevent innocent people from being executed.

A majority of Americans (56%) say Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to the death penalty for being convicted of serious crimes. This view is particularly widespread among Black adults: 85% of Black adults say Black people are more likely than Whites to receive the death penalty for being convicted of similar crimes (61% of Hispanic adults and 49% of White adults say this).

Moreover, more than six-in-ten Americans (63%), including about half of death penalty supporters (48%), say the death penalty does not deter people from committing serious crimes.

Yet support for the death penalty is strongly associated with a belief that when someone commits murder, the death penalty is morally justified. Among the public overall, 64% say the death penalty is morally justified in cases of murder, while 33% say it is not justified. An overwhelming share of death penalty supporters (90%) say it is morally justified under such circumstances, compared with 25% of death penalty opponents.

The data in the most recent survey, collected from Pew Research Center’s online American Trends Panel (ATP) , finds that 60% of Americans favor the death penalty for persons convicted of murder. Over four ATP surveys conducted since September 2019, there have been relatively modest shifts in these views – from a low of 60% seen in the most recent survey to a high of 65% seen in September 2019 and August 2020.

In Pew Research Center phone surveys conducted between September 2019 and August 2020 (with field periods nearly identical to the online surveys), support for the death penalty was significantly lower: 55% favored the death penalty in September 2019, 53% in January 2020 and 52% in August 2020. The consistency of this difference points to substantial mode effects on this question. As a result, survey results from recent online surveys are not directly comparable with past years’ telephone survey trends. A post accompanying this report provides further detail and analysis of the mode differences seen on this question. And for more on mode effects and the transition from telephone surveys to online panel surveys, see “What our transition to online polling means for decades of phone survey trends” and “Trends are a cornerstone of public opinion research. How do we continue to track changes in public opinion when there’s a shift in survey mode?”

Partisanship continues to be a major factor in support for the death penalty and opinions about its administration. Just over three-quarters of Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party (77%) say they favor the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, including 40% who strongly favor it.

Democrats and Democratic leaners are more divided on this issue: 46% favor the death penalty, while 53% are opposed. About a quarter of Democrats (23%) strongly oppose the death penalty, compared with 17% who strongly favor it.

Over the past two years, the share of Republicans who say they favor the death penalty for persons convicted of murder has decreased slightly – by 7 percentage points – while the share of Democrats who say this is essentially unchanged (46% today vs. 49% in 2019).

Republicans and Democrats also differ over whether the death penalty is morally justified, whether it acts as a deterrent to serious crime and whether adequate safeguards exist to ensure that no innocent person is put to death. Republicans are 29 percentage points more likely than Democrats to say the death penalty is morally justified, 28 points more likely to say it deters serious crimes, and 19 points more likely to say that adequate safeguards exist.

But the widest partisan divide – wider than differences in opinions about the death penalty itself – is over whether White people and Black people are equally likely to be sentenced to the death penalty for committing similar crimes.

About seven-in-ten Republicans (72%) say that White people and Black people are equally likely to be sentenced to death for the same types of crimes. Only 15% of Democrats say this. More than eight-in-ten Democrats (83%) instead say that Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to the death penalty for committing similar crimes.

Differing views of death penalty by race and ethnicity, education, ideology

There are wide ideological differences within both parties on this issue. Among Democrats, a 55% majority of conservatives and moderates favor the death penalty, a position held by just 36% of liberal Democrats (64% of liberal Democrats oppose the death penalty). A third of liberal Democrats strongly oppose the death penalty, compared with just 14% of conservatives and moderates.

While conservative Republicans are more likely to express support for the death penalty than moderate and liberal Republicans, clear majorities of both groups favor the death penalty (82% of conservative Republicans and 68% of moderate and liberal Republicans).

As in the past, support for the death penalty differs across racial and ethnic groups. Majorities of White (63%), Asian (63%) and Hispanic adults (56%) favor the death penalty for persons convicted of murder. Black adults are evenly divided: 49% favor the death penalty, while an identical share oppose it.

Support for the death penalty also varies across age groups. About half of those ages 18 to 29 (51%) favor the death penalty, compared with about six-in-ten adults ages 30 to 49 (58%) and those 65 and older (60%). Adults ages 50 to 64 are most supportive of the death penalty, with 69% in favor.

There are differences in attitudes by education, as well. Nearly seven-in-ten adults (68%) who have not attended college favor the death penalty, as do 63% of those who have some college experience but no degree.

About half of those with four-year undergraduate degrees but no postgraduate experience (49%) support the death penalty. Among those with postgraduate degrees, a larger share say they oppose (55%) than favor (44%) the death penalty.

The divide in support for the death penalty between those with and without college degrees is seen across racial and ethnic groups, though the size of this gap varies. A large majority of White adults without college degrees (72%) favor the death penalty, compared with about half (47%) of White adults who have degrees. Among Black adults, 53% of those without college degrees favor the death penalty, compared with 34% of those with college degrees. And while a majority of Hispanic adults without college degrees (58%) say they favor the death penalty, a smaller share (47%) of those with college degrees say this.

Intraparty differences in support for the death penalty

Republicans are consistently more likely than Democrats to favor the death penalty, though there are divisions within each party by age as well as by race and ethnicity.

Republicans ages 18 to 34 are less likely than other Republicans to say they favor the death penalty. Just over six-in-ten Republicans in this age group (64%) say this, compared with about eight-in-ten Republicans ages 35 and older.

Among Democrats, adults ages 50 to 64 are much more likely than adults in other age groups to favor the death penalty. A 58% majority of 50- to 64-year-old Democrats favor the death penalty, compared with 47% of those ages 35 to 49 and about four-in-ten Democrats who are 18 to 34 or 65 and older.

Overall, White adults are more likely to favor the death penalty than Black or Hispanic adults, while White and Asian American adults are equally likely to favor the death penalty. However, White Democrats are less likely to favor the death penalty than Black, Hispanic or Asian Democrats. About half of Hispanic (53%), Asian (53%) and Black (48%) Democrats favor the death penalty, compared with 42% of White Democrats.

About eight-in-ten White Republicans favor the death penalty, as do about seven-in-ten Hispanic Republicans (69%).

Differences by race and ethnicity, education over whether there are racial disparities in death penalty sentencing

There are substantial demographic differences in views of whether death sentencing is applied fairly across racial groups. While 85% of Black adults say Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to death for committing similar crimes, a narrower majority of Hispanic adults (61%) and about half of White adults (49%) say the same. People with four-year college degrees (68%) also are more likely than those who have not completed college (50%) to say that Black people and White people are treated differently when it comes to the death penalty.

About eight-in-ten Democrats (83%), including fully 94% of liberal Democrats and three-quarters of conservative and moderate Democrats, say Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to death for committing the same type of crime – a view shared by just 25% of Republicans (18% of conservative Republicans and 38% of moderate and liberal Republicans).

Across educational and racial or ethnic groups, majorities say that the death penalty does not deter serious crimes, although there are differences in how widely this view is held. About seven-in-ten (69%) of those with college degrees say this, as do about six-in-ten (59%) of those without college degrees. About seven-in-ten Black adults (72%) and narrower majorities of White (62%) and Hispanic (63%) adults say the same. Asian American adults are more divided, with half saying the death penalty deters serious crimes and a similar share (49%) saying it does not.

Among Republicans, a narrow majority of conservative Republicans (56%) say the death penalty does deter serious crimes, while a similar share of moderate and liberal Republicans (57%) say it does not.

A large majority of liberal Democrats (82%) and a smaller, though still substantial, majority of conservative and moderate Democrats (70%) say the death penalty does not deter serious crimes. But Democrats are divided over whether the death penalty is morally justified. A majority of conservative and moderate Democrats (57%) say that a death sentence is morally justified when someone commits a crime like murder, compared with fewer than half of liberal Democrats (44%).

There is widespread agreement on one topic related to the death penalty: Nearly eight-in-ten (78%) say that there is some risk an innocent person will be put to death, including large majorities among various racial or ethnic, educational, and even ideological groups. For example, about two-thirds of conservative Republicans (65%) say this – compared with 34% who say there are adequate safeguards to ensure that no innocent person will be executed – despite conservative Republicans expressing quite favorable attitudes toward the death penalty on other questions.

Overwhelming share of death penalty supporters say it is morally justified

Those who favor the death penalty consistently express more favorable attitudes regarding specific aspects of the death penalty than those who oppose it.

For instance, nine-in-ten of those who favor the death penalty also say that the death penalty is morally justified when someone commits a crime like murder. Just 25% of those who oppose the death penalty say it is morally justified.

This relationship holds among members of each party. Among Republicans and Republican leaners who favor the death penalty, 94% say it is morally justified; 86% of Democrats and Democratic leaners who favor the death penalty also say this.

By comparison, just 35% of Republicans and 21% of Democrats who oppose the death penalty say it is morally justified.

Similarly, those who favor the death penalty are more likely to say it deters people from committing serious crimes. Half of those who favor the death penalty say this, compared with 13% of those who oppose it. And even though large majorities of both groups say there is some risk an innocent person will be put to death, members of the public who favor the death penalty are 24 percentage points more likely to say that there are adequate safeguards to prevent this than Americans who oppose the death penalty.

On the question of whether Black people and White people are equally likely to be sentenced to death for committing similar crimes, partisanship is more strongly associated with these views than one’s overall support for the death penalty: Republicans who oppose the death penalty are more likely than Democrats who favor it to say White people and Black people are equally likely to be sentenced to death.

Among Republicans who favor the death penalty, 78% say that Black and White people are equally likely to receive this sentence. Among Republicans who oppose the death penalty, about half (53%) say this. However, just 26% of Democrats who favor the death penalty say that Black and White people are equally likely to receive this sentence, and only 6% of Democrats who oppose the death penalty say this.

CORRECTION (July 13, 2021): The following sentence was updated to reflect the correct timespan: “Last year, in part because of the coronavirus outbreak, fewer people were executed than in any year in nearly three decades.” The changes did not affect the report’s substantive findings.

Sign up for our Politics newsletter

Sent weekly on Wednesday

Report Materials

Table of contents, 10 facts about the death penalty in the u.s., death penalty draws more americans’ support online than in telephone surveys, california is one of 11 states that have the death penalty but haven’t used it in more than a decade, public support for the death penalty ticks up, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

March 19, 2024

Evidence Does Not Support the Use of the Death Penalty

Capital punishment must come to an end. It does not deter crime, is not humane and has no moral or medical basis

By The Editors

A death penalty vigil, held in 2021 outside an Indiana penitentiary.

Bryan Woolston/Reuters/Redux

It is long past time to abolish the death penalty in the U.S.

Capital punishment was halted in the U.S. in 1972 but reinstated in 1976, and since then, nearly 1,600 people have been executed. To whose gain? Study after study shows that the death penalty does not deter crime, puts innocent people to death , is racially biased , and is cruel and inhumane. It is state-sanctioned homicide, wholly ineffective, often botched, and a much more expensive punishment than life imprisonment. There is no ethical, scientifically supported, medically acceptable or morally justifiable way to carry it out.

The recent execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith demonstrates this barbarity. After a failed attempt at lethal injection by prison officials seemingly inexperienced in the placement of an IV, the state of Alabama killed Smith in January using nitrogen gas . The Alabama attorney general claimed that this method of execution was fast and humane , despite no supporting evidence. Eyewitnesses recounted that Smith thrashed during the nitrogen administration and took more than 20 minutes to die.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Opposition to the death penalty is growing among the American public , and the Biden administration must follow through on its promise to end this horror. The Department of Justice must heed its own admission that the death penalty doesn’t stop crime, and our legislators must continue to take up the issue on the congressional floor. The few states that still condemn people to death must follow the lead of states that have considered the evidence and rejected capital punishment.

Programs such as the Innocence Project have shown, over and over, that innocent people have been sentenced to death. Since 1973 nearly 200 people on death row have been exonerated, based on appeals, the reopening of cases, and the entrance of new and sometimes previously suppressed evidence. People have recanted testimony, and supposedly airtight cases have been poked full of evidentiary holes.

Through the death penalty, the criminal justice system has killed at least 20 people now believed to have been innocent and uncounted others whose cases have not been reexamined . Too many of these victims have been Black or Hispanic. This is not justice. These are state-sanctioned hate crimes.

Using rigorous statistical and experimental control methods, both economics and criminal justice studies have consistently found that there is no evidence for deterrence of violent crimes in states that allow capital punishment. One such study, a 2009 paper by criminology researchers at the University of Dallas, outlines experimental and statistical flaws in econometrics-based death penalty studies that claim to find a correlated reduction in violent crime. The death penalty does not stop people from killing. Executions don’t make us safer.

The methods used to kill prisoners are inhumane. Electrocution fails , causing significant pain and suffering. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist who criticizes the use of medicines in carrying out the death penalty, has found (at the request of lawyers of death row inmates) that the lungs of prisoners who were killed by lethal injection were often heavy with fluid and froth that suggested they were struggling to breathe and felt like they were drowning. Nitrogen gas is used in some veterinary euthanasia, but based in part on the behavior of rats in its presence, it is “unacceptable” for mammals , according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. This means that Smith, as his lawyers claimed in efforts to stop his execution, became a human subject in an immoral experiment.

Courts have often decided, against the abundant evidence, that these killings are constitutional and do not fall under the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the 8th Amendment or, in Smith’s appeal , both the 8th Amendment and the due process protection clause of the 14th amendment.

A small number of prosecutors and judges in a few states, mostly in the South, are responsible for most of the death sentences being handed down in the U.S. today. It’s a power they should not be able to wield. Smith was sentenced to life in prison by a jury before the judge in his case overruled the jury and gave him the death sentence.

A furious urge for vengeance against those who have done wrong—or those we think have done wrong—is the biggest motivation for the death penalty. But this desire for violent retribution is the very impulse that our criminal justice system is made to check, not abet. Elected officials need to reform this aspect of our justice system at both the state and federal levels. Capital punishment does not stop crime and mocks both justice and humanity. The death penalty in the U.S. must come to an end.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American .

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

More than a third of executions in 2022 were 'botched,' a report finds

Juliana Kim

A Texas death chamber located in Huntsville, TX. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide caption

A Texas death chamber located in Huntsville, TX.

Earlier this year, Arizona executioners struggled to insert an IV line into a man on death row, and had to be guided by the prisoner himself on how to do so. And in Alabama, the execution team reportedly struggled for hours to find a vein.

These cases were among seven botched execution attempts recorded in 2022. Death penalty researchers found that mishandled incidents made up more than a third of the total number of execution attempts — a record high even as capital punishment in the U.S. remain near a 30-year low.

Investigations

Gasping for air: autopsies reveal troubling effects of lethal injection.

"The country is moving away from the death penalty at the national level, while the states that are insistent on carrying out executions have been engaging in more and more extreme conduct in trying to do so," Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told NPR.

He also called the record number of botched execution attempts "conservative" because the dataset was limited to incidents in which the prisoner was inside the execution chamber.

"There were a number of executions that were called off even before they got to the execution because of failures to comply with the state protocol," Dunham said.

IV insertion is a common problem with lethal injection

This year, 18 people were executed in Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Alabama, Missouri and Mississippi — all by lethal injection. Many of the difficulties this year were related to difficulty inserting an IV line.

"Lethal injection looks like a medical procedure, but it's not a medical procedure," Dunham said.

While most states permit for a physician to participate in an execution, every medical association says it is unethical to do so. As a result, it is prison personnel who administer the lethal drug. According to Dunham, executioners' lack of a medical background is among the reasons that lethal injection can be problematic.

Carrying out executions took a secret toll on workers — then changed their politics

The training that executioners receive is another issue. Some are given prosthetic arms to practice with, but those fail to capture the complexity of the human body, Dunham said.

Another reason why it may be difficult for staff to find a prisoners' vein is that people on death row disproportionately have health problems.

"The health of the individuals who are being scheduled for execution is worse. And stress affects health. Stress affects the accessibility to prisoners' veins," Dunham added.

More states are reckoning with lethal injection flaws

As of now, 37 states have abolished the death penalty or have not carried out an execution in over a decade.

Last week, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown ordered for the state execution chamber to be dismantled, after commuting sentences of all 17 people on Oregon's death row.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown explains why she commuted all of her state's death sentences

Meanwhile, Alabama and Tennessee have both conducted reviews on its execution protocols after incidents of procedural errors that led to executions being called off or postponed.

The next execution nationwide is scheduled for Jan. 3 in Missouri. Amber McLaughlin, who is on death row after being found guilty of killing an ex-girlfriend, is expected to be the first openly transgender woman to be executed.

DEATH PENALTY

We know that, together, we can end the death penalty everywhere., every day, people are executed and sentenced to death by the state as punishment for a variety of crimes – sometimes for acts that should not be criminalized. in some countries, it can be for drug-related offences, in others it is reserved for terrorism-related acts and murder..

Some countries execute people who were  under the age of 18  when the crime for which they have been convicted was committed, others use the death penalty against people with mental and intellectual disabilities and several others apply the death penalty after unfair trials – in clear violation of international law and standards. People can spend years on death row, not knowing when their time is up, or whether they will see their families one last time.

The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception – regardless of who is accused, the nature or circumstances of the crime, guilt or innocence or method of execution .

About the death penalty

Amnesty International holds that the death penalty breaches human rights, in particular the right to life and the right to live free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Both rights are protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , adopted by the UN in 1948.

Over time, the international community has adopted several instruments that ban the use of the death penalty, including the following:

• The Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty.
• Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights, concerning the abolition of the death penalty, and Protocol No. 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights, concerning the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances.
• The Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Although international law says that the use of the death penalty must be restricted to the most serious crimes, meaning intentional killing, Amnesty International believes that the death penalty is never the answer.

Amnesty International has never felt more hopeful that this abhorrent punishment can and will be relegated to the annals of history Agnès Callamard, Secretary General, Amnesty International

Juvenile Executions

The use of the death penalty for crimes committed by people younger than 18 is prohibited under international human rights law, yet some countries still resort to the death penalty in these situations. Such executions are few compared to the total number of executions recorded by Amnesty International each year.

However, their significance goes beyond their number and calls into question the commitment of the executing states to respect international law.

Since 1990 Amnesty International has documented at least 163 executions of people who were below the age of 18, in 10 countries: China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Sudan, the USA and Yemen.

Several of these countries have changed their laws to exclude the practice. Iran has executed more than twice as many people who were below the age of 18 at the time of the crime as the other nine countries combined. At the time of writing Iran has executed at least 113 of them since 1990.

Execution Methods used in 2022

• Lethal injection

Where do most executions take place?

In 2022, most known executions took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the USA – in that order.

China remained the world’s leading executioner  – but the true extent of its use of the death penalty is unknown as this data is classified as a state secret; the global figure of at least  883  excludes the thousands of executions believed to have been carried out there.

Excluding China, 90% of all reported executions took place in just three countries – Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The global view: death sentences and executions 2008-2022

*This map indicates the general locations of boundaries and jurisdictions and should not be interpreted as Amnesty International’s view on disputed territories.

**Country names listed reflect nomenclature in May 2023

How many death sentences and executions take place each year?

Death sentences.

Amnesty International recorded at least 2,016 death sentences in 52 countries in 2022, a slight decrease from the total of 2,052 reported in 2021. At least 28,282 people were known to be under sentence of death globally at the end of 2022.

Amnesty International recorded at least 883 executions in 20 countries in 2022, up by 53% from 2021 (at least 579 executions).

Reasons to abolish the death penalty

It is irreversible and mistakes happen.

Execution is the ultimate, irrevocable punishment: the risk of executing an innocent person can never be eliminated. Since 1973, for example, more than 191 prisoners sent to death row in the USA have later been exonerated or released from death row on grounds of innocence. Others have been executed despite serious doubts about their guilt.

It does not deter crime

Countries who execute commonly cite the death penalty as a way to deter people from committing crime. This claim has been repeatedly discredited, and there is no evidence that the death penalty is any more effective in reducing crime than life imprisonment.

It is often used within skewed justice systems

In many cases recorded by Amnesty International, people were executed after being convicted in grossly unfair trials, on the basis of torture-tainted evidence and with inadequate legal representation. In some countries death sentences are imposed as the mandatory punishment for certain offences, meaning that judges are not able to consider the circumstances of the crime or of the defendant before sentencing.

It is discriminatory

The weight of the death penalty is disproportionally carried by those with less advantaged socio-economic backgrounds or belonging to a racial, ethnic or religious minority. This includes having limited access to legal representation, for example, or being at greater disadvantage in their experience of the criminal justice system.

It is used as a political tool

The authorities in some countries, for example Iran and Sudan, use the death penalty to punish political opponents.

What is Amnesty International doing to abolish the death penalty?

For over 45 years, Amnesty International has been campaigning to abolish the death penalty around the world.

Amnesty International monitors its use by all states to expose and hold to account governments that continue to use the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.  We publish a report annually, reporting figures and analysing trends for each country . Amnesty International’s latest report, Death Sentences and Executions 2022 , was released in May 2023.

The organization’s work to oppose the death penalty takes many forms, including targeted, advocacy and campaign based projects in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia-Pacific, Americas and Europe and Central Asia , and Middle East and North Africa regions; strengthening national and international standards against its use, including by supporting the successful adoption of resolutions by the UN General Assembly on a moratorium on the use of the death penalty; and applying pressure on cases that face imminent execution. We also support actions and work by the abolitionist movement, at national, regional and global level.

When Amnesty International started its work in 1977, only 16 countries had totally abolished the death penalty. Today, that number has risen to 112 – more than half the world’s countries. More than two-thirds are abolitionist in law or practice.

Case Studies

Saved from death row: hafez ibrahim.

Thanks to Amnesty’s campaigning efforts, the execution of  Hafez Ibrahim , from Yemen, was stopped not once, but twice. Hafez, who was accused of a crime he insists he didn’t commit, first faced a firing squad in 2005. He was taken to a small yard in a Yemeni prison and brought before a row of officers with rifles in hand. He thought that moment would be his last.

Just before he was about to be shot, he was taken back to his cell, with no explanation. “I was lost, I did not understand what was happening. I later learned that Amnesty International had called on the Yemeni President to stop my execution and the message was heard,” Hafez said.

In 2007, Hafez was about to be executed again when he sent a mobile text message to Amnesty International. “They are about to execute us.” Hafez said.

It was a message that saved his life. The message sparked an international campaign, persuading the President to stop the execution for a second time.

Now Hafez is a lawyer helping juveniles who languish on death row corridors across Yemen.

Activists on a mission: Souleymane Sow

Amnesty International’s work to abolish the death penalty is also bolstered by its incredible activists, who take it upon themselves to campaign against this abhorrent practice.

Souleymane Sow ,  has been volunteering with Amnesty International since he was a student in France. Inspired to make a difference, he returned to Guinea, set up a local group of Amnesty International volunteers and got to work. Their aim? To promote the importance of human rights, educate people on these issues and abolish the death penalty in Guinea. Along with 34 NGOs, they finally achieved their goal in 2017.

“My colleagues and I lobbied against the death penalty every day for five months. In 2016, Guinea’s National Assembly voted in favour of a new criminal code which removed the death sentence from the list of applicable penalties.  Last year [2017], they did the same in the military court, too,” said Souleymane.

“It was the first time so many NGOs had come together to campaign on an issue. People said they were happy with our work and they could see that change is possible. Most of all, it inspired us to continue campaigning.” 

It was such an incredible achievement – and it showed the importance of people power. Souleymane Sow

Related Content

Drc: reinstating executions shows a callous disregard for human rights, afghanistan: taliban must halt all executions and abolish death penalty, yemen: huthis must stop executions and release dozens facing lgbti charges, zimbabwe: cabinet’s move to abolish death penalty marks progress, lawyer kacey keeton details problems with the criminal justice system in alabama.

Site Navigation

• Gary Graham
• Aileen Wuornos - NEW!
• Anthony Porter - NEW!
• Race and the Death Penalty
• Representation in Capital Cases
• Innocence and the Death Penalty
• Legal Remedies Available to Death Sentenced Individuals
• Mental Health and the Death Penalty
• Public Opinion and the Death Penalty
• The Death Penalty for Juveniles
• The Expansion of the Federal Death Penalty
• Racial and Geographical Disparities in the Federal Death Penalty
• Post-Conviction in Capital Cases
• International Law and Opinion

Media Influence in Capital Cases

• Mitigation in Capital Cases
• Prosecutorial Discretion
• Jury Instructions: What Jurors Understand
• General Resources
• Create new account
• Request new password
• Free Email Updates

Media Influence on Capital Cases

Pre-Trial Publicity Judicial Remedies Problems in Particularly High-Profile Cases Cameras in the Courtroom Publicity in the Aileen Wuornos Case Related Links

The media wields tremendous influence in our society. Newspapers, radio, television, and new media not only spread information, but also help to determine what topics and stories people talk about. Many crimes receive extensive media coverage, which provides a challenge for prosecutors, as well as defendants and defense attorneys, when it comes to trying a case. Juries are supposed to be unbiased when deciding a case, despite the news coverage they may have come across before trial. Police officers involved in criminal cases may become entangled with the media in the process of providing information about a case. Media coverage of a trial, especially television cameras in the courtroom, can affect the behavior of witnesses and jurors.

Pre-Trial Publicity

• Lim, Snyder, and Stromberg, "Measuring Media Influence on U.S. State Courts"
• Ogloff & Vidmar, "The Impact of Pretrial Publicity on Jurors," Law and Human Behavior, Vol. 18 No. 5, 1994
• Butler, "The Role of Death Qualification on Jurors' Susceptibility to Pretrial Publicity" (88.3KB PDF)
• Minow & Cate, "Who is an Impartial Juror in an Age of Mass Media?" (2.1MB PDF)
• Shahani, "CHANGE THE MOTION, NOT THE VENUE: A CRITICAL LOOK AT THE CHANGE OF VENUE MOTION," 42 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 93 2005
• Please register or login for free access to our collection of supplementary materials.

Under the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, every defendant is entitled to a trial by an impartial jury of his or her peers. Due to extensive media coverage, jury selection in a high profile case can be extremely difficult. Jurors will likely have developed some biases about the case based on the media coverage to which they have been exposed. The impartiality of potential jurors is assessed during voir dire, the process of selecting jurors from the pool of potential jurors. Attorneys for the defense and the prosecution question members of the jury pool about numerous issues, including their exposure to pre-trial publicity and their ability to make impartial decisions and follow the judge's instructions. Social science research has found that “exposure to the various media had a prejudicial impact on people, as they were unaware of their biases.” (Ogloff & Vidmar, 1994) Even potential jurors who say they have not been biased by exposure to publicity may in fact have been prejudiced. Jurors who say they cannot set aside their bias in a case, or cannot follow a judge's instructions, are eliminated "for cause." Other jurors can be eliminated by lawyers using "peremptory strikes" (or "peremptory challenges"), which allow each side to eliminate a certain number of jurors without cause.

Capital cases, in particular, often attract extensive, emotionally charged coverage. These cases also present greater difficulties than other cases because death-qualified jurors may be more susceptible to pre-trial publicity than other jurors. According to a 2007 study, participants who passed a simulated death-qualification process were more likely to recognize the facts of a highly-publicized murder case, and were significantly more likely than "excludable" jurors to think the defendant was guilty and that he should be sentenced to death. Researchers found two likely causes for these findings. First, death-qualified participants were more likely to watch daily news programs, making them more aware of the facts in the case. Second, death-qualified jurors in other studies have shown pro-prosecution beliefs, making them more inclined to find the defendant guilty. (Butler, 2007)

Research indicates that judges are also susceptible to media coverage when making their rulings. A Stanford University study found “press coverage magnifies the influence of voters’ penal preferences on criminal sentencing decisions” of elected judges for severe violent crimes. (Lim, Snyder & Stromberg, 2010) When a case receives a large amount of media coverage, elected judges tend to sentence more punitively than if the case is less publicized.

Little research has been done to date on the possible effects of social media on court cases. New media, such as blogs, facebook, or twitter, allow the public to share facts and opinions about court cases. These websites, as well as search engines like Google, present new challenges for defendants, attorneys, and judges. Information is more widely available than ever before, and potential jurors who may not come across a case in traditional media may be influenced by the reactions of others on social media sites.

Judicial Remedies

The problems caused by pre-trial publicity can be addressed by the court in a number of ways. Despite the biasing effect of pre-trial publicity, the Supreme Court has ruled that courts cannot stop the press from publicizing truthful information about criminal trials, as doing so would violate the First Amendment right to freedom of the press. Since pre-trial publicity cannot be prevented, courts must find ways to minimize its impact on the fairness of the trial.

The court may postpone trial proceedings in order to allow time for the initial publicity to dissipate. The judge can also modify jury instructions to specifically instruct jurors to ignore pre-trial publicity. However, these approaches may not be effective in eliminating juror bias.

If defense attorneys believe their client will be harmed by pre-trial publicity, they can request a change of venue, which moves the trial away from the jurisdiction where the crime occurred. Although the U.S. Constitution guarantees a trial in the district where the crime took place, the defendant can waive this right by filing a change of venue motion. While this strategy can counteract exposure to local media coverage, it does little to reduce the impact of national coverage. Moreover, change of venue motions are rarely granted, partly due to the high cost of transporting and housing attorneys, witnesses, and court personnel. Additionally, judges are hesitant to admit that a defendant can receive a fair trial only in another jurisdiction, and they may not want to "frustrate the local community's legitimate interests in resolving the case." (Minow & Cate, 1991) Statistics from the 1990s show that California courts granted only about 10 change of venue motions per year. (Shahani, 2005) The Supreme Court has held that, in certain cases, "only a change of venue [is] constitutionally sufficient to assure the kind of impartial jury that is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment." (Groppi v. Wisconsin)

Problems in Particularly High-Profile Cases

A handful of cases receive such high attention that those involved in the case stand to profit from books, movies, or television appearances. Such opportunities may create conflicts of interest and distort the ability of key players to perform their roles. As discussed below, the possibility of fame and profit affected police officers and attorneys involved in the Aileen Wuornos case. Similarly, Montgomery County, Maryland Police Chief Charles Moose came under fire for announcing, after the two "DC snipers" (John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo) were caught, that he was going to write a book on the crimes and sell the rights to his life story to a major motion picture company. As this presented a conflict of interest, Chief Moose ended up resigning to pursue his book and movie deals.

Cameras in the Courtroom

• CSPAN: Cameras in the Court

All trials in the United States are open to the public, but until recently, this meant only those people who could attend in person. Television broadcasts and internet streaming have greatly expanded the number of people who are able to watch a trial in progress, raising questions about how such widespread public scrutiny might alter the court proceedings.

Cameras and media attention may cause a witness to testify differently because they fear intimidation resulting from their exposure. For example, if a person witnessed a crime by a gang member, the gang could retaliate against the witness for testifying if the witness' identity were widely exposed to the public during trial. Jurors may be swayed knowing the world will be scrutinizing them and their decision, whatever it may be. For example, after a highly-publicized trial, aired entirely on television, a Florida jury acquitted Casey Anthony of the murder of her two-year-old daughter. The jury was then widely criticized in the media and online, leading the judge in the case to "seal" the names of jurors to protect their safety. Such potential impacts raise serious concerns about whether a defendant will receive a fair trial.

The Supreme Court of the United States has been divided on the issue of allowing cameras into their own courtroom. Justice David Souter strongly opposed the idea, saying that cameras would enter the courtroom “over my dead body.” However, the public is overwhelmingly in favor of having cameras broadcast Supreme Court proceedings on a network such as CSPAN, which already airs coverage of legislative deliberations. The Justices who have sat on the Supreme Court for a long time, such as Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Anthony Kennedy, oppose cameras because they fear cameras would reshape the institution of the Court by turning the proceedings into entertainment. Newer Justices like Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Samuel Alito seem more open to broadcasting the proceedings, believing it would provide more transparency and allow people to see a lesser-known governmental function operating at a sophisticated level.

Publicity in the Aileen Wuornos Case

• Keitner, "Victim or Vamp? Images of Violent Women in the Criminal Justice System"
• Wuornos Direct Appeal (9.4KB PDF)
• Aileen Wuornos: Selling of a Serial Killer (1994) (84 minute film, hulu.com)
• Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) (89 minute film, requires free account at hulu.com)

Pre-trial The media branded Aileen Wuornos as the first female serial killer in U.S. history, and turned this theme into the centerpiece of her trial coverage. Prosecutors jumped on this notion in making their case and trying to prove how dangerous she was. Television and tabloid coverage that made her out to be a “man-hating murderer” helped sway public opinion against her. The sex-role stereotypes constructed by the media allowed the prosecution to build its case around the fact that women typically do not commit violent crime, especially against strangers, making it easier for a jury to decide against her. (Keitner, Victim or Vamp, 2002)

Judicial Remedies Although Wuornos changed her story numerous times regarding what happened in each of the murders and whether she acted in self-defense, her claims of a media bias remained consistent. Before her initial trial, Wuornos requested a change of venue because of all the publicity her case had received; her request was denied. This issue was brought up again on appeal, but the appellate court found that “…parties were able to select jurors who all agreed that any pretrial publicity would not bias them and would not interfere with their ability to honor the trial court’s instructions." When Wuornos was asked by a reporter after the first trial concluded why she was found guilty, she claimed it was because of “media coverage” that was out to get her.

Problems in Particularly High-Profile Cases Another troubling aspect of this case was law enforcement’s involvement with the media. Three police officers were relieved of their duties because they had entered into deals to be part of a major motion picture being made about Wuornos. The officers claimed they were “moved to sell their version of the case by pure intentions,” planning to put the money in a victims compensation fund. This called into question the credibility of some of their testimony, which may have been influenced by the money they received for their role in the case and their subsequent movie deal.

It was later discovered that Wuornos’s lawyer, Steven Glazer, who lacked prior criminal law experience, took her case for self-promotion, as he knew how much media coverage the case was receiving. Assistant Public Defender Tricia Jenkins said, “[Glazer] told me he was only taking on the case because he needed the media exposure.” Glazer requested $25,000 in return for speaking to documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield and discussing Wuornos’ case with him. Wuornos had no money to pay him, so his compensation came from interviews. He failed to investigate the officers who were making money from their movie deal, and advised Wuornos to plead guilty to all of the charges because of his limited legal experience and the lack of resources at his disposal. Although there was little debate about Wuornos’ guilt, media coverage likely played a role in her receiving the death penalty for her crimes.

Questions for Further Analysis:

• Take another high-publicity case (DC sniper John Muhammad, O.J. Simpson, Timothy McVeigh or any other that interests you), find examples of the pre-trial publicity in that case, and analyze its potential effects.
• With all of the extensive media coverage today, especially in high-publicity cases, how can the court system find jurors who are uninformed about the case? Should finding people with no knowledge of the case be the goal? What are the drawbacks of a jury composed of such people? Are there other ways to eliminate, or at least reduce, juror bias?
• What are the arguments for and against having high-publicity cases decided by judges instead of juries?
• Should movie and TV deals be prohibited until after the case has been tried?
• How may law enforcement officials be affected in carrying out their duties by media coverage of a major case?

Related Links

Judge denies six motions in Wade Wilson case, who faces death penalty for 2019 murders

The motions challenged recent changes to death penalty recommendations by jurors; sought separate trials for the different charges; and sought to bar victim impact evidence at trial, among others..

A judge this month declined six attempts by a man charged with capital murder in the 2019 deaths of two women to avoid the death penalty and seek separate trials.

Lee Circuit Judge Nicholas Thompson between Jan. 11 and March 12 denied six motions filed in the capital murder case against Wade Wilson, 29, of Fort Myers.

Wilson is charged with the first-degree murder of Kristine Melton, 35; grand theft of Melton's car; battery on Melissa Montanez, 41; first-degree murder of Diane Ruiz, 43; burglary of a dwelling belonging to Kent Amlin or Fannie Amlin; and petty theft from Kent Amlin or Fannie Amlin.

Since January, Wilson has challenged recent changes to death penalty recommendations by jurors; sought separate trials for the different charges; sought to bar victim impact evidence at trial; and hoped three aggravating factors would be dismissed in his case, alleging unconstitutionality.

Melton and Ruiz were killed within days of each other in October 2019. Melton was found dead in her home; Ruiz’s body was found in a field days after her disappearance.

Wilson was indicted by a Lee County grand jury in November 2019. He has been at the Lee County Jail since October 2019.

Apprehended near Lakeland: Alva woman on lam facing DUI manslaughter trial apprehended near Lakeland, FHP says

State prosecutors have said in court documents that on Oct. 7, 2019, Wilson stole Melton's car after killing her and visited Montanez in Melton’s car and use Melton’s cellphone to contact Montanez.

After Wilson attacked Montanez, Gardiner said, he fled in Melton's car and encountered Ruiz in Cape Coral, where police say he killed her and repeatedly drove over her body using Melton's car.

Wilson then entered a nearby business, where he confessed the homicides to an acquaintance. When the acquaintance dialed 911, Wilson fled on foot and broke into a nearby home, leading to the latter two of the six charges.

Authorities found Ruiz's body in Melton's car, along with both women's cellphones, according to court documents.

Wilson has  at least twice  faced additional charges since his initial incarceration at the Lee County Jail for the 2019 homicides. In April of last year, he faced charges in a narcotics scheme.

In October 2020, Wilson, along with a man accused in a domestic violence case,  was thwarted in a bid  to escape Lee County Jail.

Wilson and his cellmate at the time, Joseph Katz, 33, were both involved, authorities said.

The sheriff's office report said Wilson was the primary planner and instigator of the attempt.

Wilson is next due in court April 29 for a motions hearing.

Tomas Rodriguez is a Breaking/Live News Reporter for the Naples Daily News and The News-Press. You can reach Tomas at [email protected] or 772-333-5501. Connect with him on Threads  @tomasfrobeltran , Instagram  @tomasfrobeltran  and Facebook  @tomasrodrigueznews .

This Oklahoma death row inmate had a novel reason for asking for an execution stay. He still lost

Death row inmate Michael DeWayne Smith on Monday lost his request for a stay of his execution.

Smith, 41, asked for the stay because of a proposed moratorium on the death penalty that is before the state Legislature.

He is set to be executed by lethal injection April 4 at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals voted 5-0 to deny his request.

"Petitioner's claim of harm is based solely upon speculation that House Bill 3138 will pass and become law," judges said. "Petitioner has failed to show a clear legal right to the relief requested."

Smith asked for the stay March 8, after the House Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee voted 4-0 to pass HB 3138. The moratorium, if it becomes law, would halt executions currently scheduled and prevent state courts from imposing new death penalty sentences.

"A stay ... until the resolution of this pending bill calling for a moratorium would protect Mr. Smith from the deprivation of his life and liberty and prevent a manifest injustice in the event that a moratorium on executions becomes effective just shortly after Mr. Smith's execution," his attorneys told the court in their emergency request.

Death penalty moratorium passes Oklahoma House committee, but it's unlikely to become law

Attorney General Gentner Drummond and an assistant told the court a request for that reason is barred by state law. They also pointed out that the bill's author, Rep, Kevin McDugle, R-Broken Arrow, "is very pessimistic about its chances."

The bill is not expected to even be heard on the House floor.

Smith faces execution for two 2002 murders. He claims he is innocent even though he confessed to police. His attorneys also claim he is intellectually disabled.

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 4-1 March 6 to deny him clemency.

Smith told the parole board he was hallucinating from his drug use when he confessed to police. "I didn't commit these crimes. I didn't kill these people. I was high on drugs," he said.

What to know about the case

Smith was convicted at trial  of first-degree murder for two fatal shootings in Oklahoma City on Feb. 22, 2002. Jurors agreed he should be executed for both deaths.

The first victim, Janet Moore, 40, was shot once at her apartment. The second victim, Sharath Babu Pulluru, 24, was shot nine times at a convenience store then doused with lighter fluid and set on fire.

Neither was Smith's original target, according to testimony at the 2003 trial.

At the time, he was 19 and a member of a street gang in Oklahoma City known as the Oak Grove Posse. He also was high on PCP and hiding from police, who had a warrant for his arrest on a 2001 murder case.

In the first shooting, Smith actually was looking for Moore's son, Phillip Zachary, because he mistakenly thought Zachary was a snitch, prosecutors said.

"It's her fault she died," he told police. "She panicked and she got shot. ... She like, 'Help! Help!' I'm like, I had to. I had no choice."

Smith next went to the A&Z Food Mart to shoot a worker over comments to the newspaper about a robbery at another food mart next door, prosecutors said. He instead killed Pulluru, who was filling in at the store for a friend.

A clerk at the Trans Food Mart had killed a fellow gang member during a robbery on Nov. 8, 2000. A worker at the A&Z Food Mart had told The Oklahoman  in 2000 he was proud of his neighbor.

"The rest of the kids will learn a lesson by him being dead and stop doing these things," the A&Z Food Mart worker had said.

The shootings in 2002 came days before a trial for two other gang members involved in the robbery was set to begin. Smith confessed to his roommate and a neighbor before his arrest, according to their testimony at his trial.

Smith also had asked for a stay of his execution as he seeks DNA testing on evidence from the A&Z Food Mart in support of his innocence claim. The Court of Criminal Appeals denied that request Monday in a separate order.

Smith was convicted at a separate trial of second-degree murder for the fatal shooting of Otis Payne outside an Oklahoma City club on Nov. 24, 2001. He had admitted to police that he handed the gun to the shooter, David Burns. He was sentenced to life in prison for that crime.

State won't seek death penalty for man indicted on child sexual abuse charges

A grand jury has returned an indictment charging an Ocala man, Daniel Martinez, with three counts of sexual battery on a child younger than 12 and four counts of lewd lascivious molestation on a child younger than 12.

According to a new state law, the State Attorney's Office could seek the death penalty for those charges. However, in this case, prosecutors said they won't pursue capital punishment.

Circuit Judge Lisa Herndon presided over the grand jury proceedings at the Marion County Judicial Center on Thursday. Assistant State Attorney Barbara Harris presented the case to the grand jury. She is expected to prosecute the case.

Grand jury proceedings are closed to the public.

The new law, which took effect Oct. 1, says a grand jury must consider any case of capital sexual battery on a child younger than 12. The state must secure a grand jury indictment, regardless of whether it will seek the death penalty. This requirement also is in place for first-degree murder cases. In all other cases, the State Attorney's Office can file charges on its own, without a grand jury returning an indictment.

Since Oct. 1, this is the first time a Marion County grand jury has been asked to review a capital sexual battery case. In the entire 5th Judicial Circuit, which covers Marion, Sumter, Lake, Citrus and Hernando counties, prosecutors have secured five indictments for capital sexual battery on a child younger than 12.

Prosecutors in Lake County signaled their intent to seek a death sentence for Joseph A. Giampa of Leesburg, indicted on six counts of sexual battery on a child younger than 12 and three counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child. Giampa eventually sought, and was granted, a life prison sentence without the possibility of parole.

On March 29, a handcuffed Martinez faced Circuit Judge Anthony Tatti for his first appearance hearing. The judge listed Martinez's charges and said there was probable cause for his arrest. Martinez, who has no criminal history, told the judge his lawyer is Christopher Doty, an Ocala defense attorney.

Assistant State Attorney Danielle Ruse told the judge her office expects to seek pre-trial detention for Martinez. Until that request is made and considered, Martinez will be held without bail. His next court date is April 30.

Comments from Martinez's lawyer

Doty told a Star Banner reporter that his client is "an upstanding resident of the community and a devoted Jehovah Witness."

The lawyer is asking Martinez's family and friends "not to rush to judgment" and said "everything is not always as it seems."

"Let the process play out," he said.

He said once the detective told him Martinez will be arrested, Martinez immediately surrendered to law enforcement.

Doty will argue against Martinez's pre-trial detention. He said Martinez doesn't have a prior record or conviction. Secondly, he said it's difficult to prepare a case when there is limited opportunity to meet with his client. Third, he said Martinez could wear an ankle monitor so he could work or be on home detention while awaiting trial.

Doty argued that pre-trial detention is "not meant for people like Mr. Martinez."

Why detectives arrested Martinez

Allegations against Martinez surfaced in January, when a Department of Children and Families investigator visited a local school to conduct interviews. Someone had called the agency to report victims had been abused by Martinez.

Detective Jordyn Batts of the Marion County Sheriff's Office also was assigned to investigate the allegations.

The children were interviewed at Kimberly's Center for Child Protection. The interviewers were given details of separate instances where Martinez allegedly had sexual contact with the children. The behavior includes touching and intimate contact, authorities said.

The acts occurred at night, according to the victims. Detectives believe the incidents began in September 2020 and ended in January 2024.

Prison: 20 years in prison for woman charged with child sex crime

Sheriff's officials were told Martinez claims one victim forced herself on him. Martinez told the child to stop, but never reported the alleged encounter, according to officials.

At the end of the detective's investigation, a warrant was obtained for Martinez's arrest.

Contact Austin L. Miller at [email protected]

This article originally appeared on Ocala Star-Banner: State won't seek death penalty for man indicted on child sexual abuse charges

Baltimore bridge collapse: What happened and what is the death toll?

What is the death toll so far, when did the baltimore bridge collapse, why did the bridge collapse, who will pay for the damage and how much will the bridge cost.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO REBUILD THE BRIDGE?

What ship hit the baltimore bridge, what do we know about the bridge that collapsed.

HOW WILL THE BRIDGE COLLAPSE IMPACT THE BALTIMORE PORT?

Get weekly news and analysis on the U.S. elections and how it matters to the world with the newsletter On the Campaign Trail. Sign up here.

Writing by Lisa Shumaker; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Bill Berkrot

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tab

Thomson Reuters

Lisa's journalism career spans two decades, and she currently serves as the Americas Day Editor for the Global News Desk. She played a pivotal role in tracking the COVID pandemic and leading initiatives in speed, headline writing and multimedia. She has worked closely with the finance and company news teams on major stories, such as the departures of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and significant developments at Apple, Alphabet, Facebook and Tesla. Her dedication and hard work have been recognized with the 2010 Desk Editor of the Year award and a Journalist of the Year nomination in 2020. Lisa is passionate about visual and long-form storytelling. She holds a degree in both psychology and journalism from Penn State University.

Indonesian president-elect visits China after decade of close ties

Indonesia's President-elect Prabowo Subianto is expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Monday for high-level talks, less than two months after winning the race to lead Southeast Asia's biggest economy.

A blast ripped through a Central Asian-themed cafe in the southern Russian city of Voronezh on Monday.

Study says U.S. maternal death rate crisis is really a case of bad data

A new study calls into question the extent of the maternal mortality crisis in the United States, which has long posted a disproportionately high rate of maternal deaths compared with peer nations.

Data classification errors have inflated U.S. maternal death rates for two decades, according to the study , published Wednesday in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Instead of the maternal death rate more than doubling since 2002, it has remained flat, researchers found.

“There has been a lot of alarm and apprehension surrounding the fact that some of these reports show a threefold increase in maternal mortality, and that is not what we found. We found low and stable rates,” said K.S. Joseph, the study’s lead author and professor in the departments of obstetrics and gynecology and the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

A change in the way pregnancy was noted on death certificates 21 years ago to improve the detection of maternal deaths led to “substantial misclassification” and an “overestimation of maternal mortality,” the study found.

In 2003, the National Vital Statistics System added a checkbox to death certificates to note whether the deceased person was pregnant or had recently been pregnant to address concerns that pregnancy-related deaths were being undercounted.

But the box was checked for many deaths that were unrelated to pregnancy or childbirth, researchers found. For example, hundreds of deaths of people 70 or older were mistakenly classified as having been pregnant. Deaths from cancer and other causes also were counted as maternal deaths if the box was checked. As a result, the maternal mortality rates showed a dramatic increase since 2003.

Researchers noted that gaping racial disparities remain — especially between White and Black pregnant people. Black pregnant people die at nearly three times the rate of their White peers because they face higher rates of pregnancy complications such as ectopic pregnancy and eclampsia, as well as chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, heart disease and kidney failure, researchers found.

Some experts say the study’s biggest takeaway is the persistent racial disparities, with many pregnant Black people experiencing more medical complications involving Caesarean sections, postpartum hemorrhaging and preterm births. However the data is calculated, the pattern remains the same, said Colleen Denny, an associate professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology and director of family planning at NYU Langone Hospital as well as a fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

“We should be targeting a lot of our public outreach to focus on conditions that are affecting patients of color while they’re pregnant,” said Denny, who was not involved with the study.

Joseph, whose 2017 paper previously noted the inflated U.S. maternal mortality rates, said: “Many maternal deaths, perhaps more than a half of maternal deaths, are preventable, so we have to initiate programs that address these specific causes of death and prevent them.”

The impetus for the new study was researchers’ confusion over why the U.S. maternal mortality rate was so high compared with other high-income nations, said Cande Ananth, a senior author of the study and chief of epidemiology and biostatistics at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. The authors said U.S. maternal mortality is actually comparable to that of Canada and Britain. Even with the adjusted rate, however, the U.S. rate would remain higher than most peer nations.

The authors decided to ignore the checkbox and count only deaths that listed a cause related to pregnancy.

Under the new criteria, researchers found that the mortality rates were 10.2 per 100,000 live births from 1999 to 2002 and 10.4 from 2018 to 2021. In contrast, the National Vital Statistics System method produced a mortality rate of 9.65 from 1999 to 2002 and 23.6 from 2018 to 2021.

An agency spokesman declined to comment on the new study and instead pointed to its own 2018 report .

In that report, the National Vital Statistics System reviewed several studies that found the pregnancy-and-birth checkbox was being used in error, particularly for people 45 and older. At that time, the agency’s report said that without the checkbox, the rate for maternal mortality would have remained flat since 2002.

To correct for misuse of the checkbox, the agency changed the way it counted deaths. It stopped classifying deaths as pregnancy-related for people over age 44 unless there was a specific cause of death tied to pregnancy or delivery. But for those 44 or younger, the agency continued to classify every death with the box checked as being related to pregnancy or delivery — even if the specific cause of death was unrelated.

Despite the study’s conclusion that use of the checkbox led to excessively high calculations of maternal mortality, the National Vital Statistics System said in its 2018 report that it would continue to calculate rates from the checkbox to avoid undercounting maternal mortality.

Other experts say the new study can be helpful to expand the ways public health initiatives are targeted to yield better outcomes.

This is an opportunity to rethink how the nation tracks maternal health outcomes and create a better system to help identify problems and interventions, said Chiamaka Onwuzurike, medical director of the gynecology clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School who was not involved with the study. “If we keep our blinders up and think that things are working well and our systems are tracking things appropriately, what good does that really do us?”

In 2022, the White House released a blueprint to address the maternal health crisis, outlining federal actions and long-term goals for improvement. But the federal government needs to better track progress toward achieving these goals, according to a February report from the Government Accountability Office .

Examining indirect causes of maternal deaths, including mental health, can lead to policies and interventions aimed at minimizing the instances of non-obstetric causes of death, according to Amita Vyas, a professor in the department of prevention and community health and director of George Washington University’s Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health.

“When we think about maternal deaths, it’s not just in pregnancy or during childbirth,” Vyas said. “We lose the ability to design lifesaving interventions if we disregard other indirect pregnancy-related factors in the postpartum period.”

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• Personal Finance
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• March Madness
• AP Top 25 Poll
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Personal finance
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

UK court says Assange can’t be extradited on espionage charges until US rules out death penalty

Demonstrators hold placards after Stella Assange, wife of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, released a statement outside the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Two High Court judges said they would grant Assange a new appeal unless U.S. authorities give further assurances about what will happen to him. The case has been adjourned until May 20. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

• Copy Link copied

Stella Assange, wife of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, releases a statement outside the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Two High Court judges said they would grant Assange a new appeal unless U.S. authorities give further assurances about what will happen to him. The case has been adjourned until May 20.(AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

FILE - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange being taken from court, where he appeared on charges of jumping British bail seven years ago, in London, Wednesday May 1, 2019. A London court is due to rule whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can challenge extradition to the United States on espionage charges. Two judges will issue a ruling Tuesday morning in the High Court on whether Assange can make one final appeal in England. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

A woman walks past the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Two High Court judges said they would grant Assange a new appeal unless U.S. authorities give further assurances about what will happen to him. The case has been adjourned until May 20. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

Stella Assange, wife of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Two High Court judges said they would grant Assange a new appeal unless U.S. authorities give further assurances about what will happen to him. The case has been adjourned until May 20. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

FILE - Stella Assange, wife of Julian Assange, speaks besides a poster of Julian Assange at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. A London court is due to rule whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can challenge extradition to the United States on espionage charges. Two judges will issue a ruling Tuesday morning in the High Court on whether Assange can make one final appeal in England. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File)

FILE - A protester holds a placard outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. A London court is due to rule whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can challenge extradition to the United States on espionage charges. Two judges will issue a ruling Tuesday morning in the High Court on whether Assange can make one final appeal in England. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File)

Wife of Julian Assange, Stella Assange, centre, stands outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, ahead of the decision on whether the WikiLeaks founder’s final UK bid to bring an appeal over his extradition to the United States can go ahead, on Tuesday March 26, 2024. Mr Assange faces a further wait to find out whether he can bring an appeal against his extradition to the United States after judges at the High Court adjourned their decision. (Stefan Rousseau/PA via AP)

Stella Assange, wife of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Two High Court judges said they would grant Assange a new appeal unless U.S. authorities give further assurances about what will happen to him. The case has been adjourned until May 20.(AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

LONDON (AP) — A British court ruled Tuesday that Julian Assange can’t be extradited to the United States on espionage charges unless U.S. authorities guarantee he won’t get the death penalty, giving the WikiLeaks founder a partial victory in his long legal battle over the site’s publication of classified American documents.

Two High Court judges said they would grant Assange a new appeal unless U.S. authorities give further assurances within three weeks about what will happen to him. The ruling means the legal saga, which has dragged on for more than a decade, will continue — and Assange will remain inside London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, where he has spent the last five years.

Judges Victoria Sharp and Jeremy Johnson said the U.S. must guarantee that Assange, who is Australian, “is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty is not imposed.”

The judges said that if the U.S. files new assurances, “we will give the parties an opportunity to make further submissions before we make a final decision on the application for leave to appeal.” The judges said a hearing will be held May 20 if the U.S. makes those submissions.

The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday.

Assange’s supporters say he is a journalist protected by the First Amendment who exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan that was in the public interest.

Assange’s wife Stella Assange said the WikiLeaks founder “is being persecuted because he exposed the true cost of war in human lives.”

AP AUDIO: UK court says Assange can’t be extradited on espionage charges until US rules out death penalty.

AP correspondent Charles de Ledesma reports on the reaction to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s partial victory in a London court.

“The Biden administration should not issue assurances. They should drop this shameful case, which should never have been brought,” she said outside the High Court in London.

The ruling follows a two-day hearing in the High Court in February , where Assange’s lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said American authorities were seeking to punish him for WikiLeaks’ “exposure of criminality on the part of the U.S. government on an unprecedented scale,” including torture and killings.

The U.S. government said Assange’s actions went beyond journalism by soliciting, stealing and indiscriminately publishing classified government documents that endangered many people, including Iraqis and Afghans who had helped U.S. forces.

The judges rejected six of Assange’s nine grounds of appeal, including the allegation that his prosecution is political. They said that while Assange “acted out of political conviction … it does not follow however that the request for his extradition is made on account of his political views.”

The judges also said Assange could not appeal based on allegations, made by his lawyers, that the CIA developed plans to kidnap or kill Assange during the years he spent holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, to prevent him from trying to flee.

The judges said “plainly, these are allegations of the utmost seriousness,” but concluded they had no bearing on the extradition request.

“Extradition would result in him being lawfully in the custody of the United States authorities, and the reasons (if they can be called that) for rendition or kidnap or assassination then fall away,” the ruling said.

They accepted three grounds or appeal: the threat to Assange’s freedom of speech, Assange’s claim that he faces disadvantage because he is not a U.S. citizen, and the risk he could receive the death penalty.

U.S. authorities have promised Assange would not receive capital punishment, but the judges said that “nothing in the existing assurance explicitly prevents the imposition of the death penalty.”

Jennifer Robinson, one of Assange’s lawyers, said that “even if we receive the assurances, we’re not confident we can rely on them.”

Assange, 52, a computer expert, has been indicted in the U.S. on charges over Wikileaks’ publication in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of classified documents.

U.S. prosecutors say he conspired with U.S. army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and release secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Assange faces 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one charge of computer misuse. If convicted, his lawyers say he could receive a prison term of up to 175 years, though American authorities have said any sentence is likely to be much lower.

Assange’s wife and supporters say his physical and mental health have suffered during more than a decade of legal battles and confinement.

“My concerns about the precarious mental health of Julian Assange and his unfitness to be extradited, as well as the potential for him to receive a wholly disproportionate sentence in the United States, have not been assuaged by the court,” said Alice Jill Edwards, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, an independent expert for the world body.

Assange’s legal troubles began in 2010, when he was arrested in London at the request of Sweden, which wanted to question him about allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two women. In 2012, Assange jumped bail and sought refuge inside the Ecuadorian Embassy.

The relationship between Assange and his hosts eventually soured, and he was evicted from the embassy in April 2019. British police immediately arrested and imprisoned him for breaching bail in 2012. Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed.

A U.K. district court judge rejected the U.S. extradition request in 2021 on the grounds that Assange was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions. Higher courts overturned that decision after getting assurances from the U.S. about his treatment. The British government signed an extradition order in June 2022.

Associated Press writers Brian Melley in London and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.

Advertisement

Supported by

Judge Imposes Gag Order on Trump in Manhattan Criminal Trial

The order limiting the former president’s speech came after Justice Juan M. Merchan set an April 15 trial date for the case, which involves a sex scandal cover-up.

• Share full article

By Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum

The New York judge presiding over one of Donald J. Trump’s criminal trials imposed a gag order on Tuesday that prohibits him from attacking witnesses, prosecutors and jurors, the latest effort to rein in the former president’s wrathful rhetoric about his legal opponents.

The judge, Juan M. Merchan, imposed the order at the request of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which brought the case against Mr. Trump. The district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, has accused Mr. Trump of covering up a potential sex scandal during and after his 2016 campaign.

The ruling comes on the heels of Justice Merchan’s setting an April 15 trial date, rejecting Mr. Trump’s latest effort to delay the proceeding while he seeks to reclaim the White House. It will mark the first prosecution of a former American president, and it might be the only one of Mr. Trump’s criminal cases to go to trial before voters head to the polls in November.

Under the judge’s order, Mr. Trump cannot make, or direct others to make, statements about witnesses’ roles in the case. Mr. Trump is also barred from commenting on prosecutors, court staff and their relatives if he intends to interfere with their work on the case. Any comments whatsoever about jurors are banned as well, the judge ruled, citing an array of hostile remarks Mr. Trump has made about grand jurors, prosecutors and others.

“His statements were threatening, inflammatory, denigrating,” Justice Merchan wrote in the Tuesday order.

There is one notable exception to the gag order: Mr. Trump is not prohibited from attacking Mr. Bragg, who has received numerous death threats in recent months. Mr. Bragg voluntarily carved himself out of the order; in other Trump cases, prosecutors are also left out of the gag orders.

Although Justice Merchan did not specify how he might enforce the narrowly tailored order, judges typically impose fines. In extraordinary circumstances, they can send someone to jail, though that seems unlikely in this case.

The gag order, along with Justice Merchan’s other recent ruling protecting the identities of potential jurors in the case, reflects the volatile atmosphere that has swirled around Mr. Trump’s four criminal cases and several civil trials.

The order hewed closely to the terms of one in another of Mr. Trump’s criminal cases that was upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington, which wrote that “Mr. Trump’s documented pattern of speech and its demonstrated real-time, real-world consequences pose a significant and imminent threat.”

And in seeking the order last month, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors highlighted Mr. Trump’s “longstanding history of attacking witnesses, investigators, prosecutors, judges, and others involved in legal proceedings against him” — comments that the judge seized on in his ruling.

Mr. Trump, for example, has taken aim at Michael D. Cohen, his onetime fixer and one of Mr. Bragg’s central witnesses, calling him a “liar” and a “rat.” And in a rambling and angry post on his social media site on Tuesday, Mr. Trump made an ominous reference to Mr. Cohen, claiming without explanation that his former fixer was “death.” He also referred to one of Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors in pejorative terms.

Both comments would now arguably violate the gag order. On Tuesday, Mr. Cohen issued a statement thanking the judge for issuing the order.

In another post, Mr. Trump took aim at Justice Merchan and his family, claiming that the judge “hates me,” though those comments do not appear to cross the line the judge has now set.

In Mr. Trump’s other cases, the heated rhetoric has preceded violent threats. After Mr. Trump recently lost his civil fraud case in New York, which was brought by the state attorney general, envelopes of white powder were sent to both the attorney general’s office and the judge who had overseen the case. The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, was also the victim of a hoax bomb threat at his home.

Mr. Trump, who called Justice Engoron a “nut job,” has also targeted the prosecutors in all his criminal cases, falsely accusing them of working in concert with President Biden. He called Mr. Bragg, a Democrat who is Black, a “racist.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had opposed the order in the Manhattan case, arguing that it “would be unconstitutional and unlawful to impose a prior restraint on President Trump’s First Amendment speech.”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, Steven Cheung, echoed that claim on Tuesday, calling the order unconstitutional and saying that it prevents the former president “from engaging in core political speech, which is entitled to the highest level of protection under the First Amendment.”

Mr. Cheung also said that “American voters have a fundamental right to hear the uncensored voice of the leading candidate for the highest office in the land.”

Justice Merchan is just the latest judge to impose a gag order on the former president.

In addition to the order in the Washington criminal case, which involves accusations that Mr. Trump plotted to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump was ordered not to comment on court staff members in the civil fraud case after he attacked Justice Engoron’s principal law clerk. Justice Engoron imposed $15,000 in fines on the former president when he ran afoul of that order.

Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of the attorney general, inflicting a more than $450 million judgment on Mr. Trump.

In the Manhattan criminal case, Mr. Trump faces up to four years in prison. The case stems from a hush-money payment that Mr. Cohen made — to a porn star looking to sell her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump — during the 2016 campaign. After he was elected, Mr. Trump helped falsify business records related to his reimbursement of Mr. Cohen, according to prosecutors, further covering up the scandal from voters.

After Mr. Bragg filed the case last year, Justice Merchan initially stopped short of adopting a gag order, while instructing Mr. Trump to refrain from making statements “likely to incite violence or civil unrest.” But since then, Mr. Trump has continued to attack witnesses and prosecutors, prompting Mr. Bragg to seek a more formal order.

Separately, the judge’s recent order protecting prospective jurors in the case effectively barred Mr. Trump from exposing their identities, emphasizing a need to protect those who might decide the highly sensitive case.

The judge also ordered that their addresses be kept secret from everyone except the lawyers in the case, a measure that Mr. Trump’s legal team did not oppose.

In an unrelated order Tuesday, Justice Merchan issued a stern warning to Mr. Trump’s lawyers as well. He reminded them to behave professionally, or risk being held in contempt.

“This court emphasizes that it hopes for and fully expects zealous advocacy from counsel as well as spirited contribution from witnesses and parties alike,” Justice Merchan wrote. “Nonetheless, the court expects that the line between zealous advocacy and willful disregard of its orders will not be crossed.”

Jesse McKinley , Maggie Haberman and Kate Christobek contributed reporting.

Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, writing about public corruption. He has been covering the various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies. More about Ben Protess

William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer on the Metro desk, where he covers political and municipal corruption, courts, terrorism and law enforcement. He was a part of the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. More about William K. Rashbaum

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Case

The manhattan district attorney has filed charges against former president donald trump over a hush-money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election..

Taking the Case to Trial: Trump is all but certain to become the first former U.S. president to stand trial on criminal charges after a judge denied his effort to delay the proceeding and confirmed it will begin on April 15 .

Implications for Trump: As the case goes to trial, the former president’s inner circle sees a silver lining in the timing. But Trump wouldn’t be able to pardon himself  should he become president again as he could if found guilty in the federal cases against him.

Michael Cohen: Trump’s former fixer was not an essential witness in the former president’s civil fraud trial in New York  that concluded in January. But he will be when he takes the stand in the hush-money case .

Stormy Daniels: The chain of events flowing from a 2006 encounter that the adult film star said she had with Trump has led to the brink of a historic trial. Here's a look inside the hush-money payout .