Publications & Testimony

A new National Public Radio (NPR) analysis of more than 200 autopsies of death-row prisoners executed by lethal injection has found that 84% of those executed showed evidence of pulmonary edema, a condition in which a person’s lungs fill with fluid that creates the feeling of suffocation or drowning that experts have likened to waterboarding. The pulmonary edema findings were endemic to deaths by lethal injection, remaining consistent irrespective of the state that carried out the execution or…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has denied habeas corpus relief to three Georgia death-row prisoners in a series of opinions that narrowly interpreted the scope of a defendant’s right to effective representation in the penalty phase of a capital trial. The decisions, issued in unrelated cases over the course of 36 hours on September 15 and 16, 2020, absolved court-appointed counsel of significant failures in investigating, presenting, and arguing to the jury reasons to spare…

The federal government conducted its sixth and seventh executions in ten weeks on September 22 and 24, putting William Emmett LeCroy (pictured) and Christopher Vialva to death amid continuing challenges to the federal execution protocol and to carrying out executions during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the federal appeal courts set aside LeCroy’s execution challenges, Vialva’s lawsuit challenging the legality of the federal execution protocol remained pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. After the…

Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act show that the federal government’s choice to bring hundreds of people to the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana to carry out five executions in July and August in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic likely caused a COVID-19 outbreak that has already killed three and hospitalized others. In a statement issued September 21, 2020, the ACLU blasted federal officials for repeatedly carrying…

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…