Publications & Testimony

A new documentary about the case of Carlos DeLuna, a likely innocent man who was executed in Texas in 1989, premieres June 14, 2021 at the Tribeca Film Festival. The Phantom, based on an investigation by Columbia Law School Professor James Liebman and his students that culminated in the book, The Wrong Carlos, tells the story of the flawed investigation into the 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez, a single mother who was killed during a robbery of the convenience store where she worked. DeLuna not…

NEWS (6/9/21) — Nebraska: A panel of three judges has sentenced Aubrey Trail to death for the 2017 killing of Sydney Loofe. In a statement to the court before the panel pronounced sentence, Trail admitted to the killing but said that his co-defendant, Bailey Boswell, who faces capital sentencing hearing later this month, was not involved in the killing. Trail is the 12^th person on Nebraska’s death row. Trail’s death sentence continues a trend in which new death sentences are disproportionally…

The Georgia Supreme Court has denied a constitutional challenge to the state’s statutory requirement that a capital defendant must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he or she is intellectually disabled before being declared ineligible for the death penalty. In an 8 – 1 ruling issued on June 1, 2021, the Georgia high court affirmed the conviction and death sentence imposed on Rodney Young. Young had argued that requiring a capital defendant to meet the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard — the…

Raymond Riles (pictured), the nation’s longest serving death-row prisoner, has been resentenced to life. On June 9, 2021, Harris County, Texas District Judge Ana Martinez imposed the life sentence via a Zoom teleconference after county prosecutors determined that Riles was incompetent to participate in a capital resentencing trial and, if again sentenced to death, would never be mentally competent to be executed. The 71-year-old Riles was originally sentenced to death on December 11, 1975…

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (pictured) has filed motions in a Florida trial court seeking to block DNA testing that the local elected State Attorney had agreed to and a judge had granted in two 45-year-old Orange County death penalty cases. In pleadings filed June 1 and June 2, 2021 in the Florida Ninth Circuit Court, Moody objected to DNA testing for Tommy Zeigler and Henry Sireci, both of whom were sentenced to death in 1976 and have long asserted their innocence. Six of Ziegler’s…

Building on what they describe as growing momentum to end capital punishment and greater awareness of racial justice concerns, a coalition of Ohio African-American church and legislative leaders are putting their weight behind bipartisan legislation to repeal the state’s death penalty. In a May 18, 2021 press conference at the state capitol in Columbus, the Ohio Council of Churches and the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus called on the legislature to pass House Bill 183 and Senate Bill 103…

The California Supreme Court heard oral argument on June 2, 2021 in a capital case whose outcome could affect the fate of hundreds of prisoners on the state’s death row. Supported by friend-of-the-court briefs by California Governor Gavin Newsom and an alliance of progressive California district attorneys, lawyers for death row prisoner Don’te McDaniel argued to the court that California’s capital sentencing scheme is unconstitutional because it fails to require that capital sentencing juries…

NEWS (6/4/21) — Arizona: The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Lynch v. Arizona, which struck down the state’s unconstitutional refusal to instruct capital-sentencing juries that defendants who are sentenced to life are not eligible for parole, does not provide grounds for a death-row prisoner to seek new state-court review of that issue. The court dismissed an attempt by John Cruz to raise the issue, saying that his prior lawyers had failed to…

A new poll by the Pew Research Center reports that support for the death penalty is down in the United States but may be higher than previous estimates because some poll respondents are unwilling to admit to a live pollster that they support capital punishment. Results of Pew’s April 5 – 11, 2021 on-line survey of U.S. adults, released on June 2, indicated that 60% of respondents said they favored the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, down from the 65% level of support reported by…

In 1989, Nevada prison doctor, Dr. Karen Gedney (pictured) refused a request by state officials to write a prescription for execution drugs, believing that doing so violated her medical oath to do no harm and her duty to provide medical care to prisoners. In the second episode of the Discussions With DPIC podcast’s Rethinking Public Safety series, Dr. Gedney speaks with DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger about this and other issues she encountered in her three decades as a doctor in the…