Publications & Testimony

Lawyers for Tennessee death-row prisoner Pervis Payne say DNA testing in his 30-year-old case points to an “unknown male” and excludes Payne as the person who stabbed to death Charisse Christopher and her 2‑year-old daughter, Lacie, and seriously wounded her 3‑year-old son, Nicholas. In a statement issued on January 19, 2021, Payne’s lawyers from the Innocence Project and the Middle District of Tennessee federal defender’s office said that “[m]ale DNA from an unknown third party was found on…

In February 1951, Virginia executed seven Black men on charges they had raped a white woman two years earlier. The “Martinsville 7” — Francis DeSales Grayson, Frank Hairston Jr., Howard Hairston, James Luther Hairston, Joe Henry Hampton, Booker T. Millner, and John Clabon Taylor — were interrogated by police without the appointment of legal counsel and, under threats that they would be released to a lynch mob, confessed to involvement in the rape. After a succession of perfunctory trials before…

Democratic members of the U.S. House and Senate have called on incoming President Joe Biden (pictured) to take quick action on his campaign pledge to end the federal death penalty. Legislators introduced three bills to abolish the federal death penalty and urged the President to issue executive orders to halt federal executions and commute the death sentences of those on federal death row. Citing the more than 170 people exonerated from U.S. death rows since capital punishment resumed in the…

The notion that death sentences and executions provide closure to victims’ families is a myth, says Susan A. Bandes, Centennial Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at DePaul University law school. In a January 8 commentary in The Crime Report, Bandes, a pioneer in the study of emotion and the law, takes on and debunks the idea that executions bring victims’ family members closure. Prosecutors, including former Attorney General Bill Barr, often offer the promise of closure as a…

NEWS (1/13 – 16/21) — Federal: The federal government has executed Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson, and Dustin Higgs. The U.S. Supreme Court and the federal circuit courts of appeals collectively vacated 17 separate preliminary injunctions or stays of execution on the way to permitting 13 executions in a six-month period. The U.S. Supreme Court granted every application by federal prosecutors to vacate injunctions or stays of execution and denied every application by the death row prisoners to…

An historically aberrant six-month federal execution spree came to a close after midnight on January 16, 2021 when an African-American man who was scheduled to die on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday was put to death by private executioners hired in a secret no-bid contract. Dustin John Higgs (pictured), who did not kill anyone and professed his innocence prior to his execution, was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. The execution moved forward after six justices of the U.S. Supreme…

On Martin Luther King Day, DPIC looks at the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s views on capital punishment. In a November 1957 article in Ebony, Dr. King was asked “Do you think God approves the death penalty for crimes like rape and murder?” He responded, “I do not think that God approves the death penalty for any crime, rape and murder included…. Capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology, and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of…

Legislators in the Virginia House and Senate are poised to attempt a repeal of its capital punishment statute, as Governor Ralph Northam (pictured) announced that he would sponsor a bill to end the commonwealth’s death penalty. Northam issued a call to abolish the death penalty during his January 13, 2021 State of the Commonwealth address marking the opening of the 2021 legislative session. “It’s time to change the law and end the death penalty in Virginia,” Northam said. “We’re taking these…

For the second time in less than five weeks, the federal government has executed a death-row prisoner who likely was intellectually disabled, without affording him judicial review to determine his eligibility for the death penalty. Corey Johnson (pictured) was pronounced dead from lethal injection at 11:34 p.m. on January 14, 2021, the 12^th federal prisoner executed in six months and the fifth in the transition period between Donald Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 presidential election and…

After a series of rulings by the United States Supreme Court summarily vacated two stays of execution and denied attempts to reinstate two others, the federal government executed death row prisoner Lisa Montgomery (pictured) on January 13, 2021. Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, was the first woman executed by the federal government in more than 67 years, the first person executed in the U.S. in 2021, and the 11^th prisoner put to death in a six-month federal execution spree…