Publications & Testimony

Nine different groups of advocates, including former prosecutors and judges, leading legal scholars, innocence advocates, and defense attorneys, have filed friend-of-the-court amicus briefs in the United States Supreme Court asking the court to rule in favor of Arizona death-row prisoners Barry Jones and David Ramirez in cases that could have broad implications for the availability of federal judicial review of state convictions. The briefs, filed on September 22, 2021, urge the court to…

In a one-page order on September 24, 2021, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit denied federal death-row prisoner Dylann Roof’s motion seeking to reargue his appeal in front of the full circuit. On August 25, 2021, a special panel of judges from outside the circuit affirmed Roof’s convictions and death sentences for the racially motivated murders of nine parishioners in an historic Charleston, South Carolina African-American church in 2017. Roof can still ask the U.S.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has vacated the conviction of death-row prisoner Clinton Young, whose prosecutor was also on the payroll of the judge who presided over the trial and decided his trial court appeals. In an unsigned opinion and order with no dissents, the TCCA on September 22, 2021 granted Young’s petition for a new trial. “Judicial and prosecutorial misconduct — in the form of an undisclosed employment relationship between the trial judge and the prosecutor appearing…

Calling his evidence of innocence either immaterial or inadmissible, the Florida Supreme Court on September 23, 2021 denied death-row prisoner James Dailey’s post-conviction challenge to his conviction for the 1985 murder of a teenage girl. Over a strong dissent by Justice Jorge Labarga, the Court ruled that a sworn declaration by Jack Pearcy, later recanted, that he alone had committed the murder, was inadmissible and could not provide a legal basis to overturn Dailey’s conviction. It also…

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama granted a new penalty hearing to death-row prisoner Marcus Williams on September 23, 2021, finding his counsel ineffective for failing to investigate and present “a constitutionally adequate mitigation case during the penalty phase of his trial.” The ruling came following an evidentiary hearing ordered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in 2015. The district court conducted that hearing on May 14 – 16, 2018 and…

The Nevada Supreme Court has found that a prisoner who has been on the state’s death row for more than forty years is “actually innocent” of the death penalty and must be resentenced. In a ruling issued on September 16, 2021, the court reversed the death sentence imposed on Samuel Howard in 1983 for a 1980 robbery and murder in Las Vegas, holding that the sole remaining aggravating circumstance in his case that had made him eligible for the death penalty was invalid. Writing for a unanimous…

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has, with one exception, affirmed a trial court ruling denying death-row prisoner Albert Reid’s post-conviction challenge to his conviction and death sentence. In a 5 – 2 decision issued on September 22, 2021, the court upheld the decision of the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas that dismissed Reid’s post-conviction petition. The court remanded the case on the question of Reid’s competency to stand trial and assist in his defense, saying the trial court had not…

After more than six years with no executions and with a trial pending on the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection process, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has issued death warrants setting seven execution dates in a less than five-month period between late October 2021 and mid-March 2022. The death warrants were issued September 20, 2021, 25 days after Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor filed and then revised a motion requesting the execution dates and 40 days after…

On September 19, 2021, community leaders in Chattanooga, Tennessee dedicated a memorial to Ed Johnson, an innocent Black man wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 1906 for allegedly raping a white woman and lynched by a white mob after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order staying his execution. The memorial also honors the two lawyers who worked to save him. Eric Atkins, vice chair of the Ed Johnson Project committee, which spearheaded the creation of the memorial, said, “Hopefully…

An African-American man sentenced to death in Hamilton County, Ohio in 1999 for the murder of a white man is seeking to overturn his conviction and death sentence based on evidence from a recently published study that he was more than five times more likely to be sentenced to death because of his race and the race of the victim in his case. On September 3, 2021, citing statistical evidence from a study that found that the races of the defendant and the victim have significantly influenced the…