We periodically run letters from inmates on death row. Today we bring you a letter from convicted Texas murderer Robert Charles Ladd, whose final appeal was recently rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, and who will soon receive an execution date.

In this clip from the upcoming documentary The Penalty, experts on all sides of the capital punishment issue discuss the astronomical amount of money required to execute people in America.

The scheduled execution of Mark Christeson, a Missouri man who murdered a woman and her two children, was temporarily halted Tuesday night by the Supreme Court over concerns his case had not been properly reviewed.

Sixty three percent of Americans now support the death penalty, down from a high of 80% twenty years ago. Among Democrats, support has fallen below 50%. There's probably a good reason for the decline.

Belgium's authorities have agreed to euthanize Frank Van Den Bleeken, a prisoner serving a life sentence for rape and murder. Even though the country doesn't have the death penalty, authorities have let prisoners with terminal illnesses be put to death since 2002. Van Den Bleeken's illness, however, is psychiatric—he says his desire to be sexually violent will never go away.

A Florida man convicted of murdering two people reportedly dared a judge to sentence him to death, claiming he doesn't believe that the Supreme Court would actually allow an innocent man to die.

Last night, Willie Tyrone Trottie, who was convicted of a 1993 double murder, was executed in Texas after spending 20 years on death row. Trottie wrote us a letter earlier this year as part of our "Letters from Death Row" series.

Last week, two men were released after spending 30 years in prison in North Carolina. They were falsely convicted of rape and murder in 1983. They were both exonerated by DNA evidence. The man who prosecuted them is, proudly, no pussy.

The young American couple accused of murdering the girlfriend's mother and stuffing her body into a suitcase could potentially face the death penalty in Indonesia if found guilty of a premeditated murder charge.

Last night Arizona became the latest state this year to ineptly carry out an execution. Joseph Wood, who was executed for a 1989 double murder of his ex-girlfriend and her father, either "gasped" or "snored" for two hours before finally expiring.

A federal judge in Southern California ruled Wednesday that the state's death penalty is unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney wrote that the "dysfunctional administration of California's death penalty system" has led to years-long delays for executions. According to the Los Angeles Times, 900 people have been given the death penalty in California since 1978—only 13 have been executed.

We periodically publish letters from inmates on death row. Today, we bring you a message from convicted murderer Pete Russell, who has been on death row in Texas for the past 11 years.

San Quentin State Prison is home to California's death row. And the condition of the residents of that death row is such that the state is about to open a mental hospital just for them.

This morning the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Hall v. Florida. Florida uses a bright-line IQ threshold score of 70 to determine if an inmate is too intellectually disabled to be executed. And in 5-4 decision, written by Justice Kennedy, the Court struck down that threshold as unconstitutional.

We periodically run letters from death row inmates. Today we bring you a letter from Willie Tyrone Trottie, who is scheduled to be executed by the state of Texas on September 10 of this year.

This evening the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution to Missouri inmate Russell Buckelew, saying only that the matter needs to be revisited by a lower federal court.

Clayton Lockett's botched execution in April may have left a sour aftertaste about the increasingly shady business of executing criminals in America, but it's not clear that it has changed any part of the process. Today, in the case of Russell Bucklew, the Supreme Court is taking another look at the messy circumstances of capital punishment.

Sometimes someone forces you to really evaluate whether you could oppose the death penalty in all cases. Sometimes that person commits suicide in a prison cell, and you set your complicated feelings down for a bit.

I grew up with a killer. My father. He didn't kill in a way that would ever send him to jail. He wasn't in the military. Instead, he used the death penalty. Sometimes he called and gave the order for inmates to be executed.

Last week, Clayton Lockett, a convicted killer, died strapped to a table in Oklahoma, but nothing else about it went as planned. The widespread public queasiness which followed infected even some steadfast supporters of the death penalty, leading to hopes for reform. Are those hopes misplaced?