All posts tagged "Death Penalty Information Center"

It was the moans of agony that first caught Ben Wolff’s attention.

As Wolff, a defense lawyer and the director of the Texas Office of Forensic and Capital Writs, followed a jailer down a Huntsville prison corridor, he knew that his new client, Syed Rabbani, was in poor physical condition. Rabbani, then 57, was serving a death sentence for a 1987 murder, and was reported to be in bad health.

But Wolff wasn’t prepared for the groans that wafted from Rabbani’s cell as the jailer jangled his keys. He wasn’t prepared for what greeted him as the jailer flipped the light switch, illuminating the concrete cell in a fluorescent glow. ...

The arbitrary nature of the death penalty as practiced in the US is laid bare in a new study that shows that just 2% of counties across the nation have generated most of the executions in the past 40 years.

(Reuters) - Use of the death penalty has fallen to its lowest level since capital punishment was reinstated in the United States in 1976, according to a report released on Thursday by a nonprofit that tracks death penalty data.

Americans' support for the death penalty has waned to a 39-year low, according to results of a Gallup poll released Thursday.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - Ohio's top court and state bar association will form a joint task force to review the administration of the state's death penalty, the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court said on Thursday.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - A convicted ax murderer, on Delaware's death row for some 18 years, was executed on Friday at the state prison in Smyrna.