Publications & Testimony

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…

Kentucky prosecutors have dropped capital charges against two defendants who had challenged the constitutionality of the death penalty for crimes committed by offenders younger than 21 years old. On April 21, 2021, prosecutors announced that they will no longer seek the death penalty against Efrain Diaz, Jr. and Justin Delone Smith, two of the three adolescents accused of the 2015 killing University of Kentucky student Jonathan Krueger. A third co-defendant, Roman Gonzalez, is not eligible for…

NEWS (4/29/21) — Oklahoma: The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has vacated the convictions and death sentences of two more death-row prisoners who, the court found, had committed their offenses against Native Americans on tribal lands. Applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark tribal sovereignty ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the court found that the murders for which Benjamin Robert Cole Sr. and James Chandler Ryder had been convicted occurred in “Indian country” within the historical…

The Supreme Court of Appeal in Malawi has declared the country’s death-penalty law unconstitutional, making the southeast African nation the 22^nd sub-Saharan country to abolish the death penalty for all offenses. Amnesty International reported that 27 prisoners were on Malawi’s death row at the end of 2020. The high court’s ruling, issued April 28, 2021, directed that they be resentenced. The court ruled that the death-penalty statute contravened Part IV of the national constitution, which…

The history of racial oppression and lynching in the U.S. South has, civil rights advocate Martin Luther King III writes, “too frequently … gone untold and unaddressed.” But, he says in an April 17, 2021 op-ed in USA Today, Virginia’s repeal of the death penalty “shows us what is possible when we confront this country’s racist past, and acknowledge how racism permeates this country’s practices and laws.” King (pictured), the eldest son of civil rights icons Coretta Scott King and the Rev. Dr.