Publications & Testimony

NEWS (2/25/21) — Alabama: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit has denied habeas relief for Alabama death-row prisoner Charles Clark, who the trial court had sentenced to death based upon a non-unanimous jury sentencing vote. Clark had argued that the trial court improperly ordered that he be shackled during the trial, without an adequate justification and without placing the reasons for shackling him on the record. His trial counsel had waived the claim by failing to object and Clark…

Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials repeatedly misrepresented accounts of the executions they carried out in 2020 and 2021, providing sanitized descriptions of the executions that omitted all references to dramatic body movements and signs of distress observed by media witnesses, according to an Associated Press report. The sworn accounts by executioners, which federal prosecutors provided to an expert witness and to a federal district court judge to defeat the prisoners’ court claims…

Expressing concerns about wrongful convictions, racially disparate impact, and arbitrariness, Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland (pictured) told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing on February 22, 2021 that the death penalty has given him “great pause.” Garland said that he “expect[s] that the President will be giving direction” on the federal death-penalty policy, and that it was “not at all unlikely” that the Department of Justice would impose a moratorium on…

Death-penalty repeal legislation in Virginia will move to Governor Ralph Northam’s desk, after both houses approved the bill passed earlier in the session in the opposite chamber. Virginia’s legislative rules required the House of Delegates to pass the Senate bill or vice versa, even though the bill text was identical. Governor Northam has pledged to sign the bill, which will make Virginia the 23^rd state, and the first in the South, to abolish capital punishment. The Virginia Senate passed HB…

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…