In a phone interview from the 48-square-foot cell on San Quentin’s death row, where he has lived since he was sentenced to death in 1985,
In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom sent last month, American Bar Association President Mary Smith expressed her organization’s “ongoing concerns regarding the case
The American Bar Association (ABA) has sent a compelling letter to Governor Gavin Newsom concerning the case of death-row inmate Kevin Cooper. In this letter,
U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker rejected Kenneth Smith’s request for an injunction to stop Alabama from executing him with nitrogen gas late last month,
Florida prosecutor seeks death penalty in sex abuse case in a test of a new state law A Florida prosecutor announced late last month that
“Texas remained an unfortunate outlier as just one of five states to carry out executions in 2023, leading the nation with eight people put to
Our conversation on “Making a Murderer: False Confessions, Wrongful Convictions” was such an enlightening discussion between DPF President Mike Farrell and Dr. Richard Leo, Professor
2023 was the ninth consecutive year that fewer than 30 people were executed in the United States, and fewer than 50 people were sentenced to
Earlier this week, the Alabama Department of Corrections released additional details about its plan to become the first state to use nitrogen hypoxia in state
Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted Richard Glossip a stay of execution to give the Court time to review two pending petitions. Glossip was scheduled to be executed by Oklahoma on May 18. The stay doesn’t eliminate the possibility that the state will abandon its attempt to kill Glossip, who was sentenced to death in 1997, convicted of engineering the murder of Barry Van Treese, the owner of an
In Texas, a district court judge withdrew the April 26 execution date for Ivan Cantu. CBS Texas reports that the postponement was granted to give more time to review Cantu’s claims that he was convicted in 2001 based on false testimony and questionable evidence. Cantu was sentenced to death for the 2000 killings of his cousin, 27-year-old James Mosqueda, and his cousin’s girlfriend, 22-year-old Amy Kitchen, during a robbery. In
“It’s official. The death penalty is no longer in state law,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee tweeted last week after signing SB 5087. In a follow-up tweet, he laid out a timeline of the steps that led to abolition. It began in 2014 when Inslee issued a moratorium. Four years later, the state Supreme Court found state killing unconstitutional in State v. Gregory “because it is imposed in an arbitrary and
The bill Florida Gov. Ron De Santis signed into law last week will allow juries to recommend a death sentence with an 8-4 vote, the lowest threshold in the U.S. The legislation was spurred by the frustration felt by DeSantis and Republican lawmakers over the Parkland shooting verdict last year. In that case, Nikolas Cruz was convicted of killing 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 and
Not even the unprecedented presence of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who attended the hearing to advocate for clemency for Richard Glossip, was enough to convince the Oklahoma Pardon & Parole Board to grant Richard Glossip clemency on Wednesday. The vote was 2-2, with one abstention. The vote came after a three-hour long hearing, during which independent investigators, Glossip’s attorneys, and Drummond asked the board to grant clemency to Glossip,
SB 94, which would allow judges to review death penalty and life-without-parole sentences for people who have been imprisoned for at least 20 years, passed the Senate Public Safety Committee earlier this month. It now moves to the Appropriations Committee. The cost savings would be enormous. Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose), the bill’s sponsor, said in a news release that it would save the state “hundreds of millions of dollars
In his guest essay, “San Quentin Could Be the Future of Prisons in America,” in the New York Times, Bill Keller writes that “there are many ways to measure the disaster that is America’s prison system,” but the fact that “haunts” him the most is that of the 600,000 people released from prisons every year, “about three-quarters of those released from state prisons nationwide are arrested again within five years.”
The State of Florida killed Louis Gaskin on Wednesday. The state has now killed more than 100 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1972. Gaskin had severe mental illness. He was born to a teenage mother addicted to drugs. Because of her inability to care for him, he was moved between various family members, subject to abuse and neglect, and never lived in a stable environment. He dressed
“After thorough and serious deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot stand behind the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip,” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced Thursday. And he asked the state Court of Criminal Appeals “to vacate Glossip’s conviction and that the case be remanded to the district court.” Drummond filed the motion three days after he received a report from the special counsel he appointed in
