Publications & Testimony

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…

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…