Publications & Testimony

The U.S. Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” is having a growing and disproportionate impact on the Court’s resolution of controversial social issues, with some of its most profound effects being felt in death penalty cases. The term, coined in 2015 by law professor William Baude, refers to expedited emergency rulings made by the court without full briefing and argument, typically unsigned and rendered without an opinion explaining the Court’s legal reasoning. In a seven-article online symposium…

Reform prosecutors made further inroads in the American legal system in the November 2020 general election, unseating prosecutors in several of the most prolific death-sentencing counties in the United States and capturing open seats in major Texas and Florida counties, but falling short in several other high profile races. Election results updated on Thursday, November 5, showed that candidates pledging systemic reforms, including reduced use or abandonment of the death penalty, had won…

A three-judge panel in Madison County, Ohio has acquitted a man prosecutors charged with capital murder for allegedly setting his car on fire to burn down his house with his wife and children inside. The judges rejected prosecutors’ arguments that Peter Romans (pictured with his family) had poured gasoline on the driver’s side of the family’s SUV and set the car ablaze with the intent that the conflagration spread to the house to kill his wife Billi and their two children, Ami and Caleb.

In a continuing diminution of procedural safeguards in capital cases, the Florida Supreme Court has ended its long-standing practice of independently reviewing death penalty cases on appeal to ensure that they are not disproportionate to sentences imposed in similar cases. The practice, known as comparative proportionality review, was initiated by the court a half-century ago after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all existing U.S. death penalty statutes in Furman v. Georgia because of the…

NEWS (10/30/20) — Florida: The Florida Supreme Court has upheld the conviction and death sentence of Jonathan Lawrence in an opinion that removed yet another appellate safeguard for the state’s death-row prisoners. In the case, the new far-right majority of the court ended the 50-year-old practice of conducting an independent proportionality review of a death sentence to determine whether the verdict was disproportional to the sentences imposed in other capital cases. The Florida Supreme Court…

To rein in the social and economic costs caused by the overly aggressive use of the death penalty by prosecutors, a California legal scholar is proposing a plan he believes will reduce miscarriages of justice and increase prosecutorial accountability. In Shrinking the Accountability Deficit in Capital Charging, a new chapter in the 2020 Oxford Handbook of Prosecutors and Prosecution, UCLA law professor Sherod Thaxton (pictured) argues that to temper the unfettered discretion local prosecutors…

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues to use the death penalty against people accused of crimes committed as juveniles, despite a royal decree claiming to ban that practice, human rights organizations and defense lawyers have charged. On October 19, 2020, the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights issued a statement saying that thirteen prisoners still faced the death penalty in the kingdom for alleged crimes committed as juveniles. The following day, citing “glaring exceptions” in the…

Calling California capital sentencing proceedings “infected by racism,” Governor Gavin Newsom (pictured) has filed a brief in the California Supreme Court supporting a death-row prisoner’s claim that capital punishment as currently practiced in the state violates the California penal code and the state constitution. In a news release, the Governor’s office said the friend-of-the-court brief, filed on October 26, 2020 in the capital appeal of Don’te Lamont McDaniel, was “the first time in…

Amy Coney Barrett has been confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, filling the vacancy created by the death of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Shortly after her confirmation by the U.S. Senate on October 26, 2020, Justice Clarence Thomas administered the oath of office to Barrett in an outdoor ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. Barrett’s confirmation came just 30 days after her nomination, the shortest period between nomination and confirmation of a…

The leader of the world’s second largest Christian denomination has joined with the Roman Catholic Church in declaring the death penalty fundamentally incompatible with Christian teachings. In an interview with Vatican News on October 20, 2020, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, called opposition to the death penalty “the logical and moral consequence” of adherence to Christian principles of human dignity. The Orthodox patriarch’s…