Publications & Testimony

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…

The number of people under sentence of death in the United States has fallen below 2,500 for the first time in 29 years following twenty consecutive years of decline, according to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). In a new report, Capital Punishment, 2020 – Statistical Tables, released December 10, 2021, BJS says that 2,469 people were under sentence of death in the custody of 28 states and the federal government as of December 31, 2020, down 3.7% from the…

The United States Supreme Court heard oral argument on December 8, 2021 in a case that will have serious implications for the right to federal court review of wrongful convictions and death sentences. Arizona has asked the Supreme Court to reverse federal appellate court rulings in favor of Barry Jones and David Ramirez. The Court seemed skeptical of Arizona’s argument that even though the state provided ineffective counsel to represent prisoners in state courts, federal courts must ignore…

As South Carolina prepares procedures for carrying out executions via firing squad, an investigation by Columbia’s daily newspaper, The State, reports that important information about the execution process and the sources of materials to be used in executions is being hidden from the public. The state legislature passed a bill in May 2021 making the firing squad and electric chair the two means of execution in the state. However, the state has denied journalists’ requests for information about…

Oklahoma executed Bigler Jobe Stouffer II (pictured, at his clemency hearing) on December 9, 2021, after Governor Kevin Stitt rejecting a pardons board recommendation to commute his sentence to life without parole and the federal courts denied his applications to stay his execution. Stouffer, 79, was the oldest prisoner put to death in Oklahoma. It was the eleventh and final execution of 2021. On November 17, 2021, the Oklahoma Pardons and Parole board voted 3 – 2 to recommend clemency for…

Organizations advocating for the rights of abused children and those with mental illness and for fair process are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to, for a second time, summarily reverse a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) decision that upheld the death sentence imposed on Terence Andrus (pictured) despite defense counsel’s failure to investigate and present a “tidal wave” of available mitigating evidence in the penalty phase of his capital trial. In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court…

The Oklahoma Attorney General’s office has agreed to a stay of execution for a severely mentally ill death-row prisoner who may be incompetent to be executed, while the state’s Pardon and Parole Board denied clemency to two other prisoners set to be put to death in Oklahoma’s five-month scheduled execution spree. After hearing testimony on November 29, 2021 that Wade Lay experiences paranoid delusions from schizophrenia that leave him without a rational understanding of the reason for his…