Publications & Testimony

The death penalty is ​“a losing situation for everybody,” actress and Clemency star Alfre Woodard said in a recent Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists internet forum. ​“It does not bring back the person who has been taken violently. It doesn’t. It destroys lives.” Woodard joined writer, activist, and Black Lives Matter (BLM) co-founder Patrisse Cullors in a July 29, 2020 SAG-AFTRA Foundation discussion of the Woodard’s 2019 film Clemency and, as Cullors…

Long-running execution lawsuits have settled in Arizona and California, as a renewed challenge to the state’s revised lethal-injection protocol has ramped up in Oklahoma. The Arizona settlement addressed issues of execution transparency, while the California settlement acknowledged the impact of the state’s execution moratorium and preserved death-row prisoners’ rights to oppose any new execution plan should the moratorium be lifted. The Oklahoma litigation raises concerns about the…

In a primary election that was regarded by many as a referendum on reform prosecutors, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner (pictured) beat back a challenge by the circuit’s former chief homicide prosecutor, Mary Pat Carl. Election returns from the August 4, 2020, Democratic primary in St. Louis showed Gardner, the city’s first African-American Circuit Attorney, with 61% of the vote, while Carl received 39%. The race was a rematch of the 2016 primary in which then State…

The only woman on Oregon’s death row has been resentenced to life in prison. On August 3, 2020, the Lane County Circuit Court accepted a settlement agreement in which Lane County prosecutors agreed to drop their appeal of a 2019 ruling overturning the death sentence imposed on Angela McAnulty (pictured) in February 2011 and McAnulty agreed to drop her appeals of her murder conviction. McAnulty is the only woman to have been sentenced to death in the state of Oregon since voters reinstated…

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has overturned the death sentence imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (pictured) for his role in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more than 250 others. The panel unanimously ruled on July 31, 2020, the court ruled that U.S. District Court Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. had failed to adequately question jurors about their exposure to pervasive pretrial publicity about the case. ​“A core promise of our…

NEWS (7/​31/​20) — Boston, MA: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has overturned the death sentence imposed on Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In a 2 – 1 decision, a panel of the court ruled that Tsarnaev’s death sentence violated the ​“core promise of our criminal-justice system … that even the very worst among us deserves to be fairly tried and lawfully punished.” The panel found that the trial judge’s failure to question 9 of the 12 seated jurors about what they had read…

As July 2020 came to a close, the federal government issued two more notices of execution and a county judge in Texas reportedly issued a new death warrant for a death-row prisoner whose previously scheduled execution had been stayed. In a July 31 news release, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had set execution dates of September 22, 2020 for William LeCroy and September 24, 2020 for Christopher Vialva. LeCroy was sentenced to death in the U.S. District Court for the Northern…

A prominent South Georgia prosecutor, lauded for his success in capital prosecutions, has a history of misconduct in those cases, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigative report has disclosed. Longtime Brunswick Judicial Circuit Assistant District Attorney John B. Johnson III, who joined the five-county prosecutor’s office in 1977, ​“has a dark legacy of problem cases,” the paper reports, including repeatedly withholding evidence from the defense in death penalty cases. The investigative…

The U.S. government has set an August 26, 2020 execution date for the sole Native American on federal death row, against the wishes of his tribe, the victims’ family, and the local U.S. Attorney’s office that prosecuted the case. On July 29, 2020, the Federal Bureau of Prisons issued a notice of execution to Lezmond Mitchell, a member of the Navajo Nation convicted of the stabbing deaths of a woman and her nine-year-old granddaughter on tribal lands. If the execution is carried out, it would…

Recent police and vigilante killings of Black Americans have ignited a national call for systemic reform of law enforcement across the country, highlighting the link between extrajudicial abuse of force and widespread discriminatory application of unnecessarily harsh legal punishments against people of color. In the wake of these murders, Maryland public defender Kristina Leslie (pictured) writes, “[m]eaningful and equitable criminal justice reform … must include abolishing the death penalty.”