Publications & Testimony

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…

“What should become of individuals who are awaiting execution following the repeal or judicial invalidation of capital punishment legislation?,” ask authors James R. Acker (pictured, left) and Brian W. Stull (pictured, right) in a recent article published in the Akron Law Review. If history is a guide, they say, the prisoners’ lives should be spared. Acker is an emeritus distinguished teaching professor in the University of Albany’s School of Criminal Justice and Stull is a senior staff…

At the request of Cameron County prosecutors, a Texas trial court has vacated the death warrant that had scheduled the execution of Ruben Gutierrez (pictured) for October 27, 2021. In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed Gutierrez’s execution after Texas refused to allow his spiritual advisor to accompany him in the execution chamber and directed the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, where Gutierrez had filed a civil rights suit alleging religious discrimination, to…

NEWS (9/16/21) – Nevada: The Supreme Court of Nevada has overturned Samuel Howard’s death sentence, finding him “actually innocent” of the death penalty. Reversing the trial court’s dismissal of Howard’s postconviction challenge to his death sentence, the appeals court ruled that a recent decision by New York state courts that overturned a conviction prosecutors relied upon as an aggravating circumstance in Howard’s case invalidated that aggravating circumstance. The Nevada Supreme Court had…

Four Utah district attorneys, representing counties that comprise 57.5% of the state’s population, have urged the state legislature and Utah Governor Spencer Cox to enact legislation to repeal and replace Utah’s death penalty. In an open letter to Cox and the legislature released September 14, 2021, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, Grand County Attorney Christina Sloan, Summit County Attorney Margaret Olson, and Utah County Attorney David Leavitt — two Republicans and two Democrats…

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board has voted to recommend that Governor Kevin Stitt commute the death sentence imposed on Julius Jones (pictured) by an Oklahoma County jury in 1999 to a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. After a three-hour hearing on September 13, 2021 that featured testimony from prosecutors, defense attorneys, and family members of murder victim Paul Howell, the board voted 3 – 1 in favor of commutation, with one member, Scott Williams, recusing…

Former Mississippi death-row prisoner Curtis Flowers (pictured), who was exonerated in 2020, is suing the officials whose misconduct led to his arrest and repeated wrongful conviction. Flowers was tried six times and spent 23 years wrongfully incarcerated for a quadruple murder in a white-owned furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. In a complaint filed September 3, 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Flowers alleges that his trial prosecutor, an…