Publications & Testimony

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…

Eddie Lee Howard, Jr., convicted and sentenced to death based on the false forensic testimony of a since disgraced prosecution expert witness, has been exonerated after nearly 26 years on Mississippi’s death row. He is the 174^th former death-row prisoner exonerated in the U.S. since 1973 and the sixth in Mississippi. The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned Howard’s conviction in August 2020, 26 years after he was first sentenced to death for the 1992 murder and alleged rape of an 84-year-old…

Ohio has banned the death penalty for defendants who were severely mentally ill at the time of the offense. On January 9, 2021, Governor Mike DeWine (pictured) signed into law House Bill 136, which prohibits imposing the death penalty on or carrying it out against individuals whose severe mental illness at the time of the offense significantly impaired their judgment, capacity, or ability to appreciate the nature of their conduct. The new statute designates a series of disorders as severe…

The federal government’s historically aberrant execution spree has been fraught with irregularities and “has trampled over an array of barriers, both legal and practical,” according to an investigative report by the non-profit news organization, ProPublica. In a December 23, 2020 news story by reporter Isaac Arnsdorf, based upon an analysis of court records, ProPublica details a pattern of government secrecy, deceit, and misconduct during the course of conducting more executions in five months…

Calling the death penalty “ineffective, racially based, hypocritical and inhumane,” St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell (pictured) has renewed his pledge to never authorize a capital prosecution. In a December 23, 2020 op-ed in the St. Louis American, Bell urged “all prosecutors in Missouri who currently consider the death penalty an option to stop.” Bell, a former Ferguson, Missouri city council member, public defender, and prosecutor, first ran for prosecuting attorney in 2018…

Witness to Innocence, the national organization of U.S. death-row exonerees, has released a series of short videos under the tag “#ImLivingProof,” featuring the stories of men and women who had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. The series, produced by filmmaker Martin Schoeller with funding from the Art for Justice Fund, attempts to personalize the dangers of the death penalty by showing the public living proof that innocent people are sentenced to death. Eight of the videos…

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has removed a senior prison official from his position as a death-row counselor in the wake of charges that he used an anonymous Twitter account to troll a death-penalty activist and to mock federal death-row prisoners. Andrew Sutton, a Special Confinement Unit (SCU) Counselor at the Federal Correctional Complex — Terre Haute, was quietly reassigned after he was linked to a Twitter account named fozzythebear that, a lawsuit alleges, disparaged, defamed, and…

One week before the federal government intends to put three prisoners to death, two of the scheduled executions remain in doubt after rulings by federal courts in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. The scheduled January 12, 2021 execution of Lisa Montgomery (pictured, left) appeared to be back on after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed a district court ruling that had vacated her execution date. At the same time, the scheduled January 15, 2021 execution of…

After a seventeen-year moratorium on executions, the Republic of Kazakhstan has formally abolished the death penalty. On January 2, 2021, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev added his signature to a bill passed by Kazakhstan’s parliament December 29 ratifying the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, an international treaty that commits signatory nations to abolishing capital punishment. The country suspended all executions in December 2003.