Publications & Testimony

In two long-awaited decisions that will alter the landscape of Florida’s death row, the Florida Supreme Court has limited the reach of a landmark ruling that overturned the state’s constitutional prohibition against death sentences imposed after a non-unanimous jury vote for death. The court’s January 2020 decision in State v. Poole had raised the specter that the court might rescind orders that had overturned the death sentences of more than 100 Florida death-row prisoners and granted them new…

The range of methods available to the federal government to carry out executions could be expanded under a new Department of Justice regulation published on November 27, 2020. The regulation, one of numerous last-minute changes in federal practices adopted in the lame-duck period of the Trump Administration, permits the federal government to perform executions using any form of lethal injection “or by any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed or…

NEWS (11/26/20) — Florida: A Santa Rosa County judge has sentenced Thomas Fletcher to death for murdering his cellmate in a county prison. Fletcher’s case is emblematic of recent capital sentencing trends in which death sentences have been imposed disproportionally against defendants who waived key procedural protections. Fletcher strangled his cellmate, Kenneth Davis, after Davis told Fletcher he was thinking about committing suicide. State attorney Bill Eddins told reporters that Fletcher…

For the eighth time since 2007, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted a resolution calling for a global moratorium on executions. The resolution passed on November 17, 2020 by a vote of 120 – 39 with 24 countries abstaining. The United States voted against the resolution. The 120 nations supporting the measure matched the record level of support set in 2018. For the first time, the resolution specifically identified women among the groups discriminated against in the application of the…

In the November 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Gretchen Engel (pictured, left), Executive Director of North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), joins Ngozi Ndulue (pictured, below), Senior Director of Research and Special Projects at DPIC, for a discussion of their organizations’ recent reports on race and the death penalty. This fall, DPIC released Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty. Less than a month later, CDPL…

Public support for the death penalty is at its lowest level in a half-century, with opposition higher than any time since 1966, according to the 2020 annual Gallup poll on Americans’ attitudes about capital punishment. Fifty-five percent of respondents to a national survey conducted between September 30 and October 15, 2020 told Gallup that they were “in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder,” down one percentage point from the levels reported in 2018 and 2019. The figure…

NEWS (11/19/20) – Texas: The federal government executed Orlando Hall after the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a stay of execution issued earlier in the day by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He was the eighth prisoner executed by the federal government in 2020, the most in any calendar year in the 20^th or 21^st centuries. Fifteen prisoners have been executed in the United States so far this year. The district court had set aside the federal execution protocol and issued a…

Despite its defeat at the polls on November 3, the Trump administration is pressing forward with efforts to conduct an historically unprecedented number of lame duck executions and in announcing new federal capital prosecutions that it will not be in position to carry out. After the close of business on Friday, November 20, 2020, one day after carrying out the first execution during a presidential transition period in more than a century, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced its intention…

South Carolina has issued a death warrant to execute Richard Moore (pictured) on December 4, 2020, but, his lawyers say, the state has refused to tell him how it intends to carry it out. In a motion to stay Moore’s execution, filed in the South Carolina Supreme Court on November 16, Moore’s lawyers say that “the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) has provided no information about how it intends to carry out the … execution,” preventing Moore from making an intelligent selection…

On November 20, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to conference the case of Calvin McMillan, one of thirty-two Alabama death-row prisoners whose death sentences were imposed by trial judges who overrode jury recommendations to sentence the defendants to life. McMillan has asked the Court to declare the practice unconstitutional, and two jurors who voted for life in judicial override cases and three former state court judges in states that had permitted the practice, have filed…