Publications & Testimony

Lawyers for white suprema­cist Dylann Roof (pic­tured) have asked a fed­er­al appeals court to vacate his fed­er­al con­vic­tions and death sen­tences for the racial­ly-moti­vat­ed mur­ders of nine wor­shipers at an his­toric African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015. Roof’s lawyers raised more than a dozen claims of con­sti­tu­tion­al and legal error in a 321-page legal brief filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on January…

Georgia exe­cut­ed Donnie Lance on January 29, 2020 after his requests for DNA test­ing and a plea for clemen­cy sup­port­ed by the chil­dren he and mur­der vic­tim Joy Lance shared were…

In its unprece­dent­ed rush to exe­cute eight pris­on­ers over an eleven-day peri­od in April 2017, Arkansas may have exe­cut­ed an inno­cent man. Civil rights and legal reform orga­ni­za­tions filed a state Freedom of Information Act law­suit on January 23, 2020 on behalf of the broth­er of Ledell Lee (pic­tured), a man Arkansas exe­cut­ed on April 20, 2017. The law­suit argues that DNA and fin­ger­print evi­dence that courts blocked the defense from test­ing in the days leading…

Death row and the num­ber of pris­on­ers fac­ing active death sen­tences in the U.S. con­tin­ue to decline, accord­ing to the lat­est quar­ter­ly sur­vey of death row by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund…

Keith Tharpe — an African American sen­tenced to death 29 years ago by a jury that includ­ed a mem­ber who called him the ​“N‑word” and doubt­ed whether ​“Black peo­ple even have souls”— died on Georgia’s death row January 24, 2020. He was 61 years old. In a press state­ment, his lawyers from the Georgia Death Penalty Resource Center said he had been suf­fer­ing from can­cer and like­ly died of com­pli­ca­tions from the…

In a dra­mat­ic rever­sal made pos­si­ble by changes in court per­son­nel, the Florida Supreme Court has repu­di­at­ed its pri­or deci­sions requir­ing that cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing juries unan­i­mous­ly agree to the death penal­ty before a tri­al judge may sen­tence a defen­dant to death. ​“Our court … got it wrong,” the jus­tices said, when it ruled in 2016 that death sen­tences imposed after non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tions for death vio­lat­ed the state and federal…

In a case pros­e­cu­tors now describe as a ​“per­fect storm” of injus­tice, Pennsylvania death-row pris­on­er Christopher Williams (pic­tured) and his co-defen­dant Theophalis Wilson have been exon­er­at­ed of a 1989 triple mur­der in North…

Saying that Nicholas Sutton ​“has gone from a life-tak­er to a life-saver,” lawyers for the Tennessee death-row pris­on­er filed an appli­ca­tion for clemen­cy with Governor Bill Lee on January 14, 2020. The clemen­cy appli­ca­tion, which requests that Lee com­mute Sutton’s sen­tence to life with­out parole, con­tained affi­davits of sup­port from sev­en Tennessee cor­rec­tion­al offi­cials, mem­bers of the vic­tims’ fam­i­lies, and five of the jurors in the…

A DPIC analy­sis of exe­cu­tions and new death sen­tences in 2019 has found that even as death penal­ty usage declined across the United States, racial dis­par­i­ties in its application…