Publications & Testimony

In an opinion legal experts have blasted as “nightmarish” and “an abomination,” the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in two Arizona death penalty cases that 1990s amendments to the federal habeas corpus law permit state prisoners who were provided ineffective representation at trial and in post-conviction proceedings to argue that their counsel were ineffective but bar them from presenting evidence of their ineffectiveness that competent lawyers had discovered once the case had reached federal…

Florida has joined the growing number of states that have ended automatic permanent solitary confinement for prisoners sentenced to death. The Florida Department of Corrections agreed to the action as part of a settlement of a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by eight prisoners who alleged that the state’s death-row conditions were “extreme, debilitating, and inhumane, violate[d] contemporary standards of decency, and pose[d] an unreasonable risk of serious harm to the health and safety.”

The U.S. State Department and the European Union have joined human rights and pro-democracy advocates in condemning the expansion of the death penalty in Belarus to include non-lethal “attempted acts of terrorism,” calling the measure an act of repression against opponents of the nation’s autocratic regime and its assistance to the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Belarus, a former Soviet satellite nation whose President, Alexander Lukashenko, has permitted Russia to use its territory…

After 37 years of silence, a South Carolina prison doctor who was in the execution chamber when eight prisoners it was his duty to treat were put to death has for the first time publicly discussed his conflicting roles. In an interview with Chiara Eisner of the Columbia newspaper, The State, shortly after South Carolina Department of Corrections announced plans to carry out executions by firing squad, Dr. Green Neal stepped forward to share his experiences. “Death is death, no matter whether…

In an execution an expert has characterized as “botched,“ Arizona Department of Corrections personnel failed for 25 minutes to set an intravenous line in Clarence Dixon’s arms on May 11, 2022 before performing a bloody and apparently unauthorized “cutdown“ procedure to insert the IV line into a vein in his groin. It was the first execution the state had carried out after a nearly eight-year hiatus following the botched two-hour execution of Joseph Wood on July 23, 2014. Fox News media witness…

Ignoring entreaties from judges, prosecutors, and state bar presidents, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals has denied a new trial to death-row prisoner Toforest Johnson. On May 6, 2022, the state appeals court ruled that Johnson (pictured, center, in a family photo) was not entitled to relief on his claim that prosecutors in his 1998 trial in Birmingham withheld evidence of a payment to a key witness in exchange for her testimony. Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder…

The fallout following Tennessee’s aborted attempt to execute Oscar Smith on April 21, 2022 continues to grow, as state prosecutors disclosed that their pleadings had misrepresented facts in a federal lethal injection lawsuit and public records revealed that at least two members of the execution team knew the day before Smith was to be executed that the drugs purchased to put Smith to death had not been properly tested. Redacted records obtained by several media outlets on May 13, 2022 in…

A prosecutor and police officer who fabricated evidence to wrongfully convict a former Louisiana death-row prisoner are not entitled to immunity in a lawsuit alleging they “knowingly and deliberately fabricated” that testimony, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled. Michael Wearry, a Louisiana prisoner whose conviction and death sentence were overturned by the U.S Supreme Court in 2016 because prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence, had filed suit in 2018 against Livingston…

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has issued a reprieve to death-row prisoner Kareem Jackson, calling off his scheduled September 15, 2022 execution and setting a new December 10, 2025 execution date. In a news release, the governor’s office said that the reprieve had been issued “due to ongoing problems involving the willingness of pharmaceutical suppliers to provide drugs to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC), pursuant to DRC protocol, without endangering other Ohioans.”

Attorneys for Georgia death-row prisoner Virgil Presnell, Jr. (pictured left, with his mother) have filed a lawsuit arguing that Attorney General Chris Carr violated a written agreement when his office set a May 17, 2022 execution date for their client. Executions in Georgia have been on hold since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2021, Carr agreed not to set any execution dates until three conditions had been met: the expiration of the Georgia Supreme Court’s COVID-19 judicial…