Publications & Testimony

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.

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…