Publications & Testimony

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…

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…