Publications & Testimony

NEWS (8/12/21) — California: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has reversed a ruling by a California federal district court that had granted a new trial to death-row prisoner Ernest Jones. The district court had overturned Jones’s 1995 conviction for the murder of his girlfriend’s mother, finding that the trial court had violated his right to present a complete defense by refusing to allow him to personally testify about his history of trauma and prior mental health symptoms that…

Seventeen U.S. Senators and four Members of Congress who are leading the effort to abolish the federal death penalty have called on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland (pictured) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to stop seeking the death penalty in pending and future federal murder trials. In separate letters sent to Garland on August 9, 2021, the chairs of both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, along with legislative sponsors of death-penalty repeal bills and numerous other…

Alabama and Mississippi have undertaken preparatory steps towards resuming executions in the face of continuing legal challenges to their methods of execution. On August 2, 2021, Alabama’s Department of Corrections (ADOC) notified a federal judge that it had “completed the initial physical build on the nitrogen hypoxia system” that would use nitrogen hypoxia to kill prisoners. The method is untested, and the state also indicated in its filing that it had yet to develop an execution protocol…

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released its annual report, The State of Criminal Justice 2021, examining major issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. The annual bar publication includes a chapter devoted to significant developments in capital punishment, authored by Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice and a longtime member of the Steering Committee of…

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) has reversed a lower court ruling and ordered the court to reinstate the death penalty against a Birmingham man whose trial judge had sentenced him to death even though the jury had voted 10 – 2 to recommend a life sentence. With no judges dissenting, the appeals court on August 6, 2021 overturned a Jefferson County circuit court’s determination that Brandon Deon Mitchell should receive a new penalty phase hearing because of his trial counsel’s failure…

A Death Penalty Information Center analysis of data from the National Registry of Exonerations has found that law enforcement use or threat of capital prosecution against suspects or witnesses contributed to the wrongful convictions of 10% of the people exonerated in the United States and more than one-fifth of all murder exonerations in 2020. Reviewing data from the National Registry of Exonerations’ 2020 Annual Report, DPIC found that the death penalty was pursued or defendants or witnesses…

Legal reform advocates and a committee of high-profile Supreme Court practitioners have urged the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States to recommend changes in the way the Court handles emergency applications for stays of executions in death-penalty cases. In testimony in public hearings before the Commission in June and July 2021, Innocence Project Executive Director Christina Swarns, who argued the Texas death-penalty case Buck v. Davis before the Court, and the…

As President Biden considers his administration’s policy on the federal death penalty, his expressed opposition to the punishment may be buoyed by a new study that has found that “Americans support capital punishment less than they have at any time since the modern death penalty system was established in 1976.” The polling analysis, conducted by University of North Carolina political science professor Frank R. Baumgartner and published August 3, 2021 in the Washington Post’s data feature…

Racial bias in jury selection is compromising the “credibility, reliability, and integrity of the legal system,” and its effects are especially pronounced in death penalty cases, a new report from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has found. EJI’s report, Race and the Jury: Illegal Discrimination in Jury Selection, released online July 27, 2021, places the continuing illegal exclusion of jurors of color in its historical context as “a continuing legacy of our history of racial injustice,”…

Two Ohio civil rights organizations have filed suit against the state’s parole board, alleging that the board has an illegal policy of automatically denying parole to anyone who was formerly sentenced to death. On July 28, 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio and the Ohio Justice & Policy Center sued the Ohio Parole Board on behalf of Patricia Wernert and George Clayton (pictured), both of whom were sentenced to death under a law that was declared unconstitutional in 1978. Neither…