death penalty

Despite President Joe Biden’s public opposition to capital punishment, his administration supported an appeal first filed by his predecessor in a 48-page brief filed with the Supreme Court.

The South Carolina House has voted to add the firing squad to the state’s execution methods amid a lack of lethal-injection drugs

Virginia has become the 23rd state to abolish the death penalty

An Associated Press review of court filings shows executioners who put 13 inmates to death during the Trump presidency offered sanitized, incomplete versions of the executions to judges

Alabama would be the first state to carry out an execution this year if it wins final court approval to go ahead with plans to put to death a man convicted of murder

Dozens of civil rights and advocacy organizations are calling on the Biden administration to immediately halt federal executions after an unprecedented run of capital punishment under President Donald Trump

Joe Biden is the first sitting president to openly oppose the death penalty, and officials say he’s discussed the possibility of instructing the Justice Department to stop scheduling new executions.

The Trump administration has carried out its 13th and final federal execution, five days before President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in

A judge has granted a stay in what was slated to be the U.S. government’s first execution of a female inmate in nearly seven decades — a Kansas woman who killed an expectant mother in Missouri, cut the baby from her womb and passed off the newborn as her own.

The U.S. government now plans to execute the first female inmate in almost six decades just days before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the death penalty, takes office

Prosecutors in Stanislaus County said Friday they plan to retry the penalty phase in the case of convicted murderer Scott Peterson, who is on death row at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County.

A woman convicted of fatally strangling a pregnant woman, cutting her body open and kidnapping her baby is scheduled to be the first female inmate put to death by the U.S. government in more than six decades.

A new report by a think tank examining executions in the United States says death penalty cases show a long history of racial disparity, from who is executed to where and for what crimes.

Iran’s state TV is reporting that the country’s authorities have executed a wrestler for allegedly murdering a man

Japan executed its first foreigner in 10 years on Thursday, a Chinese man convicted in the 2003 murder and robbery of a family of four. Wei Wei, 40, was hanged Thursday at a detention center in Fukuoka where he had been on death row for more than 16 years, Justice Minister Masako Mori said. Wei was convicted of robbing and…

A Mississippi man whose murder conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court for racial bias was released from custody Monday for the first time in 22 years. Curtis Flowers walked out of the regional jail in Louisville hours after a judge set his bond at $250,000. A person who wanted to remain anonymous posted $25,000, the 10% needed to…

Fewer than 30 people were executed in the United States and under 50 new death sentences were imposed for the fifth straight year, part of a continuing decline in capital punishment that saw only a few states carry out executions, a new report issued Tuesday said. But even as death row populations were dropping in most of the 29 states…

The Supreme Court on Friday blocked the Trump administration from restarting federal executions next week after a 16-year break. The justices denied the administration’s plea to undo a lower court ruling in favor of inmates who have been given execution dates. The first of those had been scheduled for Monday, with a second set for Friday. Two more inmates...

Indiana’s Roman Catholic bishops are calling for a renewed moratorium on executions at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute.

A perplexed prospective juror at the trial of a former graduate student charged with kidnapping and killing a University of Illinois scholar from China said during jury selection last week that she didn’t understand how a conviction could carry the death penalty in Illinois when the state struck capital punishment from its statutes years ago.