Publications & Testimony

NEWS (8/​28/​20) — The federal government executed Keith Nelson on August 28. He was the fifth federal prisoner to be executed in 2020. Nelson’s execution had been put on hold several times as a result of preliminary injunctions issued in response to execution challenges brought by death-row prisoners Daniel Lee and Wesley Purkey. However, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated those injunctions prior to Lee’s and Purkey’s executions in July. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted…

A Florida trial court has freed a former death-row prisoner after local prosecutors said new DNA evidence had proven his innocence of the rape and murder for which he was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death 37 years ago. Based on junk-science bite-mark evidence and false testimony from a prison informant, Robert DuBoise (pictured with his mother, Myra, following his release) was convicted of raping and murdering 19-year-old Barbara Grams. The jury unanimously recommended that DuBoise…

NEWS (8/​27/​20) — Mississippi: The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the conviction and death sentence of Eddie Lee Howard based on new DNA evidence and the unreliability of bite-mark testimony used at Howard’s trial. The court’s 8 – 1 decision reversed an earlier decision of the trial court that had denied Howard a new trial. The appeals court ruled that the evidence presented to the trial court undermined the trial testimony of forensic odontologist Dr. Michael West, who claimed that Howard’s…

Over the objections of Native American leaders across the country, the federal government on August 26, 2020 executed Lezmond Mitchell (pictured), the sole Native-American prisoner on federal death row. Mitchell, a Navajo citizen, became the first Native American executed by the federal government for a crime committed against a member of his own tribe on tribal lands. The Navajo Nation government has long opposed the death penalty as inconsistent with its culture and traditions and repeatedly…

As the federal government began to carry out the second round of executions it has scheduled for 2020, autopsy results from the first round of executions in July suggest to a ​“virtual medical certainty” that federal death-row prisoners will experience ​“excruciating pain” while they are being put to death by lethal injection with pentobarbital. An autopsy of Wesley Purkey (pictured), authorized by Purkey’s next-of-kin and conducted by Western Michigan University forensic pathologist Joyce L.

Ruling in one of the most sensationalized trials of the early 2000s, the California Supreme Court has overturned the death sentence imposed on Scott Peterson for the murders of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn son in December 2002. The court upheld Peterson’s convictions for the two murders. In an opinion authored by Justice Leondra Kruger (pictured), the court unanimously ruled that Peterson had been unconstitutionally sentenced to death as a result of ​“a series of clear and…

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and American Civil Liberties Foundation have filed a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) seeking a court order requiring the BOP to disclose how much the federal government’s resumption of federal executions is costing taxpayers and what steps the government has undertaken to assess and address the COVID-19 public health risks created by the executions. ​“As the nation faces both dire public health and economic crises,” the lawsuit says…

NEWS (8/​19/​20) — California: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit released habeas corpus appeal decisions in two capital cases involving California death-row prisoner Martin Kipp, overturning his conviction in a case prosecuted in Orange County and upholding his conviction and death sentence in a Los Angeles County case. In granting a new trial in the 1983 Orange County murder of a 19-year-old woman, a 2 – 1 panel of the circuit court held that the trial court violated Kipp’s due…

Declaring that “[r]acism still exists and has no place in society,” the Tennessee Supreme Court on June 25, 2020 directed its Access to Justice Commission (AJC) to create ​“a new initiative to identify and eliminate barriers to racial and ethnic fairness and justice.” The court’s pronouncement, at the height of the racial justice protests that swept the nation following the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, was meant to signal its concern about racial bias in the…

As federal courts in Washington, D.C. and California declined to halt the execution of Lezmond Mitchell, the National Congress of American Indians, thirteen tribal governments, and more than 230 members from more than 90 U.S. tribes joined Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez in asking President Donald Trump to commute the death sentence of the sole Native American on federal death row. Native-American commentators also called on the president to spare Mitchell’s life, saying his execution…