Publications & Testimony

The Nebraska Supreme Court has upheld the state’s death penal­ty law against a claim that its death-sen­tenc­ing pro­ce­dure vio­lates cap­i­tal defen­dants’ Sixth Amendment right to a jury…

A bad­ly divid­ed fed­er­al court of appeals has lift­ed a court order that had pre­vent­ed the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment from resum­ing exe­cu­tions after a hia­tus of more than 16…

NEWS (4/​7/​20) — Nevada: A tri­al-court judge in Las Vegas has dis­missed a law­suit filed by drug­mak­ers against the Nevada prison sys­tem after state offi­cials agreed to return unused drugs it had obtained under false pre­tens­es in a failed attempt to exe­cute Scott Dozier in 2018. Pharmaceutical com­pa­nies Alvogen, Inc., Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA, and Sandoz Inc. reached a set­tle­ment with the state in which Nevada agreed to give back the drugs, which have expired, in exchange for a…

Ohio death-row pris­on­er Melvin Bonnell (pic­tured) has asked the Ohio Supreme Court to vacate his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence after his lawyers dis­cov­ered phys­i­cal evi­dence from his case that Cuyahoga County pros­e­cu­tors had repeat­ed­ly insist­ed since the mid-1990s had been lost or…

NEWS (4/​6/​20) — Texas: A Texas tri­al court has resched­uled the exe­cu­tion of Billy Joe Wardlow from April 29, 2020 until July 8, 2020, the fourth exe­cu­tion in Texas that has been post­poned because of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. District Judge Angela Saucier grant­ed a motion filed by the Morris County District Attorney’s office to resched­ule the exe­cu­tion, rather than with­draw­ing the death war­rant as a defense motion had request­ed. If the court had with­drawn the warrant,…

Official mis­con­duct and per­jury or false accu­sa­tion con­tin­ue to be the main rea­sons inno­cent men and women are wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed in America, accord­ing to the 2019 annu­al report by the National Registry of Exonerations. That mis­con­duct, the report indi­cates, is most preva­lent in cas­es involv­ing the most seri­ous criminal…

Pakistan (4/​3/​20) — The Sindh High Court, the high­est court of the Pakistani province of Sindh, has over­turned the con­vic­tion and death sen­tence of al-Qaeda leader Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh for the graph­ic mur­der of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002. The court upheld Sheikh’s con­vic­tion for kid­nap­ping, reduced his sen­tence to sev­en years in prison, and released him on time served. The court acquit­ted three oth­ers of the mur­der charges and…

Courts are fail­ing bad­ly in keep­ing junk psy­cho­log­i­cal sci­ence out of the court­room in crim­i­nal cas­es, per­mit­ting the admis­sion of psy­cho­log­i­cal tests that have nev­er been reviewed for reli­a­bil­i­ty and oth­ers that have been found unre­li­able, a recent study reports. Among the prob­lem­at­ic tests, anoth­er group of psy­chol­o­gists write, is a ​“psy­chopa­thy check­list” com­mon­ly used by pros­e­cu­tors to argue that a defen­dant pos­es a future dan­ger to soci­ety and should be sen­tenced to…

After ignor­ing health risks posed by lengthy court pro­ceed­ings dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic and fac­ing crit­i­cism that a cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion fol­low­ing the state’s abo­li­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment would amount to a polit­i­cal­ly par­ti­san waste of tax­pay­er dol­lars, pros­e­cu­tors in Adams County, Colorado have announced that they will drop the death penal­ty in a high-pro­file case involv­ing the killing of a sheriff’s…