Publications & Testimony

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…

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…