Publications & Testimony

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has upheld a federal district court ruling that Arkansas death-row prisoner Alvin Jackson is ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. On August 13, 2021, a divided 2 – 1 panel of the appeals court held that, applying current diagnostic criteria, Jackson’s significantly subaverage intellectual functioning and lifelong substantial impairments in day-to-day functioning established that he has intellectual disability. The…

A coalition of advocates for victims of domestic and gender-based violence, former prosecutors, legal scholars, and innocence organizations have filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a Texas woman who was sentenced to death for what forensic evidence suggests may have been an accidental fall that killed her two-year-old daughter. Melissa Elizabeth Lucio (pictured) is asking the Court to reverse her conviction for the death of her daughter, Mariah, arguing that she was denied the…

NBC’s true crime series, Dateline, featured an episode on August 13, 2021 on the wrongful conviction and eventual exoneration of former Philadelphia death-row prisoner Walter Ogrod (pictured). The episode, entitled “The Investigation,” is part of an NBC News series called “Justice for All” that reports on wrongful convictions and the U.S. criminal legal system. For the report, NBC News anchor Lester Holt interviewed Ogrod, the mother and stepfather of 4‑year-old victim Barbara Jean Horn…

An Oklahoma federal judge has ordered a trial in a suit filed by the state’s death-row prisoners challenging the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s three-drug lethal-injection process. Judge Stephen Friot of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma ruled on August 11, 2021 that the suit, which alleges that Oklahoma’s execution protocol violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment, may proceed to trial. Judge Friot denied several other claims, including…

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…