Publications & Testimony

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…

The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned a federal appeals court decision that had reversed the death sentences imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and injured more than 250 others. In a 6 – 3 decision authored by Justice Clarence Thomas and joined by all members of the Court’s conservative supermajority, the justices reinstated Tsarnaev’s death sentences and remanded the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to…

The Tennessee Supreme Court has issued death warrants setting execution dates for three prisoners, bringing to five — the nation’s‑high — the number of executions pending in the state in 2022. On February 22, 2022, the court set execution dates of August 18 for Byron Black, October 6 for Gary Sutton, and December 8 for Donald Middlebrooks. The court had previously set execution dates of April 21 for Oscar Smith and June 9 for Harold Nichols. Black has presented evidence that he is ineligible…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has stayed the March 8, 2022 execution of death-row prisoner Michael Gonzales (pictured, second from left, with his legal team) based on evidence that he may be ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability and that prosecutors withheld favorable evidence from the defense at the time of trial. The appeals court’s order, issued March 3, 2022, halted what would have been the first execution in Texas in 2022. Gonzales filed a 169-page…

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed a Nevada district court’s grant of a new trial to death-row prisoner Mark Rogers, blasting the state for providing him with inexperienced counsel who lacked the knowledge and resources to competently defend a capital trial. In a 2 – 1 decision issued on February 14, 2022, the appeals panel upheld a September 23, 2019 ruling by District Court Judge Gloria M. Navarro holding that the public defender assigned to represent Rogers…