Publications & Testimony

NEWS (9/​17/​20) — Florida: The Florida Supreme Court has denied post-conviction relief to Ken Lott, retroactively applying its new rule that a death sentence imposed under the state’s unconstitutional judicial fact-finding statute did not violate Lott’s right to a jury trial because the jury had unanimously found an aggravating circumstance. The court held that Lott’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial in his capital sentencing proceeding extended only to the determination of whether the…

A study of 40 years of Texas death sentences has found that the likelihood that a defendant accused of a death-eligible murder will be sentenced to death is three times greater if the case involves a white female victim. The study, A Systematic Lottery: The Texas Death Penalty, 1976 to 2016, by Scott Phillips (pictured, left) and Trent Steidley (pictured, right), University of Denver professors in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, compared two groups of Texas murder defendants…

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. The 87-year-old justice, who repeatedly expressed skepticism about the death penalty but never took the step of saying it was inherently unconstitutional, succumbed to pancreatic cancer on September 18, 2020. Her death immediately threw the future direction of the Court into turmoil. Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg had been an anchor of the four-justice moderate-to-liberal wing of the Court and had voted in the majority…

The federal government intends to execute Christopher Vialva (pictured) on September 24, 2020, the first time in nearly 70 years it will have put any teenage offender to death. But according to a prominent cognitive neuropsychologist, the decision to execute Vialva is out of step with what science now knows about the workings of the adolescent brain. Vialva was 19 years old when he and four co-defendants, aged 15, 16, 16, and 18, killed a Texas couple during a carjacking and robbery. In a…

A Florida man and an Arkansas woman, convicted of murder in separate cases involving junk science and prosecutorial misconduct, have been exonerated, decades after being wrongfully capitally prosecuted. Hillsborough Circuit Judge Christopher Nash dismissed all charges against former Florida death-row prisoner Robert DuBoise on September 14, 2020, granting a motion filed by the office of State Attorney Andrew Warren. The motion was the culmination of an investigation by Warren’s Conviction…

NEWS (9/​15/​20) — Texas: A Bexar County trial court judge has issued an order withdrawing the death warrant that had scheduled Carlos Trevino’s execution for September 30, 2020. The court cited ​“the current COVID-19 conditions in Texas” as the grounds for postponement. The order was the third time in 2020 that Trevino’s execution had been rescheduled. His execution was initially scheduled for March 11, 2020, but was postponed until June 3. Shortly thereafter, Governor Greg Abbott declared a…

As the 2020 National Football League (NFL) season’s opening weekend began on Sunday, September 13, end zones were painted with the words ​“End Racism” and ​“It Takes All of Us.” Six NFL teams remained in locker rooms for the National Anthem, and players and one coach kneeled. After having been accused of blackballing players who peacefully demonstrated during the national anthem, the NFL stated in early September that “[t]he league is committed to integrating important causes vital to players and…

The Death Penalty Information Center has released a major new report on race and the U.S. death penalty, providing an in-depth look at the historical role race has played in the death penalty and detailing the pervasive impact racial discrimination continues to have throughout every stage of a death penalty case today. Enduring Injustice: the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty. released on September 15, 2020, also makes the case for why redressing discrimination in…

Leaders in the Tennessee African-American community are urging Governor Bill Lee and the state and federal courts to halt the execution of a Black death-row prisoner who may be both innocent and intellectually disabled and who has been denied access to the courts to review those claims. A growing coalition of state legislators, legal associations, faith leaders, and community groups in Memphis have called for the courts to permit DNA testing that could potentially exonerate Pervis Payne…

NEWS (9/​11/​20) — Florida: Nearly one year after a Hillsborough County jury recommended that Granville Ritchie be sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a 9‑year-old girl, Judge Michelle Sisco formally imposed the death penalty in the case. The death sentence is the 14^th DPIC’s tracking has verified so far in 2020, more than a third of which have been imposed in Florida. It is the third death sentence DPIC is aware of that has been imposed since the coronavirus pandemic shut down most…