Earlier this month, U.S District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, nominated to the federal court by President Trump in 2017, temporarily blocked the Department of Justice
“Despite a decades-long decline in public support for capital punishment, the political tug-of-war on capital punishment is heating back up,” Melanie Kalmanson writes in her
(Update 1/29/26: On Wednesday, January 28, Texas killed 55-year-old Charles Victor Thompson, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1999 for killing his ex-girlfriend,
In Texas, Tommy Lee Walker, a Black 19-year-old executed in 1956 for a rape and murder he didn’t commit, was exonerated last week, 70 years
“After decades as the nation’s death penalty pariah, Texas was not the lead executioner this year,” the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty states
(Today, January 29, 2026, Gov. DeSantis signed his third death warrant. He ordered Billy Leon Kearse, sentenced to death for the robbery and murder of
In March 2019, recently elected California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on the death penalty, halted executions, took down the execution chamber, and dismissed
While the death penalty “appears to be experiencing a renaissance of sorts,” in light of the 34 executions so far this year, that may not
In Utah, a court-appointed forensic psychologist stated in a court record that he believes that 67-year-old Ralph Menzies, convicted of killing 26-year-old Maurine Hunsaker in
Like many of you, we’re shocked at President Trump’s executive order, “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” and believe it is a publicity stunt based on his usual rhetoric of fear and hatred. His intention is to reverse the progress that has been made in slowing down and, in some places, ending the killing of those imprisoned by the state. But knowledge is power. We know that the
President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row today, declining to commute the sentences of Robert D. Bowers, convicted of killing 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018; Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, with his brother, killed three people and
California Gov. Gavin Newsom “has demonstrated a callous disregard for the dark history” of the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons and jails, Jack Morris writes in his powerful CalMatters essay Morris points to Newsom’s two-time veto of of the California Mandela Act in 2022 and 2023, which would have limited the practice, and again this year when he killed AB280, which would have limited solitary confinement to
Curtis Lee Ervin was sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder-for-hire of Carlene McDonald in 1986. Late last month, Federal Judge Vince Chhabria, at the request of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who “conceded that a Batson violation occurred” in Ervin’s case, ruled that Ervin should either be released or retried within 60 days. Ervin, now 71, has been on death row for 33 years. His case is one
A woman incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla died earlier this month during a heat wave that sent Chowchilla’s temperatures over 111 degrees during the Fourth of July weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Elizabeth Nomura, an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, told the Chronicle that her organization had received “distressing” messages from several women at the prison, who reported temperatures over 95 degrees
“Amnesty International’s monitoring shows that in 2023 the lowest number of countries on record carried out the highest number of known executions in close to a decade,” AI states in its annual report, “The Use of the Death Penalty in 2023.” “These figures confirm trends of recent years that pointed to the ever-increasing isolation of retentionist countries.” Global use of the death penalty in 2023 increased 31% from 2022. The
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee on Tuesday signed into law a bill that will allow a person to be sentenced to death for the rape of a child, the Center Square reports. Tennessee now joins Florida, which passed a similar bill in 2023, defying the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008). That decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy for the 5-4 majority, found that “a death sentence for
Donald Trump is promising that if he is reelected in November, he will execute every one of the 42 men on federal death row. The declaration is included in an 877-page document released by the Trump campaign, “Project 2025,” laying out all the monstrous plans the administration will unleash if he is not defeated. On page 554 is a paragraph promising to “do everything possible to obtain finality for the
“Of course, the death penalty is racist. And it would be wrong even if it weren’t,” the Los Angeles Times stated in an editorial earlier this week. The piece is in response to two significant developments that occurred last month, highlighting the racism inherent in capital punishment. The first was a writ petition filed by the Office of the State Public Defender, legal organizations, and civil rights groups at the