Publications & Testimony

Oklahoma’s legacy of botched executions has continued to grow, as media witnesses to the October 28, 2021 execution of John Grant (pictured) reported that Grant suffered repeated convulsions and vomited over a nearly 15-minute period after he was administered the controversial execution drug midazolam. Grant’s execution was Oklahoma’s 113^th since executions resumed in the United States in 1977 — tied with Virginia for the second most of any state during that period. It was also the state’s…

Within hours of a partisan vote in the United States Supreme Court lifting an appeals court stay, Oklahoma executed John Grant on October 28, 2021, ending a six-year hiatus brought on by a series of execution mishaps in 2014 and 2015. Eyewitnesses reported that Grant convulsed more than two dozen times and vomited as Oklahoma put him to death with a controversial three-drug execution cocktail whose constitutionality is the subject of a federal-court trial scheduled to begin in February 2022.

Three years after the religiously-motivated attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, the status of the state and federal prosecutions in the case remains unsettled. As the three Jewish congregations who worship at the synagogue marked the anniversary of the October 27, 2018 attack that took the lives of eleven congregants, no trial date is in sight and the prospect of a capital trial that many in the tightly-knit community oppose continues to delay healing. Lawyers for the accused…

The U.S. Supreme Court has pushed back arguments in three death-penalty cases so it can expedite consideration of two cases involving Texas’ restrictive abortion statute. To hear argument in United States v. Texas and Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson on November 1, 2021, the court rescheduled argument in Ramirez (John) v. Collier and Shinn v. Ramirez (David) and Jones. The Court will now hear argument in Ramirez v. Collier on November 9, 2021, and in Shinn v. Ramirez and Jones on December 8…

The U.S. Supreme Court on October 18, 2021 denied review in the case of Texas death-row prisoner Melissa Elizabeth Lucio (pictured). Lucio was convicted and sentenced to death on charges that she murdered her two-year-old daughter, Mariah. Lucio has long maintained that Mariah died from an accidental fall. During a lengthy interrogation by police on the night her daughter died, Lucio gave a statement that prosecutors presented to the jury as a confession to killing Mariah. Lucio admitted to…

A Bastrop, Texas trial court heard closing arguments October 18, 2021 on whether Texas death-row prisoner Rodney Reed should be granted a new trial in the April 1996 murder of Stacey Stites. The argument concluded the adversarial portion of an extraordinary evidentiary hearing ordered by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) to review Reed’s claims that prosecutors secured his convictions for rape and murder by suppressing exculpatory evidence and presenting false testimony. The TCCA…

A second Ohio death-row prisoner has been resentenced to life without parole under a new state law that makes individuals who were seriously mentally ill at the time of their crime ineligible for the death penalty. Donald Ketterer, who was sentenced to death in Butler County in February 2004, was transferred from death row in Ohio’s Chillicothe Correctional Institution on October 6, 2021 to a state prison in Warren County after a Butler County Court of Common Pleas ruling in September that…

Alabama has executed an intellectually disabled death-row prisoner who was sentenced to death by his trial judge despite a non-unanimous sentencing recommendation by his jury. Willie B. Smith III was executed by three-drug lethal injection on October 21, 2021 after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his appeal of a lower federal court ruling denying his claim that the state’s choice to execute him by lethal injection violated his rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Smith…

A St. Louis Circuit Court judge has denied St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner’s (pictured) July 2021 request for special prosecutors to handle three death-eligible homicide cases in her jurisdiction. On October 15, 2021, Circuit Judge Elizabeth Hogan wrote that the conflicts cited by Gardner’s office in its request for a special prosecutor were not “disqualifying” and therefore that “the Court has no authority to appoint a special prosecutor.” Gardner was elected in 2016 and…

Alleging that Shelby County Assistant District Attorney General Stephen Jones may have been representing the prosecution in his case while simultaneously serving as a capital case staff attorney assisting the county’s judges, Tennessee death-row prisoner Pervis Payne (pictured) has moved to disqualify the Shelby County District Attorney General’s office from further participation in his case. Payne is awaiting a scheduled December 13, 2021 court hearing to determine whether he is ineligible for…