Publications & Testimony

One day after Governor Bill Lee signed a bill curing a defect in Tennessee law that had prevented death-row prisoners from challenging their death sentences on the basis of intellectual disability, Pervis Payne’s (pictured) lawyers asked a Memphis trial court to vacate his death sentence. On May 12, 2021, federal defenders representing Payne filed a Petition to Determine Ineligibility to be Executed in the Shelby County Criminal Court seeking that the court “declare that Mr. Payne is…

The legislature doesn’t want capital punishment, the executive branch can’t obtain execution drugs, and Nebraska prosecutors have moved forward this year with the pandemic-delayed capital sentencing trials of two defendants separately convicted of a murder out of a voyeuristic true-crime novel. The state, writes Associated Press reporter Grant Schulte in a May 9, 2021 analysis, is “still wedded to the idea of executing prisoners, just not the practical part of doing it” and appears “caught in a…

Posthumous forensic testing of evidence in the case of Ledell Lee (pictured), who was executed in Arkansas in 2017, has found DNA from an unidentified male on a bloody club used to kill Debra Reese 29 years ago and on a blood-soaked shirt that was wrapped around the weapon. The DNA results, released by the Innocence Project and the ACLU on April 30, 2021, raise additional troubling questions about Lee’s conviction. Lee, who consistently maintained his innocence of the crime, was executed on…

A federal appeals court has reversed the death sentence of an African-American Georgia death-row prisoner who was represented at trial by a defense lawyer notorious for his history of substandard representation and racial bias in death-penalty cases. On April 27, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the ruling of a federal district court and overturned the death sentence imposed on Willie James Pye (pictured). In a unanimous but unpublished opinion, the appeals court…

NEWS (5/6/21) — Florida: The Florida Supreme Court issued two decisions denying relief in capital cases. In Randall Deviney v. State, the court denied Deviney’s direct appeal from the death sentence imposed in 2017 in Deviney’s capital resentencing trial. The trial judge had initially sentenced Deviney to death in 2008 under Florida’s unconstitutional judicial factfinding procedures, imposing the death penalty after four of the jurors in the case had voted for a life sentence. The main issue…

In an overwhelming bipartisan vote, the Texas House of Representatives has passed a bill that ends death-penalty liability under the state’s controversial “law of parties” for felony accomplices who neither kill nor intended that a killing take place and were minor participants in the conduct that led to the death of the victim. Currently, Texas law makes any participant in a felony criminally liable for the acts of everyone else involved in the crime, irrespective of how small a role he played…

One day shy of the tenth anniversary of the state’s last execution, the South Carolina legislature, frustrated by the state’s inability to obtain execution drugs, approved a bill that would authorize putting prisoners to death in the electric chair or by firing squad. On May 5, 2021, the South Carolina House of Representatives voted 66 – 43 to approve Senate Bill 200, bringing the bill closer to final passage. The State Senate passed an earlier version of the bill on March 2 by a vote of 32 – 11.

A new poll of registered Texas voters has found that support for the death penalty, while still strong, has fallen significantly over the past decade. A University of Texas/Texas Tribune internet survey of 1,200 registered voters conducted from April 16 – 22, 2021 found that 63% say they favor keeping the death penalty for people convicted of violent crimes. That number is down from 75% in February 2015 and 78% when the poll began in 2010. The poll found that fewer Texas voters said they want to…

A former Utah defense lawyer has received a $250,000 settlement after suing Weber County for allegedly firing him in retaliation for his public criticism of the county’s refusal to properly fund a death-row prisoner’s capital appeal and its interference in the case. Samuel Newton (pictured), now a law professor at the University of Idaho, reached a settlement with county officials in a longstanding dispute over the Weber County Commissioners’ termination of his contract to provide criminal…

Finding “brazen misconduct” by a prosecutor who withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and then secretly served as the trial judge’s law clerk in the case, a Midland County, Texas judge has recommended that death-row prisoner Clinton Young (pictured) be granted a new trial. In a 30-page factfinding order issued on April 26, 2021, Senior Judge Sid Harle excoriated former assistant district attorney Ralph Petty and the Midland County District Attorney’s office for “shocking prosecutorial…