The South Carolina Department of Corrections announced March 18 that it will now organize executions by firing squad, which was legalized last year after a decadelong halt in carrying out any death sentences. The law, adopted last May, makes South…
Supporters of Oklahoma death row prisoner Julius Darius Jones cheered as Gov. Kevin Stitt canceled Jones’ execution just four hours before it was due at the state prison in McAlester Nov. 18. Stitt commuted Jones’ death sentence to life without…
After a six-year “pause” in executions, the result of a series of botched death-house procedures, including 43 minutes of writhing agony for Clayton Lockett in 2014, Oklahoma authorities renewed executions Oct. 28. And once again it was an inhumane disaster,…
Two death-row inmates were executed in October, despite vigorous court appeals challenging the death sentences imposed on Ernest Lee Johnson and Willie B. Smith on the basis they violated the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling barring execution of “people with intellectual…
On Sept. 8 the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the execution of John Henry Ramirez, a death-row prisoner in Texas, three hours before he was to be killed. He was waiting in a holding cell a few feet from the death…
John Henry Ramirez is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville Sept. 8, the third execution there this year. Ramirez filed a federal suit Aug. 10 after prison officials denied his request to…
Hoping to jump start resumption of the death penalty, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill May 14 legalizing firing squads and making killings with the state’s 109-year-old electric chair the default method of execution. No one has been…
Arizona prison officials have “refurbished” their lethal gas chamber at the Florence state prison and bought the chemicals needed to resume poison gas executions there, using the same hydrogen cyanide employed by the Nazis in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, the…
Quintin Jones, a 41-year-old African American, was executed at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville May 19. After 20 years on death row, he was given a lethal dose of pentobarbital, which attacks the brain and central nervous system and…
“There is no place for the death penalty in this commonwealth, in the South or in this nation,” Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam told the press as he signed a bill abolishing capital punishment March 24 in front of the Greensville…
