Publications & Testimony

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review the case of Jewish death-row pris­on­er Randy Halprin (pic­tured), who was tried and sen­tenced to death in Texas before a judge who made anti-Semitic and racist com­ments about Halprin and his co-defen­­dants. The April 6, 2020 deci­sion marked the sec­ond time in less than two months that the Court has declined to review a con­tro­ver­sial Texas death-penal­­ty case in the wake of stays of…

Saying she want­ed jus­tice for her mur­dered four-year-old daugh­ter, not​“a closed case with an inno­cent per­son in jail,” Sharon Fahy has joined with the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office and defense lawyers in the fight to imme­di­ate­ly free Walter Ogrod (pic­tured) from Pennsylvania​’s…

NEWS (4/​9/​20) — Pennsylvania: A fed­er­al dis­trict court judge has approved a set­tle­ment of a class action chal­lenge to the con­di­tions of con­fine­ment on Pennsylvania’s death row that offi­cial­ly ends the state’s pol­i­cy of manda­to­ry incar­cer­a­tion of death-row pris­on­ers in per­ma­nent soli­tary con­fine­ment. In a 14-page Memorandum and Order, Judge John E. Jones III of the United States District Court for the Middle…

The Nebraska Supreme Court has upheld the state’s death penal­ty law against a claim that its death-sen­­tenc­ing pro­ce­dure vio­lates cap­i­tal defen­dants’ Sixth Amendment right to…

A bad­ly divid­ed fed­er­al court of appeals has lift­ed a court order that had pre­vent­ed the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment from resum­ing exe­cu­tions after a hia­tus of more…

NEWS (4/​7/​20) — Nevada: A tri­al-court judge in Las Vegas has dis­missed a law­suit filed by drug­mak­ers against the Nevada prison sys­tem after state offi­cials agreed to return unused drugs it had obtained under false pre­tens­es in a failed attempt to exe­cute Scott Dozier in 2018. Pharmaceutical com­pa­nies Alvogen, Inc., Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA, and Sandoz Inc. reached a set­tle­ment with the state in which Nevada agreed to give back the drugs, which have expired,…

Ohio death-row pris­on­er Melvin Bonnell (pic­tured) has asked the Ohio Supreme Court to vacate his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence after his lawyers dis­cov­ered phys­i­cal evi­dence from his case that Cuyahoga County pros­e­cu­tors had repeat­ed­ly insist­ed since the mid-1990s had been…

NEWS (4/​6/​20) — Texas: A Texas tri­al court has resched­uled the exe­cu­tion of Billy Joe Wardlow from April 29, 2020 until July 8, 2020, the fourth exe­cu­tion in Texas that has been post­poned because of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. District Judge Angela Saucier grant­ed a motion filed by the Morris County District Attorney’s office to resched­ule the exe­cu­tion, rather than with­draw­ing the death war­rant as a defense motion had request­ed. If the court had withdrawn…

Official mis­con­duct and per­jury or false accu­sa­tion con­tin­ue to be the main rea­sons inno­cent men and women are wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed in America, accord­ing to the 2019 annu­al report by the National Registry of Exonerations. That mis­con­duct, the report indi­cates, is most preva­lent in cas­es involv­ing the most serious…

Pakistan (4/​3/​20) — The Sindh High Court, the high­est court of the Pakistani province of Sindh, has over­turned the con­vic­tion and death sen­tence of al-Qaeda leader Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh for the graph­ic mur­der of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002. The court upheld Sheikh’s con­vic­tion for kid­nap­ping, reduced his sen­tence to sev­en years in prison, and released him on time served. The court acquit­ted three oth­ers of the…