Publications & Testimony

As Texas pre­pared to car­ry out the first exe­cu­tion of 2020 on January 15, neigh­bor­ing Oklahoma — once the sec­ond most pro­lif­ic exe­cu­tion­er in the United States — marked five years since its last exe­cu­tion. The states present a con­trast in exe­cu­tion prac­tices. Though the use of the death penal­ty has sharply declined in both states, Texas con­tin­ues to lead the nation in exe­cu­tions, while Oklahoma will join the near­ly two-thirds of…

Just Mercy, the movie adap­ta­tion of Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) Executive Director Bryan Stevenson​’s book of the same name, cel­e­brat­ed its nation­wide release on January 10, 2020 with week­end tick­et sales of more than $9.7 mil­lion. The film, which focus­es on the wrong­ful con­vic­tion of Walter McMillian—one of Stevenson’s ear­ly death-penal­­ty cas­es — ranked fifth among all movies in domestic box…

On January 16, Georgia plans to exe­cute Jimmy Meders (pic­tured in his National Guard uni­form), a man whom jurors say they would have sen­tenced to life with­out parole if that option had been avail­able and who, state sen­tenc­ing prac­tices sug­gest, would not face the death penal­ty today. For those rea­sons, Meders’ lawyers say in court plead­ings and an appli­ca­tion before the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, his exe­cu­tion would violate…

NEWS — January 14 and 17: Florida juries have reject­ed the death penal­ty in cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing retri­als of two pris­on­ers who had ini­tial­ly been uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly sen­tenced to death fol­low­ing non-unan­i­­mous jury votes for…

In two cas­es in which the death penal­ty played a cen­tral role, recent exonerees in Florida and Idaho have ini­ti­at­ed legal pro­ceed­ings against gov­ern­ment offi­cials, alleg­ing that they were wrongfully prosecuted…

The Nebraska Supreme Court has ruled that the 2015 leg­isla­tive repeal of the state’s death-penal­­ty statute did not inval­i­date the death sen­tences of the pris­on­ers on the state’s death row because the repeal bill nev­er became law before it was reject­ed by a statewide…

After hav­ing been rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2019 for his pat­tern of racial­ly biased jury selec­tion in the cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tions of Curtis Flowers and sued in fed­er­al court to bar future race-based jury strikes, Mississippi pros­e­cu­tor Doug Evans has vol­un­tar­i­ly recused him­self from future involvement in…

On January 7, 2020, Louisiana marked the pas­sage of ten years since its…

With exe­cu­tions on hold due to prob­lems with the lethal-injec­­tion pro­to­col, the future of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Ohio is uncer­tain. High-rank­ing Ohio offi­cials have expressed con­cerns about the effec­tive­ness and via­bil­i­ty of the state’s death penal­ty, and two recent columns in lead­ing Ohio news­pa­pers have argued that the state should end…

Death sen­tences imposed in the United States fell by more than half over the course of the 2010s, con­tin­u­ing a steep nation­wide decline that has seen death sen­tences fall by more than 89% since the peak death sen­tenc­ing years of the mid 1990s. Fewer death sen­tences were imposed in the sec­ond half of the 2010s than in any oth­er five-year peri­od since cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment resumed in the United States in 1973. [Click here to enlarge…