May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the impact of men­tal ill­ness is keen­ly felt on death row: at least two in five peo­ple exe­cut­ed have a doc­u­ment­ed seri­ous men­tal ill­ness, and research sug­gests that many more death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers are undi­ag­nosed. A nation­al major­i­ty, 60% of Americans, oppos­es exe­cut­ing peo­ple with seri­ous men­tal ill­ness. In the past two decades, sci­ence and med­i­cine have con­tributed to a much bet­ter under­stand­ing of how seri­ous men­tal ill­ness, which refers to men­tal, behav­ioral, or emo­tion­al dis­or­ders that sig­nif­i­cant­ly impair a person’s abil­i­ty to function…

On May 3, 2024, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals announced its deci­sion in the case of Christopher Henderson, a death-sen­tenced man who had been tried by an all-white jury in Madison County, Alabama, where the pop­u­la­tion is 24.6% Black. Prosecutors in his cap­i­tal tri­al used peremp­to­ry strikes to remove six of the 10 qual­i­fied Black poten­tial jurors and all remain­ing jurors of col­or. Mr. Henderson’s coun­sel from the Equal Justice Initiative iden­ti­fied evi­dence that the prosecutor’s strikes were racial­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry in vio­la­tion of Batson v. Kentucky, which held that…

In a May 23, 2024 op-ed pub­lished in The Dallas Morning News, Brian Wharton, the retired super­vis­ing detec­tive in Robert Roberson’s case, urged Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell to reex­am­ine the case and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to reex­am­ine a pend­ing motion on Mr. Roberson’s inno­cence claims, which have pre­vi­ous­ly been denied. ​“It would be a ter­ri­ble lega­cy for all of us to be asso­ci­at­ed with exe­cut­ing an inno­cent man based on a rush to judg­ment and bad sci­ence,” con­clud­ed Mr. Wharton. ​“We must pre­vent Texas from…

Susie Williams Carter was just a baby when her 16-year-old broth­er, Alexander McClay Williams, was con­vict­ed of mur­der and exe­cut­ed in Pennsylvania in 1931. Over 90 years lat­er, Ms. Carter, now 94, con­tin­ues her family’s deter­mi­na­tion to clear her brother’s name. In June 2022, a Delaware County, Pennsylvania judge agreed that law enforce­ment had dis­re­gard­ed evi­dence and coerced Mr. Williams into sign­ing mul­ti­ple false con­fes­sions. All charges against Mr. Williams were posthu­mous­ly dis­missed and then-Governor Tom Wolf apol­o­gized to his fam­i­ly, call­ing Mr. Williams’ exe­cu­tion ​“an egre­gious mis­car­riage of justice.”…

On May 20, 2024, Jefferson County, Alabama District Attorney Danny Carr asked a cir­cuit judge to grant a new tri­al to Toforest Johnson (cen­ter), an Alabama death row pris­on­er whose con­vic­tion DA Carr believes is ​“fun­da­men­tal­ly unre­li­able.” This extra­or­di­nary request is the lat­est in a series of appeals for Mr. Johnson, who was sen­tenced to death in 1998 for the 1995 mur­der of Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff William Hardy but has always main­tained his inno­cence. ​“A thor­ough review and inves­ti­ga­tion of the entire case leaves no con­fi­dence in the integrity…