Publications & Testimony

Former lightweight and junior welterweight boxing contender Anthony Fletcher (pictured) has been released from prison, 28 years after he was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder and sent to Pennsylvania’s death row by false medical testimony. In a virtual hearing in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas on January 21, 2021, Fletcher entered a plea of no contest to charges of third-degree murder, and Judge Lillian Ransom resentenced him to 12½ – 25 years. Because he had already served…

A South Dakota state senator who previously served as a prosecutor and a state court judge has introduced a bill to limit the breadth of the state’s death penalty statute. Senate Bill 98, introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arthur Rusch (R – Clay, pictured) on January 25, 2021, would restrict capital punishment to a single aggravating circumstance, premeditated murders in which a defendant killed a police officer, corrections officer, or firefighter during the performance of their…

As the Virginia General Assembly considers legislation to abolish the death penalty, opponents of capital punishment gathered at lynching sites across the state to emphasize the historical link between lynchings and executions. Groups in Alexandria, Danville, Norfolk, Richmond, and Roanoke recalled historical injustices, reading the names and stories of lynching victims, and called for an end to capital punishment. The vigils were held at historically significant locations, including sites of…

NEWS (1/22/21) — Texas: The Kaufman County District Attorney’s office has conceded that Texas death-row prisoner Charles Brownlow is intellectually disabled and cannot be resentenced to death. The county prosecutors’ decision comes after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed Brownlow’s death sentence, saying that the state courts had previously rejected his claim of intellectual disability using a definition of the disorder that the U.S. Supreme Court later struck down as…

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…