Publications & Testimony

Nearly seven years after the botched execution of Joseph Wood put the death penalty on hold in Arizona, state officials are seeking to resume executions. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced on April 6, 2021 that he is asking the Arizona Supreme Court to set a briefing schedule and issue execution warrants for death-row prisoners Clarence Dixon and Frank Atwood. At present, no state but Texas has any pending executions scheduled for 2021. The Attorney General’s announcement drew…

NEWS (4/8/21) — Nevada: The Nevada Supreme Court has granted capital defendant Wilber Ernesto Martinez-Guzman’s emergency motion to stay a premature deadline the trial court had set for his lawyers to file a claim that he is ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. A trial court in Reno had set an April 20 deadline for Martinez-Guzman, four months earlier than the time allotted under Nevada law, which permits a defendant to file up to ten days before the scheduled…

Just one out of every six death sentences imposed in Ohio in the past forty years has resulted in an execution, according to the Ohio Attorney General’s 2020 Ohio Capital Crimes Annual Report. The report, released by Attorney General Dave Yost on April 1, 2021, criticized the state’s death-penalty system as “increasingly time-consuming, costly, and lethargic.” According to the report, 336 people have been sentenced to death since the state’s current death-penalty law was instituted in 1981. Of…

More than thirty years after a Florida judge sentenced him to death following an 8 – 4 sentencing recommendation by an all-white jury, Crosley Green (pictured) has been freed. Citing Green’s age and health risks related to continued incarceration during the pandemic, Judge Roy B. Dalton of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida on April 7, 2021, ordered Green’s immediate release while a federal appeals court considers prosecutors’ appeal of the district court’s July 2018…

In a wide-ranging six-part editorial series analyzing systemic flaws in the administration of the death penalty, the editorial board of the South Florida Sun Sentinel has called for the abolition of capital punishment. “[I]t is past time to repeal it, here in Florida and nationwide,” the editors wrote. The editorial series, published from March 21 through March 28, 2021, critiqued capital punishment from a variety of angles. The death penalty, the editors wrote, “has nothing to do with…

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter has asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider its decision recognizing the tribal sovereignty of the Chickasaw Nation over crimes committed by or against Native Americans on Chickasaw Nation lands. On March 11, 2021, applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2020 tribal sovereignty ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Oklahoma appeals court ruled that the Chickasaw Nation Reservation created in a series of treaties between the United States…

A federal district court has ruled that Texas unconstitutionally denied DNA testing to a death-row prisoner who is alive today only because of a last-minute stay of execution granted because the state refused to allow his religious adviser to accompany him in the execution chamber. In a 26-page ruling issued on March 23, 2021, Judge Hilda Tagle of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas paved the way for Ruben Gutierrez (pictured) to obtain DNA testing that he argues will…

NEWS (3/31/21) — Florida: After finding that Florida death-row prisoner William Greg Thomas was entitled to present an untimely habeas corpus petition because his prior lawyer had abandoned him, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reviewed but denied Thomas’ challenge to his conviction and death sentence. The court held that Thomas was entitled to equitable tolling of the habeas corpus statute of limitations but ruled that his ineffective assistance claims were either…

Clemency efforts on behalf of Tennessee death-row prisoner Pervis Payne (pictured) are surging, as a petition on his behalf by The Innocence Project had collected more than 600,000 signatures by March 26, 2021 and social media campaigns supporting his cause continue to attract increasing attention worldwide. Payne’s claims of innocence, intellectual disability, and racial bias have resonated with supporters from numerous religious, legal, and civil rights organizations, including the Tennessee…

California Governor Gavin Newsom has appointed Rob Bonta (pictured), a state legislator who co-authored a proposed state constitutional amendment to ban capital punishment, as California’s attorney general. Bonta fills the vacancy created by President Joe Biden’s appointment of former state attorney general Xavier Becerra as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In his March 24, 2021 announcement of the appointment, Newsom said Bonta “represents what makes California…