Publications & Testimony

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…

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.