Publications & Testimony

James Coddington, the last of the seven death-row prisoners scheduled to be put to death in Oklahoma’s five-month execution spree, has received a stay of execution. On December 23, 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Friot, who is presiding over a challenge brought by Oklahoma death-row prisoners to the constitutionality of the state’s lethal-injection protocol, stayed Coddington’s March 10, 2022 execution date “until a final judgment on Mr. Coddington’s claims in this case has been…

More than half of all U.S. death-row prisoners are or have recently been incarcerated in prolonged conditions of solitary confinement that are likely unconstitutional and that violate international human rights norms, a DPIC analysis of data in a recent law review article has found. In Cruel but not Unusual: The Automatic Use of Indefinite Solitary Confinement on Death Row, published in fall 2021 in the Texas Journal on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights, Merel Pontier (pictured) catalogues the…

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform has sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland seeking information on the Department of Justice’s death penalty practices and policies, including whether DOJ plans to resume federal executions and to obtain new supplies of the drug pentobarbital to carry out additional executions. The letter, signed by Representatives Jamie Raskin (D – Maryland) and Ayanna Pressley (D – Massachusetts) and sent December 15, 2021, asked the Justice Department…

Prosecutors hid favorable evidence from Texas death-row prisoner Rodney Reed during his 1998 trial for the murder of Stacey Stites and then argued for his execution claiming that the evidence did not exist, Reed’s lawyers allege in a new court pleading filed in his case. Reed has consistently maintained his innocence in Stites’ murder and has argued that her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, a disgraced former police officer and a sex offender, is the killer. Reed says that he and Stites were…

At least one in seven death-row prisoners put to death in the United States since executions resumed in 1977 had legal claims in their cases that would render their executions unconstitutional, a new Cornell University Law School study shows. The study, Dead Right: A Cautionary Capital Punishment Tale, by Cornell Law School professors Joseph Margulies, John Blume, and Sheri Johnson (pictured, left to right) was published in the Fall 2021 issue of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. The…

Virginia’s historic abolition of the death penalty highlighted a year in which support for capital punishment continued to erode, according to the 2021 Year End Report from the Death Penalty Information Center. Executions, death sentences, and public support for capital punishment were all at or near historic lows in 2021, the report said, while the executions and new death sentences that did take place exposed deep flaws in the administration of the nation’s capital punishment system.

A Texas trial judge has dismissed all charges against an El Paso murder defendant, saying that the decision to seek the death penalty against him was a product of “prosecutorial vindictiveness.” In an order issued December 14, 2021, District Court Judge Alyssa Perez (pictured) freed Ivan Gabaldon, dismissing his case with prejudice. Gabaldon’s lawyers had argued that county prosecutors had sought the death penalty against him in retaliation for exercising his constitutional right to a speedy…

The Alabama Court of the Judiciary has suspended for 90 days without pay an African-American trial judge who declared the state’s death penalty statute unconstitutional and criticized appellate review of some death penalty cases as “ceremonial at best.” After a four-day trial, the disciplinary panel ruled on December 3, 2021 that Jefferson County Judge Tracie Todd had violated four canons of judicial ethics in connection with her conduct in death penalty cases. In an opinion that provided…

More than 34 years after having been sentenced to death in Nashville, Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman is coming off Tennessee’s death row. After a prolonged dispute between Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III, and Davidson County reform District Attorney Glenn Funk, Slatery announced on December 10, 2021 that he would not appeal a November 11 plea deal that would resentence Abdur’Rahman to three consecutive life terms. Nashville Criminal Court Judge Monte Watkins approved the resentencing…

Florida death-row prisoner Paul Durousseau was re-sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole December 10, 2021, when a second capital sentencing jury reached a non-unanimous sentencing verdict. Durousseau was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 on charges that he had raped and murdered a 24-year-old woman in Jacksonville in 1999. The trial court imposed the death penalty in that case after the jury split 10 – 2 in favor of death. At the time, Florida was one of three states…