Publications & Testimony

Arguing that a brain-dam­aged woman fac­ing the death penal­ty for the starv­ing death of her young daugh­ter ​“was inca­pable of rep­re­sent­ing her­self,” lawyers from the Georgia Office of the Capital Defender have asked that they be reap­point­ed as her coun­sel if the case advances to the penal­ty-phase of her tri­al for life or…

In an action con­demned by the United Nations and human rights groups as a fla­grant vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al law, Saudi Arabia behead­ed 37 peo­ple, includ­ing juve­nile offend­ers, in six sep­a­rate loca­tions on April 23, 2019. It was the nation’s largest mass exe­cu­tion since January 2016. Most of the peo­ple exe­cut­ed were mem­bers of the Shi’a Muslim minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ty. The human rights advo­cates blast­ed Saudi offi­cials for tar­get­ing polit­i­cal­ly dis­fa­vored groups and disregarding…

Texas has exe­cut­ed John William King (pic­tured), one of three men con­vict­ed of the bru­tal lynch­ing of James Byrd, Jr., after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to inter­vene in his case. King’s lawyers had asked the Court to grant a stay of his sched­uled April 24, 2019 exe­cu­tion after a divid­ed Texas Court of Criminal Appeals vot­ed 5 – 4 on April 22 to per­mit the exe­cu­tion to pro­ceed. King, an avowed white suprema­cist, had main­tained since the time…

At least five peo­ple were exon­er­at­ed in 2018 after hav­ing been wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed in cas­es that involved the mis­use or threat­ened use of the death penal­ty, a DPIC analy­sis of data accom­pa­ny­ing a new report by the National Registry of Exonerations has shown. The National Registry’s annu­al report on wrong­ful con­vic­tions, Exonerations in 2018, record­ed a record 151 new exon­er­a­tions across the United States in 2018, includ­ing 68 exon­er­a­tions result­ing from wrongful homicide…

The Fresno County District Attorney’s office has announced that it is drop­ping the death penal­ty against Douglas Stankewitz (pic­tured), California’s longest-serv­ing death-row pris­on­er. After review­ing exten­sive mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence that Stankewitz’s tri­al coun­sel had failed to inves­ti­gate, Fresno pros­e­cu­tors announced on April 19, 2019 that a sen­tence of life with­out parole would be ​“fair and just” in Stankewitz’s case and that they will not…

Three south­ern states have tak­en action to lim­it the public’s access to infor­ma­tion relat­ing to exe­cu­tions by increas­ing secre­cy sur­round­ing lethal-injec­tion drug sup­pli­ers. On April 12, 2019, the Texas Supreme Court reversed an ear­li­er deci­sion that would have dis­closed the source of lethal-injec­tion drugs used to car­ry out exe­cu­tions in Texas in 2014, assert­ing that dis­clo­sure ​“would cre­ate a sub­stan­tial threat of phys­i­cal harm to the source’s employ­ees and oth­ers.” On…

A sec­ond Muslim death-row pris­on­er has filed a fed­er­al civ­il rights law­suit chal­leng­ing Alabama​’s pol­i­cy of allow­ing only a Protestant Christian chap­lain in the exe­cu­tion cham­ber. Charles Burton, Jr. (pic­tured), con­vert­ed to Islam 47 years ago. In a com­plaint filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, Burton, who was sen­tenced to death in 1992, argues that Alabama’s pol­i­cy vio­lates the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses…

A civil­ian fed­er­al appeals court has dealt anoth­er blow to the Guantánamo mil­i­tary com­mis­sion death-penal­ty pro­ceed­ings, strik­ing more than two years of deci­sions in the USS Cole bomb­ing pros­e­cu­tion of Abd Al-Rahim Hussein Muhammed Al-Nashiri because of a mil­i­tary judge’s undis­closed con­flict of inter­est. Al-Nashiri faces cap­i­tal charges for his alleged role in the sui­cide bomb­ing attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 in which 17 U.S. Navy sailors were killed and…