Publications & Testimony

Arizona reportedly has “refurbished” its gas chamber and has spent more than $2,000 to acquire ingredients to execute prisoners with cyanide gas, the same gas used by the Nazis to murder more than one million men, women, and children during the Holocaust. Records obtained by The Guardian show that the Arizona Department of Corrections Rehabilitation and Reentry purchased a solid brick of potassium cyanide in December for $1,530. The state also purchased supplies of additional ingredients for…

California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered an independent investigation into the case of Kevin Cooper, who has consistently maintained his innocence in the 1983 quadruple-murder for which he was sentenced to death. Newsom’s May 28, 2021 executive order appoints the law firm Morrison and Foerster, LLP as Special Counsel to the California Board of Parole Hearings and directs the firm to “conduct a full review of the trial and appellate records in [Cooper’s] case and of the facts underlying the…

NEWS (5/24 and 5/26/21) — Washington, D.C.: The U.S. Supreme Court issued rulings in two death-penalty cases, denying a defense petition to review an “as-applied” challenge to Missouri’s lethal-injection protocol and granting a prosecution petition to delay enforcement of a state-court ruling that had voided the conviction of an Oklahoma death-row prisoner. On May 24, the Court denied certiorari in Ernest Johnson v. Precythe, declining to review whether execution by lethal injection…

In the first Racial Justice Act case to reach a hearing since the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the state legislature’s attempt to retroactively repeal the landmark law, a North Carolina judge has ordered state prosecutors to produce decades of data on jury selection in capital cases. On May 20, 2021, Superior Court Judge Wayland Sermons (pictured) granted a request from the legal team representing death-row prisoner Hasson Bacote that prosecutors produce records related to…

Lawyers for federal death row prisoner Dylann Roof argued to a federal appeals court that the avowed white supremacist’s convictions and death sentences in his trial for the 2015 murders of nine Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina should be overturned because the judge presiding over his case unconstitutionally permitted Roof to represent himself while mentally incompetent. In oral argument on May 25, 2021 before a specially constituted…

Saying that “the private sector can no longer be a silent bystander in the society it inhabits,” former Unilever CEO Paul Polman, has called on business leaders around the world to take a stand against the death penalty. “The death penalty has to go,” Polman wrote in a May 12, 2021 commentary in Business Insider. “Business has a vital part to play.” Polman, the co-founder and co-chair of IMAGINE, a global business consultancy promoting structural and institutional changes in corporate…

A committee created by the California state legislature to study the state’s penal code and propose improvements in the law has recommended that California repeal its death penalty and expeditiously reduce the size of its death row. At the conclusion of a virtual meeting on May 14, 2021, the California Committee on Revision of the Penal Code (CRPC) unanimously voted to recommend that the state abolish the death penalty. It was the first ever policy vote on the death penalty by the Committee…

In a failure of transparency one legislative leader described as “unfathomable,” the State of Texas put Quintin Jones (pictured) to death on May 19, 2021 without any media witnesses present to observe the execution. It was the first time in the 571 executions conducted by Texas since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld its death penalty statute in 1976 that no media witnesses were present. Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) Director of Communications Jeremy Desel blamed the snafu on…

An Idaho trial court has stayed the scheduled June 2, 2021 execution of Gerald Pizzuto, Jr. (pictured), halting state prosecutors’ efforts to put the hospice-bound terminally ill prisoner to death before his stage‑4 cancer can take his life and state officials can consider his petition for clemency. On April 9, Pizzuto’s lawyers filed a clemency petition, seeking to commute his sentence to life without possibility parole based upon his terminal illness, brain damage from head injuries…

In a primary election widely considered a referendum on reform prosecutors, incumbent Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner easily secured a victory against former Philadelphia homicide prosecutor Carlos Vega. Krasner won the May 18, 2021 election on a platform of continuing the reform he began four years ago when he was first elected: eschewing use of the death penalty, initiating systemic criminal justice reforms, and ending mass incarceration. Krasner’s Democratic primary win all but…