Publications & Testimony

An Arizona trial court has ruled that Clarence Dixon, a death-row prisoner with auditory and visual hallucinations and delusional thought processes from paranoid schizophrenia, is competent to be executed. In an opinion dated May 3, 2022 — the same day the court conducted an evidentiary hearing on the issue — Pinal County Judge Robert Carter Olson found that Dixon “has a mental disorder or mental illness of schizophrenia” but that his mental state was not “so distorted by this mental illness…

In a case legal experts say could redress a miscarriage of justice or institutionalize it, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the Texas federal courts’ refusal to permit DNA testing of crime-scene evidence that could potentially exonerate death-row prisoner Rodney Reed. On April 25, 2022, the Court granted Reed’s petition for writ of certiorari, which raises the question of when the time clock begins to run on a state prisoner’s federal civil rights lawsuit seeking access to DNA…

The capital sentencing trial of Nikolas Cruz in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (pictured) in Parkland, Florida has been delayed once again as jury selection in the high-profile case devolved into chaos and confusion. The fourth week of jury selection in Cruz’s penalty trial was postponed after Broward County Judge Elizabeth Scherer granted a prosecution motion to restart jury selection based upon the improper removal of 11 jurors from the case, then later…

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (pictured) has paused all executions scheduled for 2022 and called for an “independent review” of the state’s execution protocol to address a “technical oversight” that led him to halt Oscar Franklin Smith’s execution less than a half-hour before it was scheduled to be carried out on April 21, 2022. In a news release issued at 5:43 a.m. on Monday, May 2, 2022, Lee announced that the state would retain former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton to conduct a third-party review…

The U.S. Supreme Court has heard argument in two death penalty cases that present highly technical legal issues that could profoundly affect the extent to which prisoners convicted in state courts will have meaningful access to federal review of their cases. In two of the last cases to be argued before Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement at the end of the Court’s term, the Court on April 25 and 26 considered Nance v. Ward, a Georgia case about the proper way to challenge execution protocols…

Carman Deck (pictured) has been sentenced to death three times. Each of those death sentences were overturned — once by the U.S. Supreme Court — as a result of prejudicial constitutional violations in his trials. Nonetheless, he faces execution in Missouri on May 3, 2022 because a procedural technicality overturned his third grant of relief, blocking him from presenting his claim that critical mitigating evidence calling for a sentence less than death had become unavailable due to the long…

Five years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas death sentence when an expert witness had testified that a Black defendant posed an increased risk of committing future acts of violence because of his race, the Court has refused to review another Texas capital case in which the trial court permitted a juror to serve who expressed the very same view. On April 18, 2022, the Court denied a petition for certiorari filed on behalf of Kristopher Love challenging the trial court’s refusal…

On April 27, 2017, Kenneth Williams convulsed violently as he died on the gurney, the fourth prisoner put to death in an eleven-day execution spree in which Arkansas intended to execute eight men before its supply of execution drugs expired. It has not executed anyone since. Arkansas has now gone five years without an execution, bringing to 39 the number of U.S. states that have either abolished the death penalty or not carried out an execution in five or more years. (Click to enlarge map.)

The South Carolina Supreme Court has halted two scheduled executions, including one that would have been the state’s first execution by firing squad, amid ongoing legal challenges by state death-row prisoners to the state’s execution methods. In separate orders, the state’s high court issued stays of execution for Richard Moore, who was scheduled to be put to death by firing squad on April 29, 2022, and to Brad Sigmon, who faced a May 13, 2022 execution date. It was the third stay of execution…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has halted the scheduled April 27, 2022 execution of Melissa Lucio and directed that a Cameron County trial court conduct a hearing to address evidence that she may be innocent of charges that she murdered her two-year-old daughter, Mariah (pictured, being held by her mother). In an unpublished three-page order issued April 25, 2022, the Texas appeals court granted Lucio review of four issues: that prosecutors obtained her conviction using false testimony…