Publications & Testimony

Two former death-row prisoners whose sentences were commuted by governors in Illinois and Ohio more than a decade ago have been released from custody. Renaldo Hudson (pictured) was one of 167 prisoners whose death sentences were commuted to life without parole by Governor George Ryan in January 2003. He was released from Danville Correctional Center on September 2, 2020, after Governor J.B. Pritzker granted him a second commutation, reducing his sentence to time served. Jeffrey Hill was…

Eight years after his exoneration from death row, an Ohio trial court judge has declared that Joe D’Ambrosio (pictured) was ​“wrongfully imprisoned.” The August 31, 2020 ruling by Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Michael Russo moves D’Ambrosio one step closer to receiving compensation for the more than two decades he spent on death row as a result of prosecutorial misconduct. D’Ambrosio first filed suit seeking a declaration of wrongful imprisonment in 2012, after the federal courts had…

Texas death-row prisoner Clinton Young (pictured), who came within days of execution in October 2017 while prosecutors hid evidence of his innocence, has filed a claim for a new trial based upon previously undisclosed evidence that an assistant district attorney who prosecuted him was simultaneously employed by the trial judge to provide legal advice in his case. In an Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus Seeking Relief from a Judgment of Death, filed August 13, 2020 in Midland County…

After six trials marred by prosecutorial misconduct and racial prejudice, drawing a scathing rebuke from the U.S. Supreme Court, former Mississippi death-row prisoner Curtis Flowers (pictured with the ankle monitor that had kept him under house arrest) has been exonerated. On September 4, 2020, nearly 23 years after he was first questionably convicted of a quadruple murder in Winona, Mississippi, the Mississippi Attorney General’s office dropped all charges against Flowers and a Montgomery…

NEWS (9/​4/​20) — Ohio: Citing an unwillingness to endanger public health, Governor Mike DeWine has issued a new set of reprieves that will push back the first three executions scheduled in Ohio for 2021 until at least 2023. In a news release, the Governor’s office said he issued the reprieves ​“due to ongoing problems involving the willingness of pharmaceutical suppliers to provide drugs to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction … without endangering other Ohioans.” DeWine…

In the closing days of its 2020 legislative session, the California legislature passed a trio of racial justice reform bills expected to reduce the influence of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic bias in the administration of the death penalty in the state with the country’s largest death row. On August 28, 2020, the California senate gave its final approval to Assembly Bill 2512, which amends California’s death penalty intellectual disability statute to prohibit the use of race-based IQ…

At a time in which the United States as a whole and individual states and counties have continued their long-term movement away from the death penalty, the federal government’s current execution spree has established it as an outlier jurisdiction out of step with the practices of the nation as a whole. The federal government has executed five prisoners in less than two months (click to enlarge map), with two more executions slated for September 22 and 24. No state has carried out any…

When Truth is All You Have, a new memoir by Centurion Ministries founder Jim McCloskey (pictured) tells the story of what many consider to be the birth of the modern innocence movement. The book, written with former USA Today national editor Philip Lerman, and released in July 2020, describes McCloskey’s personal and professional evolution as he created Centurion Ministries in 1983, the first-ever organization dedicated to fighting wrongful convictions in the United States. Barbara Bradley…

The Mississippi Supreme Court has granted a new trial to death-row prisoner Eddie Lee Howard, Jr. (pictured), finding that the combination of scientifically invalid bite-mark evidence used to convict him and new DNA evidence entitled him to a new trial in the 1992 murder and alleged rape of an 84-year-old white woman. In an 8 – 1 decision on August 27, 2020, the court held that the discredited forensic testimony, ​“along with new DNA testing and the paucity of other evidence linking Howard to the…

More prisoners in the United States have died in the coronavirus pandemic than have been executed in the country in past two decades, new prison data shows, and more California death-row prisoners have been killed by the virus than have been executed in the state since 1993. Ohio State University Law Professor Douglas Berman reported in his Sentencing Law and Policy blog that as of August 23, 2020, prisons across the United States had confirmed the deaths of 858 prisoners from COVID-19. ​“This…