Publications & Testimony

As a state legislator in 1981, Jim Petro (pictured) supported a bill to reinstate Ohio’s death penalty after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s previous capital punishment statute. Later, as Ohio Attorney General, he supervised 19 executions in the state. Since then, his views have changed and he recently co-authored an op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch urging the legislature to repeal the state’s death penalty. In the April 2021 episode of the Death Penalty Information Center podcast…

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a Georgia death-penalty case in which the prosecution was permitted to make a visibly shackled defendant reenact the murder in front of the jury, while his defense counsel raised no objection. In a decision issued on April 19, 2021, the Court denied the petition for writ of certiorari filed by lawyers for Georgia death-row prisoner Frederick Whatley (pictured). Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, writing that “counsel’s unreasonable failure to…

The Tennessee state legislature has overwhelmingly approved and sent to the governor a bill that creates a procedure by which death-row prisoners can obtain judicial review of claims that they are ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. On April 26, 2021, HB 1062 passed the Tennessee House by a vote of 89 – 4 and the Senate by a vote of 28 – 1. The bipartisan bill was inspired by the case of Pervis Payne (pictured), a Tennessee death-row prisoner with strong evidence…

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has amended its execution protocol to permit a condemned prisoner to be accompanied in the execution chamber by a spiritual adviser of his or her own choosing. The protocol amendment, adopted on April 21, 2021, follows two years of litigation over TDCJ policies that had denied condemned death-row prisoners access to the comfort of their own spiritual adviser in the execution chamber. The TDCJ’s prior policies had drawn fierce opposition across…

NEWS (4/21 – 4/23/21) — Texas: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled against Texas death-row prisoners in three separate capital appeals. On April 23, a split panel of the court upheld a conviction and death sentence imposed by an all-White jury on Andre Thomas — a Black man — for killing his wife, who was White, and two children. Although three of the jurors who were empaneled expressed strong opposition to interracial marriage, Thomas’ defense counsel did not object to seating…

The Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission has suspended an African-American judge who declared the state’s death penalty statute unconstitutional, accusing her of unprofessional conduct and anti-death penalty bias. In a 109-page complaint filed on April 6, 2021, the Commission charged Judge Tracie Todd (pictured), a criminal court trial judge in the Birmingham Division of the Jefferson County Circuit Court, “with multiple incidents of abuse of judicial power and abandonment of the judicial role…

As the United States undergoes an awakening on racial injustices in policing and the judicial process, commentators and public policy advocates are calling for a reimagining of public safety and criminal punishment that rejects the reflexive imposition of harsh punishment as an instrument of social control. In an April 9, 2021 op-ed in The Washington Post and a series of April 12 essays by the Brennan Center for Justice, policy experts say it is time for the nation to view the U.S. legal…

Fewer executions were carried out across the world in 2020 than at any time in a decade and new death sentences fell by more than a third, according to a new report by Amnesty International. It was the third consecutive year in which confirmed executions reached a 10-year low, and the sixth year in a row in which confirmed executions declined, Amnesty said. The human rights organization’s report, Global Report: Death Sentences and Executions 2020, released April 21, 2021, said that Amnesty had…

A controversial psychiatrist who repeatedly testified that severely mentally ill death-row prisoners were faking their symptoms and were competent to be executed has been barred from medical practice in Florida. On March 31, 2021, the Florida Department of Health issued an emergency restriction on the medical license of Alan J. Waldman, M.D. (pictured), prohibiting him from practicing as a medical doctor until the impaired practitioner program for the state’s Board of Medicine provides notice…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has overturned the death sentence of the nation’s longest-serving death-row prisoner, 45 years after he was first sent to death row. In an unpublished opinion issued on April 14, 2021, the TCCA held that Raymond Riles (pictured), originally sentenced to death by a Harris County jury on December 11, 1975, is entitled to a new sentencing hearing. The court ruled that Riles had been unconstitutionally sentenced to death in his 1978 retrial when the trial…