Publications & Testimony

A divided Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board has denied the clemency petition filed on behalf of death-row prisoner John Marion Grant, who is scheduled to be executed on October 28, 2021. The 3 – 2 vote on October 5, 2021 — with Board members Adam Luck and Kelly Doyle voting in favor of clemency and members Richard Smothermon, Scott Williams, and Larry Morris voting to let the execution proceed — paves the way for the state’s first execution in more than six years, following a series of botched…

An Oregon appellate court has granted a new trial to death-row prisoner Jesse Johnson, finding his trial counsel ineffective for failing to interview a neighbor of the homicide victim whose eyewitness testimony could potentially exonerate him of the murder. On October 6, 2021, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled that Johnson’s trial lawyers deficiently investigated the murder, failing to speak with Patricia Hubbard, a neighbor who lived directly across the street…

Kirk Bloodsworth, the first former death-row prisoner to have been exonerated by DNA testing, has become the first person to receive supplemental compensation under a new Maryland wrongful imprisonment statute. Bloodsworth, who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 on charges that he had raped and murdered 9‑year-old Dawn Hamilton, won a new trial as a result of prosecutorial misconduct but was wrongfully convicted a second time and sentenced to life imprisonment. DNA testing…

Calling his evidence of innocence either immaterial or inadmissible, the Florida Supreme Court on September 23, 2021 denied death-row prisoner James Dailey’s (pictured) post-conviction challenge to his conviction for the 1985 murder of a teenage girl. By a vote of 6 – 1, the court upheld Dailey’s conviction, ruling that a sworn declaration by Dailey’s co-defendant Jack Pearcy that he alone had committed the murder was inadmissible and could not provide a legal basis for a new trial. The court…

The death penalty is reserved for “’the worst of the worst’ — or at least that is what we are told,” writes University of Richmond law professor Corrina Barrett Lain (pictured) in a Washington & Lee Law Review post-mortem on Virginia’s use of capital punishment. Although the “worst of the worst” is a core command of a constitutionally compliant death penalty, “the death penalty doesn’t just exist in the abstract,” Lain notes. And when she takes the opportunity “to set the record straight about…

As the execution date nears for a Missouri man widely regarded to be intellectually disabled, a former Missouri Governor, Supreme Court Justice, and papal envoy have joined faith and civil rights leaders, and the prisoner’s lawyers in efforts to spare his life. Ernest Johnson (pictured) is scheduled to be executed on October 5, 2021. Despite significant evidence supporting Johnson’s claim that he is ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability, the Missouri Supreme Court…

Sherwood Brown has been exonerated of the charges that sent him to death row in Mississippi in 1995 for a triple murder he did not commit. On August 24, 2021, DeSoto County Circuit Court Judge Jimmy McClure granted a prosecution motion to dismiss charges against Brown (pictured after his release), who was released later that day after having spent 26 years on the state’s death row or facing the prospects of a capital retrial. “We are extremely thankful to see Sherwood walk out of prison a free…

In the September 2021 episode of Discussions With DPIC, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill political scientist Frank Baumgartner (pictured), one of the nation’s leading academic authorities on the death penalty, joins Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham to discuss what research has shown about the impact of race, gender, and geography in capital cases and the current historically low level of public support for capital punishment. Asked what 50 years of data…

Two men exonerated from death row, one in Ohio and one in Oklahoma, have received million ‑dollar payouts for their wrongful convictions and death sentences. Both were tried and convicted in counties with long histories of prosecutorial misconduct and high rates of wrongful capital convictions. The compensation comes more than a decade after each was released from incarceration. In early September 2021, former death-row prisoner Robert Miller reached a $2 million settlement with Oklahoma City…

In a case that reflects the waning use of capital punishment, even in the some of the counties that have carried out the most executions in modern times, Rick Rhoades on September 28, 2021 became the first person convicted in Harris County (Houston), Texas to be executed in two years. Rhoades was sentenced to death in Harris County in 1992. With 130 executions since the 1970s, the county is responsible for putting more prisoners to death than any other county in the nation, and for more…