Publications & Testimony

Whether South Dakota death-row pris­on­er Charles Rhines (pic­tured) lives or dies may depend less on whether he was con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death and more on whether the courts val­ue final­i­ty more than they val­ue fair­ness. As Rhines filed two sep­a­rate peti­tions in the U.S. Supreme Court and an appeal in the South Dakota Supreme Court on November 1, the South Dakota Department of Corrections announced that his execution,…

Ten exe­cu­tions were sched­uled to take place in October 2019, more than in any oth­er month in the last two years. As the month closed, how­ev­er, nine of those exe­cu­tions were not car­ried out. The 90% rate of war­rant fail­ures sym­bol­izes the death penalty’s con­tin­u­ing decline and the wide­spread prob­lems states are hav­ing with its imple­men­ta­tion. And with eight active exe­cu­tion dates pend­ing and two oth­er stays of exe­cu­tion in place in November and December, 2019 is near­ly cer­tain to become the…

Three U.S. exe­cu­tions were halt­ed on October 30, 2019, as the Georgia Supreme Court issued a day-of-exe­cu­tion stay to Ray Jefferson Cromartie and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (pic­tured) grant­ed war­rants of reprieve to the next two death-row pris­on­ers sched­uled for exe­cu­tion in Ohio. The actions capped a tumul­tuous October in which nine of ten sched­uled exe­cu­tions did not take place and fed­er­al courts stayed two…

When Attorney General William Barr announced in July 2019 that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment planned to exe­cute five pris­on­ers in a five-week span from December 9, 2019 to January 15, 2020, he declared that ​“we owe it to the vic­tims and their fam­i­lies to car­ry for­ward the sen­tence imposed by our jus­tice sys­tem.” In at least two of those cas­es, how­ev­er, the vic­tims’ fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ty have said they don’t want the death penalty carried…

More than 250 con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers from across the coun­try have signed on to a state­ment express­ing their oppo­si­tion to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as admin­is­tered across the United States and issued a ​“call [to] our fel­low con­ser­v­a­tives to reex­am­ine the death penal­ty and demon­strate the lead­er­ship need­ed to end this failed pol­i­cy.” Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty (CCATDP) released the state­ment in con­junc­tion with an October 28, 2019 nation­al­ly webcast press…

Supported by the mur­der victim’s daugh­ter, a Georgia death-row pris­on­er who is sched­uled for exe­cu­tion October 30, 2019 is ask­ing the fed­er­al courts to grant him a stay to per­mit DNA test­ing that, he says, will prove that he did not com­mit the killing for which he is on death row. Ray Cromartie (pic­tured) admits his involve­ment in the rob­bery in which Richard Slysz was mur­dered, but main­tains that his co-defen­dant shot the…

A Shelby County (Memphis) judge has heard argu­ment and will rule on November 18, 2019 whether to allow DNA test­ing in a case that could show whether the state of Tennessee exe­cut­ed an inno­cent man in June of 2006. On October 14, lawyers from the Innocence Project, rep­re­sent­ing the estate of Sedley Alley (pic­tured) and his daugh­ter, April Alley, urged Criminal Court Judge Paula Skahan to release for DNA test­ing phys­i­cal evi­dence that they…

Courts in Texas and Florida have grant­ed stays of exe­cu­tion to two men who faced immi­nent exe­cu­tion despite seri­ous ques­tions as to their involve­ment in the mur­ders for which they were sen­tenced to death. On October 22, 2019, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) stayed the exe­cu­tion of Ruben Gutierrez (pic­tured, left), which had been sched­uled for October 30. The fol­low­ing day, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida…