Publications & Testimony

In a dramatic deviation from historical practices, the Trump Administration is poised to conduct the first federal executions during a lame-duck presidency in more than a century. The Department of Justice has scheduled three federal executions during the administration’s lame-duck period: Orlando Hall on November 19, Lisa Montgomery on December 8, and Brandon Bernard on December 10. The last time the U.S. government carried out an execution between a presidential election and the inauguration…

Lawyers for federal death-row prisoner Orlando Hall (pictured), who is scheduled to be executed on November 19, 2020, have filed a motion to stay his execution based upon evidence that his death sentence was a product of pervasive racial discrimination. In pleadings filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana on November 12, Hall, who is Black, argues that his conviction and death sentence are the unconstitutional product of systemic racial discrimination in the…

Bill Pelke (pictured, speaking to a group of students in Uganda in 2014), death penalty abolitionist and founder of the Journey of Hope, died November 12, 2020 in Anchorage, Alaska. Pelke began his work to end the death penalty after his grandmother, Ruth Pelke, was murdered in Indiana by four teenage girls. One of the perpetrators, 15-year-old Paula Cooper, became the youngest person ever sentenced to death in Indiana. Moved by his Christian faith, Pelke worked to reverse Cooper’s death…

Two death-sentenced prisoners in Kansas have filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the state’s policy of automatic solitary confinement for death-row prisoners is unconstitutional. The two prisoners, Sidney Gleason and Scott Cheever, have been held in isolation for 14 and 12 years, respectively. Seven of the ten people on Kansas’ death row have been kept in solitary confinement for more than ten years. The prisoners’ lawsuit asserts that the practice of incarcerating all death-row prisoners in…

Lawyers for federal death-row prisoner Lisa Montgomery filed suit in federal district court in Washington, D.C. on November 12, seeking to stay her December 8 execution because the lead counsel in her case have contracted the coronavirus. A stay is necessary, the complaint alleges, because Montgomery’s lawyers ​“cannot represent her because they are seriously ill, through no fault of their own. On the contrary, they are sick because [Attorney General William] Barr recklessly scheduled Mrs.

A diverse coalition of more than 1,000 advocates, including current and former prosecutors, activists fighting sex trafficking and domestic violence, and mental health organizations, have joined forces to ask President Donald Trump to halt the upcoming execution of the only woman on federal death row, Lisa Montgomery (pictured). In a series of letters delivered to administration officials and released to the public by Montgomery’s lawyers on November 11, 2020, the advocates argue that…

The United States faced harsh criticism from the world community for its continued use of capital punishment during a United Nations review of its human rights record on November 9, 2020. During the U.N. Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review of the United States’ human rights record on November 9, 2020, countries around the world criticized the U.S. for systemic racism, police violence against civilians, separation of immigrant families and internment of immigrant children, and use of…

Lawyers for James Frazier (pictured), Ohio’s oldest death-row prisoner, have filed a motion to prevent his execution, arguing that he has severe vascular dementia that has rendered him unable to understand his punishment. Legal papers filed in the Lucas County Court of Common Pleas in October 2020 assert that Frazier, now 79 years old, suffered a series of mini-strokes in 2017 that have caused serious physical, psychological, and cognitive impairments that make him incompetent to be executed.

Citing the coronavirus pandemic, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has granted a temporary reprieve to death-row prisoner Pervis Payne, halting his scheduled December 3, 2020 execution. The execution was the last scheduled by any state in 2020, assuring that states will carry out fewer executions in 2020 than in any other year since 1983. Lee issued a temporary reprieve on November 6, 2020 that will remain in effect until April 9, 2021. A short statement released by the governor in connection with…

The Death Penalty Information Center is partnering with the Veteran Advocacy Project to present a six-part webinar series on Veterans and the Death Penalty. The webinars, which are co-sponsored by Advancing Real Change, Inc. and Witness to Innocence, will address a broad range of serious issues that have made veterans disproportionately vulnerable to capital prosecution. The series opens Monday, November 9, the week the nation commemorates Veterans Day 2020, with a session on Veterans on Death…