Publications & Testimony

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who described his decid­ing vote to uphold the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in 1976 as the one court vote he most regret­ted, has died. He was 99 years old. A media advi­so­ry released by the Supreme Court on July 16, 2019, said that Stevens died of com­pli­ca­tions from a stroke he suf­fered the day before. ​“He brought to our bench an inim­itable blend of kind­ness, humil­i­ty, wis­dom, and inde­pen­dence,” Chief Justice John…

Amidst an ongo­ing law­suit chal­leng­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of South Carolina​’s death-row con­di­tions, the state has moved its death-row pris­on­ers to a dif­fer­ent prison. On July 11, 2019, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDOC) moved the state’s 38 death-row pris­on­ers from Kirkland Correctional Institution to the near­by Broad River Correctional Institution (pic­tured), into a facil­i­ty that had orig­i­nal­ly been built to house death-row pris­on­ers in 1988. In a press…

Rick Unklesbay served as a pros­e­cu­tor in the Pima County Attorney’s Office in Arizona for near­ly four decades, pros­e­cut­ing more than 100 homi­cides, includ­ing six­teen in which death sen­tences were imposed. He put Don Miller on death row and, in November 2000, watched as Arizona put Miller to death. In Arbitrary Death: A Prosecutor’s Perspective on the Death Penalty, Unklesbay tells…

NEWS: July 19—The Nebraska Supreme Court has upheld the con­vic­tions and death sen­tences in the case of Nikko Jenkins, who was con­vict­ed of four mur­ders com­mit­ted in Omaha in August 2013. The court reject­ed the chal­lenge that Jenkins — who has attempt­ed sui­cide on mul­ti­ple occa­sions — should not be sub­ject to the death penal­ty because of mental…

In the span of two weeks, juries in four unre­lat­ed cas­es in which Florida pros­e­cu­tors had sought the death penal­ty have instead returned life sen­tences. The cas­es — which were con­sid­ered prob­a­ble death ver­dicts if judges were per­mit­ted to impose sen­tence — illus­trate the impact of the changes in Florida law in 2016 and 2017 ban­ning judi­cial death sen­tences based on non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tions for death. Between June 27, 2019 and July 11, 2019, jurors in the cas­es of…

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section will soon release its annu­al report on issues, trends, and sig­nif­i­cant changes in America’s crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. The new pub­li­ca­tion, The State of Criminal Justice 2019, includes a chap­ter by Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice, describ­ing sig­nif­i­cant death penal­ty cas­es and cap­i­tal punishment…

The num­ber of peo­ple on death row or fac­ing cap­i­tal resen­tenc­ing in the United States has con­tin­ued its 19-year decline, accord­ing to a new death-row cen­sus by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). The Spring 2019 edi­tion of Death Row USA, released in ear­ly July, reports that 2,673 peo­ple in 32 states or in U.S. fed­er­al or mil­i­tary cus­tody were on death rows across the U.S. as of April 1, 2019. That total reflects a 2.6% drop from the same time in 2018…

A Texas coun­ty court has set an exe­cu­tion date for a Jewish death-row pris­on­er despite his pend­ing fed­er­al appeal alleg­ing that the judge who presided over his tri­al and sen­tenc­ing should have been removed from the case because of his big­ot­ed racist and anti-Semitic views. On July 3, 2019, Dallas County Judge Lela Mays set an October 10 exe­cu­tion date for Randy Halprin, while he is active­ly lit­i­gat­ing a claim that for­mer Judge Vickers Cunningham repeat­ed­ly referred to Halprin…

The death penal­ty and lynch­ing were instru­ments of ​“white suprema­cist polit­i­cal and social pow­er” in North Carolina, diverg­ing in form but not in func­tion. So writes University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill American Studies Professor Seth Kotch In his new­ly released book, Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina. Lethal State tracks North Carolina’s use of the death penal­ty from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the present. Kotch sum­ma­rizes the through…

NEWS: JULY 10 — An Oregon tri­al court has over­turned the con­vic­tion and death sen­tence of Angela McAnaulty, the only woman on the state’s death row. The Washington County Circuit Court found that McAnaulty’s lawyers had pro­vid­ed inef­fec­tive assis­tance in advis­ing her to plead guilty to mur­der when the District Attorney had not agreed to drop the death penal­ty for those charges. The court also ruled that coun­sel were inef­fec­tive at the penal­ty phase for fail­ing to con­sult an…