Publications & Testimony

Military prosecutors and defense attorneys are reportedly discussing plea deals that could take the death penalty off the table in the Guantánamo military commission cases of five men accused of involvement in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The negotiations, first reported by the New York Times on March 15, 2022 and subsequently confirmed by defense counsel, would require alleged 9/11 planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others to plead…

A Pennsylvania trial court has granted a new trial to death-row prisoner Kevin Dowling (pictured), finding that prosecutors withheld evidence that would have shown he was 40 miles away when their sole eyewitness claimed to have seen him near the murder scene. In a ruling issued February 22, 2022, Lebanon County Senior Judge Robert J. Eby, sitting by designation in Dowling’s York County case, also found that prosecutors failed to correct the testimony of a state trooper who fabricated a…

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia executed 81 people on March 12, 2022, the largest mass execution in the modern history of the country, eliciting outrage from United Nations and non-governmental human rights organizations. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet issued a statement March 14 saying that the executions did not conform to “international human rights and humanitarian law and may amount to a war crime.” “I condemn Saudi Arabia’s mass execution,” she said. Saudi…

Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk is asking a Tennessee trial court to vacate the death sentence imposed on Byron Black (pictured), agreeing that the Nashville man, who is scheduled to be executed in August 2022, is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible to be executed. In a pleading filed in the Davidson County Criminal Court on March 9, 2022, Funk wrote that two mental health experts historically relied upon by Tennessee prosecutors in death-penalty cases had concluded…

The number of people sentenced to death or facing continuing jeopardy of execution in pending capital retrial or resentencing proceedings in U.S. states has dropped below 2,400 for the first time since 1990, a Death Penalty Information Center analysis of NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) data has shown. In its Winter 2022 edition of Death Row USA (DRUSA), released in late February of 2022, LDF reported that the number of people on state death rows or facing possible capital…

Marty McClain, a Florida capital defense lawyer who represented the state’s death-row prisoners for more than 30 years, died March 7, 2022 at the age of 67. McClain was a towering presence in Florida capital litigation, representing more than 300 death-sentenced petitioners in post-conviction appeals before the Florida Supreme Court. He was responsible for the exonerations of multiple innocent death-row prisoners, including Juan Roberto Melendez, and is credited with leading efforts to…

Bills to increase secrecy in the conduct of executions have met different fates in Florida and Idaho. Florida legislators on March 7, 2022 gave final legislative approval to a bill that would conceal the identity of execution participants, including suppliers of execution drugs. Meanwhile, a similar measure in Idaho passed the House of Representatives but failed on a tie vote in a Senate committee on March 9. Supporters of the secrecy bills have asserted, without evidence, that they are…

A six-day federal trial on the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol has concluded, with medical experts for the state’s death-row prisoners citing autopsy and eyewitness evidence to call the process “torturous” and doctors for the state denying that prisoners suffered as they were being put to death. The evidentiary portion of the trial began with medical testimony for the prisoners on February 28, 2022 and concluded with closing arguments from the two sides on March 7.

New Hampshire State Representative Robert “Renny” Cushing (pictured), a longtime victim-advocate who led the Granite State’s successful efforts to repeal the death penalty, died March 7, 2022 after a multi-year battle with prostate cancer. For more than two decades, Cushing, whose father and brother-in-law were murdered in separate incidents years apart, was the face of death-penalty abolition in New Hampshire and a leading advocate of the movement to end the death penalty nationwide.

Timothy Foster, whose conviction and death sentence were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 because Georgia prosecutors discriminatorily struck Black jurors from serving in his case, has been resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. On March 4, 2022, Foster (pictured) pleaded guilty in a Rome, Georgia courtroom and accepted the life sentence after prosecutors agreed to drop the death penalty in his case. The plea deal ends a 35-year legal odyssey that began in…