Publications & Testimony

Saying the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) act­ed unlaw­ful­ly in reset­ting Lisa Montgomery​’s exe­cu­tion for January 12, 2021, a fed­er­al judge in Washington has for a sec­ond time blocked efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice to put to death the only woman on fed­er­al death row. In an order issued late in the day on December 24, 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Randolph D. Moss agreed with Montgomery’s lawyers that the BOP lacked legal author­i­ty to reschedule…

Fueled by at least 16 COVID-19 deaths and a record-low num­ber of new death sen­tences caused by the can­ce­la­tion or post­pone­ment of cap­i­tal tri­als, the pop­u­la­tion of U.S. death row dipped 3.4% in the year span­ning October 2019 through September 2020, accord­ing to the lat­est quar­ter­ly death-row cen­sus by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund…

The Texas Supreme Court has unan­i­mous­ly ruled that the state’s comp­trol­ler had no author­i­ty to deny death-row exoneree Alfred Dewayne Brown​’s appli­ca­tion for com­pen­sa­tion after a tri­al court had declared him ​“actu­al­ly…

Two men sched­uled for exe­cu­tion by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in January 2021 are among the fed­er­al death-row pris­on­ers who have test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. Lawyers for Corey Johnson (pic­tured, left) and Dustin Higgs (pic­tured, below), announced that they had been noti­fied by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) that their clients had con­tract­ed the coro­n­avirus, amidst an out­break of the dis­ease at the…

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the human rights body charged with over­see­ing Western Hemisphere nations’ com­pli­ance with human rights oblig­a­tions, has called on the United States to halt the sched­uled January 12, 2021 exe­cu­tion of Lisa…

A for­mer Pennsylvania death-row pris­on­er has been freed, one month after the tri­al court barred his retri­al because of ​“egre­gious” pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct by the coun­ty district…

Death sen­tences reached their low­est lev­el in the mod­ern era and exe­cu­tions hit a gen­er­a­tional low despite an his­tor­i­cal­ly anom­alous fed­er­al exe­cu­tion spree, accord­ing to the 2020 Year End Report from the Death Penalty Information Center. As the nation grap­pled with a dead­ly pan­dem­ic and expe­ri­enced a reawak­en­ing on racial jus­tice, most states put tri­als and exe­cu­tions on hold. At the same time, ignor­ing pub­lic health warn­ings and buck­ing nation­al trends, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment car­ried out…

Saying that “[l]ethal injec­tion appears to us to be impos­si­ble from a prac­ti­cal point of view today,” Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (pic­tured) told reporters it is ​“pret­ty clear” that the state will not exe­cute any­one in…

Just hours after tak­ing office, new­ly elect­ed Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón issued a series of sweep­ing changes that end­ed new death-penal­ty pros­e­cu­tions and moved towards recon­sid­er­ing exist­ing death sen­tences in the coun­ty with the nation’s largest death row. The pol­i­cy changes sig­naled the poten­tial nation­wide impact of local pros­e­cu­tor elec­tions in 2020, as new reform pros­e­cu­tors pre­pare to take the helm in coun­ties that con­sti­tute more than…