Publications & Testimony

Bills that would exempt individuals with severe mental illness from the death penalty have taken major steps forward in the Kentucky and South Dakota legislatures. The Kentucky House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (76 – 19) on February 9, 2022, to advance its severe mental illness exemption, HB 269, to the state senate. The South Dakota Senate followed on February 22, voting 21 – 14 to pass SB 159. Both bills have Republican sponsors and received bipartisan support. The measures exempt…

Members of the Arizona Jewish community have filed suit to bar the state from executing prisoners in its gas chamber, using the same substance employed by the Nazis during the Holocaust to murder more than one million people. On February 15, 2022, the ACLU of Arizona filed a taxpayers’ complaint in a Maricopa County trial court on behalf of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Phoenix, along with its executive director and a member of its board, arguing that the state’s planned…

Calling capital punishment in the U.S. “broken,” 56 elected prosecutors from across the country have issued a joint statement urging systemic changes to end the death penalty nationwide. As an initial step, the prosecutors pledged to not seek the death penalty “against people with intellectual disabilities, post-traumatic stress disorder, histories of traumatic brain injury, or other intellectual or cognitive challenges that diminish their ability to fully understand and regulate their own…

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has issued reprieves of three more executions that had been set to occur in 2022, rescheduling them for 2025. In executive orders issued February 18, 2022, DeWine halted the executions of Percy Hutton, Douglas Coley, and Cedric Carter, who had been scheduled to be put to death June 22, July 20, and August 24, 2022, respectively. The governor rescheduled Hutton’s execution for June 18, 2025, Coley’s for September 24, 2025, and Carter’s for August 27, 2025. A news…

When Oklahoma executed Gilbert Postelle on February 17, 2022, it came with a dubious distinction. The intellectually impaired man who was 18 years old at the time of his offense became the 44^th person prosecuted in Oklahoma County to be put to death since executions resumed in the U.S. in 1977. His death made the county the nation’s third-most prolific county executioner over the past half-century, tied with Tarrant and Bexar counties in Texas. (Click to enlarge graphic.) Postelle was the…

A high-profile Republican-led effort to abolish the death penalty in Utah has failed in committee by a single vote. State representatives in the House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee voted 6 – 5 on February 14, 2022 not to advance a proposal that would repeal Utah’s death penalty and replace it with a new non-capital sentencing alternative of 45 years to life. The bill, HB 147, was introduced in the deeply conservative state by Republican lawmakers Representative V. Lowry Snow and…

Nevada prosecutors have failed to meet a deadline to obtain a death warrant to execute Zane Floyd before its supply of a key lethal-injection drug expires, indefinitely extending the near 16-year pause between executions in the state. With Nevada law requiring two-week notice of an execution, Clark County prosecutors had until February 13, 2022, to obtain a warrant if they were to attempt to execute Floyd before the state’s supply of 50 ketamine vials expires on February 28. They did not do…

In what one analyst described as “an important step to restore the rule of law,” the U.S. Department of Justice has pledged not to use statements obtained by torture in its Guantánamo Military Commissions prosecution of Abd Al-Rahim Hussein Al-Nashiri. Al-Nashiri is accused of masterminding the Al Qaeda suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors in October 2000. The U.S. government is seeking the death penalty against him. In a brief filed January 31, 2022, the Department…

Autopsy results for an Oklahoma death-row prisoner whose execution state officials claimed “was carried out … without complication” have confirmed eyewitness reports that John Grant likely suffered a torturous death. The autopsy, conducted by Tulsa Medical Examiner Jeremy Shelton, M.D., the morning after Grant was executed on October 28, 2021, revealed that Grant suffered pulmonary edema and intramuscular hemorrhaging, and aspirated on his vomit as a result of the lethal injection. The autopsy…

A federal district court has overturned the death sentence of an Alabama death-row prisoner whose abandonment by his state post-conviction counsel led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the right of access to federal habeas corpus review. On January 27, 2022, Judge Karon O. Bowdre of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama overturned Cory Maples’ death sentence, holding that his trial counsel had provided prejudicially deficient representation during the penalty…