Publications & Testimony

NEWS (2/​5/​20): The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the con­vic­tion and death sen­tence of Marine Corps vet­er­an John Thuesen, who sus­tained com­­bat-relat­ed PTSD from his ser­vice in the war in Iraq. In an unsigned, unpub­lished opin­ion on February 5, the appeals court adopt­ed all but a hand­ful of the tri­al court’s find­ings of fact and con­clu­sions of law, which had reject­ed Thuesen’s claim that his tri­al lawyer had been inef­fec­tive in failing to…

As the death penal­ty con­tin­ues to wilt across the coun­try, what­ev­er peno­log­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion it once pur­port­ed­ly served is dying as well, say cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment schol­ars Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker (pic­tured). In their new arti­cle The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of the Death Penalty in the United States in the January 2020 Annual Review of Criminology, the Steikers exam­ine four cen­tral issues in the rise and fall…

Calling the death penal­ty​“a failed gov­ern­ment pro­gram,” 21 cur­rent and for­mer Virginia pros­e­cu­tors have signed on to a let­ter to the commonwealth’s General Assembly urg­ing the leg­is­la­ture to abol­ish cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The let­ter was signed by for­mer Attorneys General Mark L. Earley, Sr., a Republican who presided over 36 exe­cu­tions dur­ing 13 years in office, and Democrat William G. Broaddus, nine cur­rent or for­mer Commonwealth’s Attorneys elect­ed across the…

For the third con­sec­u­tive year, the Washington State Senate has vot­ed to remove the death penal­ty from the state’s statute books. In a 28 – 18 vote praised by abo­li­tion advo­cates for its bipar­ti­san­ship, four sen­ate Republicans joined 24 of their Democratic col­leagues on January 30, 2020 to for­mal­ly repeal Washington’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment law. With a new Speaker replac­ing Democratic lead­er­ship who had pre­vent­ed the bill from com­ing up for a vote in the House in 2018 and…

In leg­isla­tive votes 1,600 miles apart on January 30, 2020, state sen­ates in Colorado and Virginia took his­toric steps toward abol­ish­ing or reform­ing their state death-penalty…

After near­ly two decades of cap­i­tal tri­als and death-penal­­ty rever­sals, for­mer Florida death-row pris­on­er David Snelgrove has been resen­tenced to life in prison with­out parole. His three sen­tenc­ing tri­als pro­vid­ed a barom­e­ter of the impact of the United States Supreme Court and Florida Supreme Court deci­sions in Hurst v. Florida and Hurst v. State, and the lengths to which pros­e­cu­tors were will­ing to go in attempts to keep…

Lawyers for white suprema­cist Dylann Roof (pic­tured) have asked a fed­er­al appeals court to vacate his fed­er­al con­vic­tions and death sen­tences for the racial­­ly-moti­­vat­ed mur­ders of nine wor­shipers at an his­toric African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015. Roof’s lawyers raised more than a dozen claims of con­sti­tu­tion­al and legal error in a 321-page legal brief filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth…

Georgia exe­cut­ed Donnie Lance on January 29, 2020 after his requests for DNA test­ing and a plea for clemen­cy sup­port­ed by the chil­dren he and mur­der vic­tim Joy Lance…

In its unprece­dent­ed rush to exe­cute eight pris­on­ers over an eleven-day peri­od in April 2017, Arkansas may have exe­cut­ed an inno­cent man. Civil rights and legal reform orga­ni­za­tions filed a state Freedom of Information Act law­suit on January 23, 2020 on behalf of the broth­er of Ledell Lee (pic­tured), a man Arkansas exe­cut­ed on April 20, 2017. The law­suit argues that DNA and fin­ger­print evi­dence that courts blocked the defense from…

Death row and the num­ber of pris­on­ers fac­ing active death sen­tences in the U.S. con­tin­ue to decline, accord­ing to the lat­est quar­ter­ly sur­vey of death row by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund…