Articles
Dwindling Death Penalty: Victim of the Recession?
The death penalty used to be a big deal, important enough to figure prominently in the 1988 presidential debates. Four years later, in 1992, White House aspirant...
Despite a Controversial Execution, China Curbs Use of the Death Penalty
The international furor over China's execution of a British man convicted of heroin-trafficking has drawn attention to the country's harsh criminal-justice...
Why Did Texas Gut Its Forensics Commission?
His predecessor left office to become President but Rick Perry has now become the longest-serving and most powerful governor in the history of the state of...
Davis Ruling Raises New Death-Penalty Questions
Under normal circumstances, it takes a case of national importance to rile the Supreme Court during its summer recess. But in the words of an old axiom about...
Kenya's Death Row Inmates Get Life Instead
In a move meant to ease the "mental anguish" of prison inmates and make it possible to put them to work, Kenya's president has commuted the sentences of the...
A Texas Judge on Trial: Closed to a Death-Row Appeal?
Soft-spoken and a devout Christian, Judge Sharon Keller presides as chief justice of Texas' highest criminal court. She's also known as "Sharon Killer" by her...
The Tide Shifts Against the Death Penalty
If there were such a thing as a golden age of capital punishment in America, it peaked in 1999. There were 98 executions in the U.S. that year, the highest...
Is Texas Changing Its Mind About the Death Penalty?
Texas has executed prisoners with a regularity and in record numbers that has earned the state worldwide attention. But, while Texas still led the U.S. in...
New Jersey: A Death Penalty Trend?
No criminal has been executed in New Jersey since 1963, so the fact that Gov. Jon Corzine has just signed a bill abolishing the state's death penalty might seem...
Lethal Injection
The state of Virginia has executed John Allen Muhammad via lethal injection on Nov. 10. Muhammad, known as the D.C. sniper, was sentenced to death for the...
Obama's Supreme Move to the Center
When the Supreme Court issues rulings on hot-button issues like gun control and the death penalty in the middle of a presidential campaign, Republicans could be...
Cracking Down on Courtroom Tears
Defense attorneys in capital murder cases have often been accused of not working hard enough to help spare their clients the death penalty, in some cases even...
A False Consensus on Lethal Injection
The Supreme Court reopened the nation's execution chambers on Wednesday, rejecting a claim by Kentucky inmates — echoed by prisoners across the country — that...
Death Penalty Walking
On Jan. 7, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a pair of Kentucky lawsuits challenging the lethal three-drug cocktail used in most U.S. executions. The...
A Willie Horton Hit on Obama?
Update Appended: April 22, 2008 An old right-wing attack dog has returned with a new target: Barack Obama. Starting Tuesday, a group of conservative...
A Supreme Court Boost for Suicide?
When the Supreme Court ruled last month that lethal injection didn't constitute cruel and unusual punishment, there was rejoicing from a peculiar interest...
In Prison with Jodi Picoult
Q&ABest-selling author Jodi Picoult often takes on moral quandaries in her work. Which is one of the reasons she sweet-talked her way onto Death Row. TIME caught...
No Death Penalty for Chicago Murders
In the first state to declare a moratorium on executions, the sentence handed down Thursday by an Illinois jury in the notorious Brown's restaurant murder...
Death Penalty for Child Molesters?
In the state that is the nation's undisputed death penalty leader, Texas, you might think there is no such thing as a punishment considered too harsh. But as...
China's Message on Executions
When China's state media announced a change of rules on the death penalty earlier this week, they did so with great fanfare. The reform — an amendment to the ...
