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Death Penalty Exonerations

When was the last time in the U.S. that someone was executed under a government-imposed death penalty but later exonerated?

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As of November 2026, the last person who was executed under the death penalty and later exonerated was put to death in 1939, or 87 years ago. An exoneration is an official act by an authoritative government body declaring that a previously convicted person is innocent. Some death penalty opponents assert that innocent people have been executed in recent times but that “there is no way to tell how many” because courts and defense attorneys do not pursue exonerations after the defendant dies. In reality, advocacy groups and media outlets investigate post-execution innocence cases, and governments also participate in some of these cases. Thus, the person who was put to death in 1939 was exonerated in 2011. Other examples of such cases are detailed at the first link below.

DocumentationDeath Penalty Exonerations Exoneration Definition

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Offshore Wind Costs

U.S. Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer claims that the completion of a large offshore wind farm in New England is “great news for lower costs” and “one of many victories to come in our ongoing fight to lower prices for Americans.”

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IN FACT, the cost of generating electricity via offshore wind is more than 3 times greater than natural gas, and subsidizing wind impoverishes Americans while enriching foreign corporations. Here are the specifics:

The federal government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that the levelized cost of electricity from offshore wind is 3.4 times greater than natural gas.
The actual cost of offshore wind is even higher than that because EIA’s levelized costs don’t account for the fact that renewables like wind and solar don’t produce energy when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Thus, they must be backed up by expensive energy storage systems or technologies that generate electricity on demand, like natural gas.
Due to the unreliability of wind and solar, EIA warns that its levelized costs are “not directly comparable to those for other technologies,” a vital fact that proponents of solar and wind often ignore.
After 40+ years of the U.S. government aggressively subsidizing solar and wind while discouraging the use of fossil fuels through taxes and regulations, solar and wind provided only 7.2% of all U.S. energy in 2025.
In addition to federal subsidies, some states have subsidized solar and wind so heavily that the New York Times reported in 2024 that “thousands” of “renewable energy” companies “are reeling” from a reduction in only one California solar subsidy, causing a “sharp decline” in rooftop solar installations.
Per a 2024 report by the International Energy Agency, “Although renewable energy technologies are becoming more cost-competitive,” “roughly 87% of global renewable utility-scale capacity growth in 2023–2028 is expected to be stimulated by policy schemes” in which “government policy is the primary driver.”
In Germany, which is a “global leader in sustainable energy production,” the average price of household electricity is 3.5 times that of the United States.
A diverse array of scholarly publications document that affordable energy is “essential for public health and economic prosperity,” while high energy prices drive up hunger, drive down wages, stoke unemployment, and harm people in a wide variety of other ways.
Schumer alleges that this new wind farm is “great news” for “union jobs,” but the scholarly encyclopedia Environmental and Natural Resource Economics explains that the financial benefits of renewable energy subsidies “largely accrue to the owners of capital” because “energy development” is “capital-intensive,” and growth in “the green jobs sector does not necessarily imply net job creation” since it reduces the jobs “that would have been produced from fossil fuels,” and thus, “net job creation may be zero (or negative).”
With regard to the owners of capital, the new wind farm was constructed by a Danish company named Ørsted, and China manufactures roughly 70% of the world’s supply of “all six key clean” energy technologies, including wind.
Among the reasons for China’s dominance in “clean energy” is that the mining and manufacturing of these products can create significant pollution, and China has relatively weak laws against pollution.

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