News & Updates

Share:
Filter & Search

In brief: February 2024

In Louisiana earlier this week, a state legislative committee approved a proposal to add nitrogen gas and electrocution to its execution protocol, the Louisiana Illuminator

Read More »

In brief: March 2023

In Texas, corrections officials executed two men this month, Gary Green and Arthur Brown, Jr. Texas has killed five men this year. With last week’s withdrawal of the March 30 death warrant for Anibal Canales, Jr., its last execution scheduled for this year is set for April 26, when the state plan to kill Ivan Cantu. Brown was sentenced to death for killing four people in Houston in 1992. He

Read More »

Texas withdraws Andre Thomas’s execution warrant

A state district judge withdrew the April 5 execution warrant for Andre Thomas earlier this month to give Thomas’s lawyers time to prepare for a hearing to determine his mental competency. Thomas’s lawyer, Maurie Levin, immediately issued a statement hailing the judge’s order. “The Court’s order gives Mr. Thomas the time necessary to make the threshold showing that his lifelong, profound mental illness, characterized by fixed auditory and visual hallucinations,

Read More »

CA Gov. Newsom to turn San Quentin State Prison into “San Quentin Rehabilitation Center”

Declaring that he wants to “literally transform this place,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week that San Quentin State Prison will convert from a maximum-security prison to a “one-of-a-kind facility focused on improving public safety through rehabilitation and education.” In a news conference inside the prison, Newsom said it will be renamed the “San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.” Under “the direction of an advisory group composed of state and world-renowned

Read More »

South Carolina and Florida want to expand their death penalty statutes

Bucking a trend of decreasing support for the death penalty in the United States, Republican-dominated legislatures in South Carolina and Florida are attempting to expand their states’ use of capital punishment. In South Carolina, Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would make women who have an abortion subject to the death penalty. The “South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act of 2023” removes all exceptions, including rape, the health of the

Read More »

Alabama to tinker with the machinery of death again

Three months after a series of botched executions caused Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to call for a pause in state killing to allow time for a “top-to-bottom review,” of the state’s broken execution protocol, the state is ready to try again.  In a letter to state Attorney General Steve Marshall last Friday, Ivey said it “is time to resume our duty of carrying out lawful death sentences,” AL.com reports. According

Read More »

The execution of Donald Dillbeck

Florida corrections officials killed Donald Dillbeck last Thursday. They did so despite the extensive evidence of his horrific sexual and physical abuse as a child, the brain damage he suffered from his mother’s alcohol abuse during her pregnancy, and his serious mental illness. They did so despite the pleas of 29 evangelical Christian leaders, and hundreds of people around the country who signed petitions, called the governor, and marched in

Read More »

Donald Spoto

Former Death Penalty Focus board member Donald Spoto died earlier this month. He was 81. His death from a brain hemorrhage was announced by his husband, Danish artist, and school administrator Ole Flemming Larsen. The couple lived near Copenhagen in Denmark.  A prolific writer, whose dozens of books included biographies of prominent men and women from the fields of politics, show business, and religion, he was as complex and brilliant

Read More »

While we’re on the subject . . .

“Justice Department standards on federal death penalty called confusing,” was the headline in a recent Washington Post article. The paper interviewed federal defense lawyers and legislators about President Biden’s and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s inconsistent policy on the issue of the death penalty and the cases in which the DOJ decides to seek it. The paper notes that “Garland has deauthorized 25 death penalty cases that were started under previous

Read More »

In brief: February 2023

The Death Penalty Information Center reports that the first state killing this year occurred on January 3, when Missouri executed Amber McLaughlin. Texas followed one week later with the execution of Robert Fratta, and Oklahoma two days later with the killing of Scott Eizember. Texas killed Wesley Ruiz and John Balentine this month, Missouri executed Leonard Taylor, and Florida killed Donald Dillbeck last week. Four more executions are scheduled for

Read More »