Publications & Testimony

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…

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…