Publications & Testimony

NEWS (4/​21 – 4/​23/​21) — Texas: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled against Texas death-row pris­on­ers in three separate…

The Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission has sus­pend­ed an African-American judge who declared the state’s death penal­ty statute uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, accus­ing her of unpro­fes­sion­al con­duct and anti-death…

As the United States under­goes an awak­en­ing on racial injus­tices in polic­ing and the judi­cial process, com­men­ta­tors and pub­lic pol­i­cy advo­cates are call­ing for a reimag­in­ing of pub­lic safe­ty and crim­i­nal pun­ish­ment that rejects the reflex­ive impo­si­tion of harsh pun­ish­ment as an instrument of…

Fewer exe­cu­tions were car­ried out across the world in 2020 than at any time in a decade and new death sen­tences fell by more than a third, accord­ing to a new report by Amnesty International. It was the third con­sec­u­tive year in which con­firmed exe­cu­tions reached a 10-year low, and the sixth year in a row in which con­firmed executions declined,…

A con­tro­ver­sial psy­chi­a­trist who repeat­ed­ly tes­ti­fied that severe­ly men­tal­ly ill death-row pris­on­ers were fak­ing their symp­toms and were com­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed has been barred from med­ical practice in…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has over­turned the death sen­tence of the nation’s longest-serv­ing death-row pris­on­er, 45 years after he was first sent…

NEWS (4/​16/​21) — Tennessee: The Tennessee Supreme Court has upheld the death sen­tence imposed in the May 2016 retri­al of Michael Rimmer for the mur­der of his ex-girlfriend in…

Executions for drug offens­es plum­met­ed world­wide dur­ing 2020, accord­ing to a new report by the glob­al drug-pol­i­­cy mon­i­tor Harm Reduction International…

On April 14, 2021, com­mit­tees in both cham­bers of the Tennessee leg­is­la­ture vot­ed to advance bills that would cre­ate a legal mech­a­nism for death-row pris­on­ers to chal­lenge their death sen­tences on the grounds that they have intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. The leg­is­la­tion would close a loop­hole in Tennessee law that denies pris­on­ers whose con­vic­tions became final before the U.S. Supreme Court barred the exe­cu­tion of indi­vid­u­als with intellectual…

At a time in which the Arizona Department of Corrections is fac­ing crit­i­cism for crum­bling infra­struc­ture, sub­stan­dard med­ical care, and under­staffing, the depart­ment has spent $1.5 mil­lion to pur­chase the lethal-injec­­tion drug pen­to­bar­bi­tal from an undis­closed source. The exor­bi­tant price, experts say, is a func­tion of the ques­tion­able use of the drug for non-med­i­cal pur­pos­es and the secre­tive nature of…