Publications & Testimony

Justin D. Levinson and Rachel G. Schaefer recent­ly pub­lished Flawed Framework, Fatal Discretion: Unraveling Implicit Bias in Capital Punishment Decisions. The arti­cle syn­the­sizes mul­ti­ple stud­ies exam­in­ing the role of implic­it bias among key deci­sion­mak­ers with­in the legal sys­tem. The authors use this research as evi­dence of both the his­tor­i­cal and ongo­ing influ­ence of implic­it bias on the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty. In 2025, **75% of defendants against…

For decades, Texas per­formed exe­cu­tions at the high­est rate in the coun­try. It has car­ried out the most exe­cu­tions in the mod­ern era, with near­ly five times the num­ber as the next high­est state. However, that trend has changed in recent years, as both the num­ber of new death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions has sig­nif­i­cant­ly declined. The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s (TCADP) 2025 Annual Report exam­ines the dwin­dling use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and the…

Today is the ten-year anniver­sary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s deci­sion in Hurst v. Florida. Heralded as a water­shed rul­ing for cap­i­tal defen­dants, Hurst reaf­firmed the prin­ci­ple that the jury alone must find the facts nec­es­sary to con­demn a per­son to die — impli­cat­ing the death sen­tences of hun­dreds of pris­on­ers across three states. The Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury…

On December 29, 2025, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney issued an order block­ing the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole (GBPP) from resched­ul­ing a clemen­cy hear­ing and set­ting a new exe­cu­tion date for Stacey Humphreys. Two weeks ear­li­er, on December 15^th the GBPP put Mr. Humphreys’ December 16^th clemen­cy hear­ing on hold​“indef­i­nite­ly,” leav­ing in lim­bo the sta­tus of his exe­cu­tion, sched­uled for the fol­low­ing day. Judge McBurney issued the stay,…

The United States car­ried out 47 exe­cu­tions in 2025, and Florida car­ried out 19 — the high­est num­ber in state his­to­ry and more than dou­ble its pre­vi­ous mod­ern record, accord­ing to a year-end report from Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP). Executions in Florida — which aver­aged one exe­cu­tion every 16 days from February 2025 through December 2025 — account­ed for 40% of the 47 exe­cu­tions nation­wide, mak­ing Florida a clear out­lier in the use of the death…

On December 5, 2025, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro issued an exe­cu­tion reprieve for Richard Roland Laird, the same day the Department of Corrections Secretary Laurel Harry signed a Notice of Execution for January 2, 2026. In issu­ing the same-day reprieve, Gov. Shapiro act­ed on his promise to main­tain an exe­cu­tion mora­to­ri­um in Pennsylvania. In February 2023, Gov. Shapiro announced he would con­tin­ue his pre­de­ces­sor Tom Wolf’s halt on exe­cu­tions, and called upon the…