Publications & Testimony

The Ohio House of Representatives has over­whelm­ing­ly approved a bill that would ban the death penal­ty for offend­ers who were seri­ous­ly men­tal­ly ill at the time of the offense. House Bill 136, spon­sored by Rep. Brett Hillyer (R – Uhrichsville, pic­tured), passed the House by a vote of 76 – 18 on June 5, 2019 with bipar­ti­san sup­port and was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 11. Hillyer’s bill would remove the death penal­ty as a sen­tenc­ing option for defendants…

The U.S. Supreme Court has grant­ed review of an Arizona death-penal­­ty case in which the state courts first refused to con­sid­er a defendant’s mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence and then denied his request for a jury sen­tenc­ing hear­ing after his death sen­tence was over­turned. The Court on June 10, 2019 grant­ed the peti­tion for writ of cer­tio­rari filed by Arizona death-row pris­on­er James Erin McKinney (pic­tured) 26 years after he was first…

A spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor in Harris County, Texas, has filed a com­plaint with the Texas State Bar Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel against for­mer Assistant District Attorney Daniel Rizzo, alleg­ing that Rizzo inten­tion­al­ly con­cealed excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence cru­cial to the exon­er­a­tion of for­mer death-row pris­on­er Alfred Dewayne Brown (pic­tured). Brown was wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 2005 for a robbery…

NEWS (6/​16): On this date 75 years ago, South Carolina exe­cut­ed George Stinney, an inno­cent 14-year-old black boy framed for the mur­ders of two young white girls. The Stinney fam­i­ly was forced to flee their home in Alcolu because of the threat of vio­lence. Stinney was tried before an all-white jury in a tri­al that took less than half a day. He was the only black per­son in the cour­t­house. The jury took just ten min­utes to convict…

A study of tax rates and crime rates in Texas coun­ties has found that death-penal­­ty tri­als con­tribute to high­er prop­er­ty tax rates and increased rates of prop­er­ty crime. Alex Lundberg (pic­tured), an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of Economics at West Virginia University, ana­lyzed bud­getary and crime rate data from Texas coun­ties and found that coun­ties respond­ed to the high cost bur­den of cap­i­tal tri­als by raising property…

One year after a state task force issued a report call­ing Pennsylvania’s death penal­ty seri­ous­ly flawed and in need of major reform, bipar­ti­san oppo­si­tion to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is sur­fac­ing in the Commonwealth’s leg­is­la­ture. A group of leg­is­la­tors, led by Lebanon County Republican State Rep. Frank Ryan (pic­tured, left) and Philadelphia Democrat Chris Rabb (pic­tured, right), have pre­pared leg­is­la­tion to repeal Pennsylvania’s death penal­ty and are…

Four years after the racial­ly moti­vat­ed mur­ders of nine African-American parish­ioners at the his­toric Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015, a new book by Charleston Post and Courier reporter Jennifer Berry Hawes explores the after­math of the killings and the extra­or­di­nary nar­ra­tive of grace and for­give­ness it pro­duced. As a reporter for the Post and Courier,…

An Alabama woman who may have been raped by guards has giv­en birth after being impreg­nat­ed in the Coosa County jail while await­ing tri­al on cap­i­tal mur­der charges. LaToni Daniel (pic­tured), an hon­or­ably dis­charged Army National Guard vet­er­an who has been in pre­tri­al cus­tody with­out bail for more than sev­en­teen months, had been pre­scribed seda­tives in the prison for a sup­posed seizure dis­or­der, and the medication…

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a land­mark report titled Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward, in which it raised sig­nif­i­cant ques­tions about the valid­i­ty of every foren­sic sci­ence dis­ci­pline except DNA analy­sis. The report con­clud­ed,​“no foren­sic method has been rig­or­ous­ly shown to have the capac­i­ty to con­sis­tent­ly, and with a high degree of cer­tain­ty, demon­strate a con­nec­tion between evidence and…

Aramis Ayala (pic­tured), the first African American elect­ed as a state attor­ney in Florida, will not seek re-elec­­tion as Orange-Osceola County State Attorney. Citing con­flicts with the Florida Supreme Court’s pro­nounce­ments on cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tions, Ayala announced in a Facebook video on May 28, 2019 that she would not pur­sue a sec­ond term as state attor­ney.​“It’s time for me to move for­ward and to con­tin­ue the pursuit of…