Publications & Testimony

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey has drawn crit­i­cism for deny­ing clemen­cy and pre­sid­ing over the exe­cu­tion of Michael Samra (pic­tured) on May 16, 2019, one day after issu­ing a state­ment call­ing Alabama a pro-life state and declar­ing life ​“pre­cious” and ​“sacred.” On May 15, Ivey signed into law a bill that crim­i­nal­izes abor­tion, say­ing that the new law ​“stands as a pow­er­ful tes­ta­ment to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is pre­cious and that every life is a sacred gift from God.” After…

In the lat­est episode of the Discussions with DPIC pod­cast, Emmy- and Oscar-win­ner Edward Zwick speaks about his new movie, Trial By Fire. The film, which Zwick co-pro­duced and direct­ed, tells the sto­ry of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 1992 for the deaths of his three chil­dren in a house fire that pros­e­cu­tors wrong­ly claimed had been inten­tion­al­ly set. As Willingham’s exe­cu­tion approached in 2004, evi­dence came to light that arson…

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued an advi­so­ry mem­o­ran­dum declar­ing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ​“lacks juris­dic­tion” to reg­u­late exe­cu­tion drugs, includ­ing enforc­ing fed­er­al laws that pro­hib­it the import of such drugs from abroad. The mem­o­ran­dum, authored by Assistant Attorney General Steven A. Engel (pic­tured) for the Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, places the admin­is­tra­tion square­ly in con­flict with a 2012…

In the wake of sharp crit­i­cism of sev­er­al con­tro­ver­sial death-penal­ty deci­sions, the five con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tices of the U.S. Supreme Court issued three opin­ions on May 13, 2019, explain­ing their votes in those ear­li­er cas­es. The opin­ions, issued in con­nec­tion with the appar­ent­ly incon­sis­tent orders in reli­gious dis­crim­i­na­tion claims brought by two death-row pris­on­ers and a deci­sion declin­ing to review the case of an Alabama death-row pris­on­er who had chal­lenged the state’s…

Facing a May 16, 2019 exe­cu­tion date, Alabama death-row pris­on­er Michael Brandon Samra (pic­tured) has asked the United States Supreme Court and Governor Kay Ivey to halt his exe­cu­tion and for the Court to con­sid­er the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly of impos­ing the death penal­ty upon 19-year-old offend­ers. In a peti­tion filed on April 27, Samra — a teenage offend­er with bor­der­line intel­lec­tu­al func­tion­ing — asked the U.S. Supreme Court to…

Proponents of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment have long argued for the death penal­ty on the grounds that it brings clo­sure to fam­i­ly mem­bers of homi­cide vic­tims. But sci­ence sug­gests that achiev­ing clo­sure through exe­cu­tion may be a myth, says fam­i­ly and child ther­a­pist Linda Lewis Griffith (pic­tured) in a May 6, 2019 col­umn in the San Luis Obispo Tribune, and that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment may actu­al­ly make matters…

A new study of Louisiana​’s death penal­ty reports that the state’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem costs tax­pay­ers at least $15.6 mil­lion a year more than a sys­tem with life with­out parole as the max­i­mum sen­tence. The study by retired New Orleans dis­trict Chief Judge Calvin Johnson (pic­tured, left) and Loyola Law Professor William Quigley (pic­tured, right), released on May 2, 2019, found that Louisiana has spent more than $200 mil­lion on its…

A fed­er­al appeals court has declared that Virginia for many years housed its death-row pris­on­ers in uncon­sti­tu­tion­al con­di­tions and has barred the state from revert­ing to its pri­or prac­tices. On May 3, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the Commonwealth’s for­mer pol­i­cy of 23- or 24-hour per day soli­tary con­fine­ment of death-row pris­on­ers con­sti­tut­ed cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment in vio­la­tion of the Eighth Amendment. The 2 – 1 deci­sion upheld a rul­ing by the U.S.

A two-week fed­er­al tri­al on the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of Arkansas​’s lethal-injec­tion pro­to­col came to a close May 2, 2019, as the par­ties pre­sent­ed legal argu­ments to the court after eight days of tes­ti­mo­ny. U.S. District Judge Kristine G. Baker must now deter­mine whether the state’s three-drug pro­to­col begin­ning with the seda­tive mida­zo­lam is allow­able. Lawyers rep­re­sent­ing a group of death-row pris­on­ers pre­sent­ed tes­ti­mo­ny from wit­ness­es of recent exe­cu­tions, as well as medical…

Sometimes you need a joke about a cute but very angry desert rain frog to pre­pare an unsus­pect­ing audi­ence for a seri­ous dis­cus­sion of lethal-injec­tion exe­cu­tions in the United States. That was the approach under­tak­en by Last Week Tonight, the satir­i­cal week­ly HBO com­e­dy-news show host­ed by John Oliver, as Oliver addressed the dead­ly seri­ous issue of lethal injec­tion in the show’s May 5, 2019 episode. Oliver called the death penal­ty ​“a wrong, bad…