Publications & Testimony

NEWS (2/16/21) — Pennsylvania: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has reinstated death-row exoneree Roderick Johnson’s lawsuit seeking damages for his placement in solitary confinement for almost twenty years. Johnson was sentenced to death in 1998 in Berks County, Pennsylvania. He was not released from solitary confinement on death row even after his conviction and sentence had been vacated, and the government was contesting his entitlement to a new trial. The appeals court…

A bipartisan group of legislators has announced the introduction of a bill to repeal Ohio’s death penalty. In a virtual press conference on February 18, 2021, four Republican and four Democratic legislators spoke about the latest effort to end capital punishment in the Buckeye State. “Like so many Ohioans, I once supported capital punishment and over time, with prayer and reflection have come to believe it’s the wrong policy for the state of Ohio,” said Sen. Steve Huffman (R – Tipp City…

The United States has entered the longest period in 40 years without any state carrying out an execution, an analysis of data in the Death Penalty Information Center execution database has found. On February 18, 2021, the U.S. reached 225 days since Texas executed Billy Wardlow on July 8, 2020, the last state execution conducted since the COVID-19 pandemic. That interval surpassed the 224 days between the September 25, 2007 execution of Michael Richard in Texas and the May 6, 2008 execution of…

For the first time in its history, National Geographic magazine has tackled the subject of capital punishment. Sentenced to death, but innocent, a feature story in the March 2021 issue of the magazine, chronicles the stories of fifteen death-row exonerees and illuminates the pervasive issue of innocence and the death penalty in the United States. The article, released on the same day as the Death Penalty Information Center’s new report The Innocence Epidemic, uses DPIC data and compelling…

New research by the Death Penalty Information Center has found 11 previously unrecorded death-row exonerations, bringing the total number of people exonerated after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death to 185. The data now show that for every 8.3 people who have been put to death in the U.S. since executions resumed in the 1970s, one person who had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death has been exonerated. Wrongful capital convictions occurred in virtually every part of…

Continuing an unparalleled pattern of rulings adverse to Texas death-row prisoners, a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has reinstated the conviction and death sentence of a mother convicted of killing her two-year-old daughter in what, the defense has argued, was actually an accidental fall. In a 10 – 7 ruling issued a on February 9, 2021, the en banc court of appeals reversed a 2019 ruling by a unanimous three-judge panel of the same court, which had granted Melissa Lucio…

In his new book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, journalist Maurice Chammah presages the death of America’s capital punishment system. Chammah expertly weaves together systemic issues with individual, humanizing case details to illustrate the efforts of lawyers, organizations, and activists who are challenging the foundations of the system with the goal of abolishing the death penalty. The New York Times called it “a case study that speaks more broadly to our…

Inadequate testing, resistance to contact tracing, and poor social distancing practices likely made the thirteen federal executions in 2020 – 2021 COVID-19 superspreader events, the Associated Press has concluded. In the ten days after the December 10, 2020 execution of Brandon Bernard, 70% of prisoners on federal death row and hundreds of others incarcerated in the Terre Haute Correctional Complex where the executions took place tested positive for COVID-19. At least a dozen others who…

NEWS (2/11/21) — Alabama: In a splintered vote with three conservative justices noting their dissents, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Alabama Attorney General’s application to vacate a federal appeals court injunction that had halted that night’s scheduled execution of Willie B. Smith III unless the state permitted his pastor to be present in the death chamber to provide religious comfort during his execution. In a second night-of-execution order, the Court lifted a stay of execution based…