Publications & Testimony

A coalition of disability rights groups, legal experts, and conservative advocates are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the uniquely harsh burden of proof Georgia has imposed upon defendants seeking to establish their ineligibility for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. In four friend-of-the-court briefs filed in late December 2021, two former U.S. solicitors general, eight former prosecutors and judges, seven leading disability rights organizations, scholars…

An Alabama federal judge has issued an order halting the scheduled January 27, 2022 execution of Matthew Reeves (pictured). On January 7, Judge R. Austin Huffaker of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, granted a preliminary injunction preventing Alabama from executing Reeves “by any method other than nitrogen hypoxia.” Huffaker found that Reeves is likely to succeed in his claim that the state violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) when prison officials…

As 2021 came to a close, editorial writers in four death penalty states called for legislative and executive action to end capital punishment or further limit its use. Editorial boards for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Idaho Statesman took note that as the death penalty declines in usage and public support, it remains arbitrary and inhumane in its application and continues to place innocent lives at risk. Additionally, recently retired Los Angeles Times…

On January 6, 1959, Richard and Mildred Loving were convicted on felony charges of “miscegenation” under Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which criminalized interracial marriage. The trial court sentenced them to one year in prison but suspended the sentence conditioned upon their leaving Virginia and not returning together for 25 years. The court wrote: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference…

A former conservative federal judge and U.S. Solicitor General has called on the United States Supreme Court to vacate a ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) that allowed a Texas death sentence to stand in the face of an earlier Supreme Court ruling that defense counsel had unreasonably failed to present a “tidal wave” of “compelling mitigating evidence.” Kenneth W. Starr (pictured), who was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by…

A hospice-bound death-row prisoner has filed a motion in Idaho state court challenging the authority of Governor Brad Little to reject a pardons commission recommendation that his death sentence be commuted to life without possibility of parole. Gerald Pizzuto, Jr., who was sentenced to death in 1986 for the killings of two gold prospectors, suffers from advanced bladder cancer, chronic heart and coronary artery disease, coronary obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and Type 2 diabetes with…

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace laureate who described himself as “passionately opposed to the death penalty,” died in Cape Town, South Africa on December 26, 2021. He was 90 years old. Tutu, who as Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town helped turn the conscience of the world against the white supremacist policies of apartheid that oppressed his homeland, later was tasked by President Nelson Mandela with chairing the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. While unrelenting in his…

When Utah County Attorney David Leavitt (pictured) announced on September 8, 2021 that his office would no longer pursue the death penalty, his decision to do so was emblematic of a broader shift in conservative thinking on the death penalty. The Republican district attorney from “a deeply conservative” county that gave Donald Trump a 41-percentage-point margin of victory in the 2020 presidential election joined what the Wall Street Journal describes as “a growing movement of conservatives…

Fewer people were on death rows across the United States as of July 1, 2021 or faced continuing jeopardy of execution in pending capital retrial or resentencing proceedings than at any other time in more than three decades, according to data compiled by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and analyzed by the Death Penalty Information Center. In its Summer 2021 edition of Death Row USA (DRUSA), released December 17, 2021, LDF reported that the number of people on state, federal…

Devonia Inman, sentenced to life in a capital murder trial in which Georgia prosecutors hid exculpatory evidence, has been exonerated 23 years after his wrongful conviction. On December 20, 2021, one month after Judge Kristina Cook Graham granted Inman a new trial based on evidence that the prosecution had unconstitutionally suppressed multiple police records and physical evidence that another man had committed the killing, the Alapaha Judicial Circuit District Attorney Chase L. Studstill…