The death penalty in America is a flawed, expensive policy, defined by bias and error. It targets the most vulnerable people in our society and corrupts the integrity of our criminal justice system. From police officers to family members of murder victims, Americans are recognizing that the death penalty does not make us safer.
EJI provides legal assistance to people on death row, many of whom are innocent or wrongly convicted. We provide representation at trial, on appeal, and in postconviction proceedings to people facing execution. We have documented widespread racial bias in the administration of the death penalty and we challenge racial discrimination in jury selection, sentencing, and throughout the system. We protect vulnerable people facing execution, including people with mental illness who are uniquely at risk, and we produce reports about capital punishment and the ways in which public safety can be undermined by relying on this expensive and flawed punishment.
The failure to provide adequate counsel to capital defendants and people sentenced to death is a defining feature of the American death penalty. Whether a defendant will be sentenced to death typically depends on the quality of his legal team more than any other factor.
Some lawyers provide outstanding representation to capital defendants. But few defendants facing capital charges can afford to hire an attorney, so they are appointed lawyers who are frequently overworked, underpaid, and inexperienced in trying death penalty cases.
Race still influences who is sentenced to death and executed in America today. The data in Georgia has actually gotten worse: people convicted of killing white victims are 17 times more likely to be executed than those convicted of killing Black victims.21 Death Penalty Information Center, Study Finds Staggering Race-of-Victim Disparities in Georgia Executions and that the Death-Penalty Appeals Process Makes Them Worse (Sept. 18, 2019).
Executing people with mental illness presents the same concerns about culpability and reliability that led the Court to bar the death penalty for children and people with intellectual disability. People who have a mental illness or disability that significantly impairs their cognitive or volitional functioning at the time of the offense should be exempted from capital punishment because they do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct.
After more than three decades of research examining whether the threat of a death sentence deters people from committing aggravated murders, there is no reliable evidence that the death penalty deters murder or that it protects police. The National Research Council of the National Academies concluded that studies claiming the death penalty has a deterrent effect are fundamentally flawed.35 National Research Council of the National Academies, Deterrence and the Death Penalty 2 (Daniel S. Nagin & John V. Pepper eds., 2012). Studies have shown that murder rates, including murders of police officers, are consistently higher in states that have the death penalty, while states that abolished the death penalty have the lowest rates of police officers killed in the line of duty.36 Death Penalty Information Center, Capital Punishment and Police Safety (2017).
Use of the death penalty and public support for it are declining. New death sentences have remained near record lows since 2015 after peaking at more than 300 per year in the mid-90s. Executions have declined significantly over the past two decades.41 Death Penalty Information Center, The Death Penalty in 2018: Year End Report (July 2019).
Once again, executions were concentrated in the South. Texas and Oklahoma each executed five inmates, while Alabama put two inmates to death and Mississippi executed one. Arizona executed three inmates in 2022, while Missouri executed two.
February 17, 2022: Oklahoma executed Gilbert Ray Postelle. He was 35 years old. He was killed with a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, and prison officials declared him dead at 10:14 a.m. He did not give any last words and glanced a few times at the seven witnesses who were in the viewing room.
April 21, 2022: Texas executed Carl Wayne Buntion. He was 78 years old, and was Texas' oldest person on death row. "I wanted the Irby family to know one thing: I do have remorse for what I did," Buntion said while strapped to the Texas death chamber gurney. "I pray to God that they get the closure for me killing their father and Ms. Irby's husband.
May 11, 2022: Arizona executed Clarence Wayne Dixon, after a nearly eight-year hiatus in the state's use of the death penalty brought on by difficulty state officials faced in finding lethal injection drugs. He was 66 years old. The last time Arizona executed a prisoner was in July 2014, when Joseph Wood was given 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours in an execution that his lawyers said was botched. Wood snorted repeatedly and gasped more than 600 times before he died. Arizona has 112 people on death row.
June 8, 2022: Arizona executed Frank Atwood at the state prison in Florence. He was 66 years old. This was the state's second execution since officials started carrying out the death penalty in May after a nearly eight-year hiatus.
July 28, 2022: Alabama executed Joe Nathan James, Jr. He was 50 years old. Officials took three hours to set an IV line before putting James to death. The Death Penalty Information Center called it "the longest botched lethal injection execution in U.S. history."
August 17, 2022: Texas executed Kosoul Chanthakoummane. He was 41 years old. It was the second execution this year in a state that typically puts more people to death than any other. He used his final statement to thank Jesus Christ, ministers with the Texas prison system and "all these people in my life that aided me in this journey." Chanthakoummane added: "To Mrs. Walker's family, I pray that my death will bring them peace," he said into a microphone hanging above him as he lay on a prison gurney.
November 17, 2022: Oklahoma executed Richard Stephen Fairchild, an ex-Marine, on his 63rd birthday. "Today's a day for Adam, justice for Adam," Fairchild said while strapped to gurney in the death chamber. "I'm at peace with God. Don't grieve for me because I'm going home to meet my heavenly father."
Eleven people were executed in the U.S. last year, the fewest since 1988: Texas executed three people, Oklahoma executed two and one each were put to death in Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri. Three federal inmates were executed in January 2021, toward the end of Donald Trump's presidency.
The vast majority of people exonerated from death row are Black or Latinx, and more than half of death row exonerees are Black. Studies consistently demonstrate that the race of the accused and/or race of the victim plays an arbitrary yet determinative role in the administration of the death penalty. This is significant in the context of wrongful conviction because official misconduct has been documented in three-fourths of the cases of Black exonerees and two-thirds of the cases of Latinx exonerees, while official misconduct is present in less than 60% of the cases of white exonerees.
The Innocence Project currently represents people on death row with strong claims of innocence and supports coalitions working to ban the use of the death penalty. Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire became the most recent states to outlaw capital punishment, but 27 states, the federal government, and the U.S. military still allow the use of this arbitrary and brutal punishment.
This webpage is regularly updated to display the most recent final drug overdose death data published annually by NCHS. NCHS systems receive and analyze data from death certificates, including cause-of-death information reported by state and local medical examiners and coroners. Because drug overdose deaths often require lengthy investigations, data are updated as new information is received.
In January 2003, researchers at the University of Maryland concluded in a study commissioned by the Maryland Governor that defendants are much more likely to be sentenced to death if they have killed a white person. Urgent: Maryland residents can take action to send a free fax to their state legislators about a pending death penalty bill!
In April 2001, researchers from the University of North Carolina released a study of all homicide cases in North Carolina between 1993 and 1997. The study found that the odds of getting a death sentence increased three and a half times if the victim was white rather than black.
In 1998, Kentucky became the first death penalty state to pass the Racial Justice Act, a law that prohibits the death penalty from being sought on the basis of race. Following this victory, Racial Justice Act legislation was introduced, but was not passed, in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Nebraska, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
In 1997, David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth examined the death penalty rates among all death eligible defendants in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between the years of 1983 and 1993. The results of their study proved that the odds of receiving the death penalty in Philadelphia increased by 38% when the accused was black.
Nationwide, a 1990 General Accounting Office (GAO) report reviewed numerous studies of patterns of racial discrimination in death penalty sentencing. Their review found that for homicides committed under otherwise similar circumstances, and where defendants had similar criminal histories, a defendant was several times more likely to receive the death penalty if the victim was white than if his victim was African American.
University of Iowa law professor David Baldus found that during the 1980s prosecutors in Georgia sought the death penalty for 70 % of black defendants with white victims, but for only 15% of white defendants with black victims.
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