Publications & Testimony

Pervis Payne (pictured) was young, black, and, he says, in the wrong place at the wrong time. The son of a minister, he is on death row in Tennessee, convicted of the horrific murders of a white woman and her two-year-old daughter and the stabbing of her three-year-old son in 1987. His case, profiled by Steven Hale in The Appeal on April 29, 2020, features evidence of innocence, intellectual disability, prosecutorial misconduct, and racial stereotyping. Payne is scheduled to be executed on…

Alleging that the Texas prison system is “failing to undertake take basic measures to protect [them] from the risk of disease and death” presented by the coronavirus pandemic, prisoners on the state’s death row have filed a class-action motion to join a federal prison-conditions lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). The motion and an accompanying class-action complaint, filed May 1, 2020 by the Texas Innocence Network in the U.S. District Court for the Southern…

In a federal capital case with implications relating to tribal sovereignty, a federal appeals court has denied a Native-American prisoner’s appeal seeking to investigate racial bias in his case, while questioning the federal government’s pursuit of the death penalty against him. On May 1, 2020, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied Lezmond Mitchell’s request to re-open his habeas corpus challenge to his conviction and death sentence based on a 2017 U.S.

NEWS (5/1/20) — Ohio: By a vote of 6 – 2, the Ohio Parole Board has recommend that Governor Mike DeWine commute the sentence of death-row prisoner Gregory Lott (pictured) to life without parole. The decision on clemency is now up to Gov. DeWine, who has twice delayed Lott’s execution. Lott’s execution had been scheduled for August 2019, but on March 7, 2019, DeWine issued a reprieve and rescheduled the execution for March 12, 2020. Citing the unavailability of execution drugs, Gov. DeWine…

In a case long marred by prosecutorial misconduct, the Missouri Supreme Court has denied a stay of execution for Walter Barton (pictured), rejecting his claims of innocence and incompetence to be executed. The court’s ruling on April 27, 2020 made no mention of Barton’s additional request to put off his execution because of public health dangers relating to the coronavirus pandemic. If Barton’s execution is carried out as scheduled on May 19, it would be the first in the nation since the…

NEWS (5/1/20) — California: A split three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has upheld the conviction and death sentence of Richard Allen Benson for the sexual molestation of two young girls, murdering them, their mother, and their baby brother. The court unanimously agreed that a police officer’s false statement during interrogation that Benson would not face the death penalty did not render his confession invalid. In a 2 – 1 penalty-phase decision, the panel ruled…

Conservative commentator Drew Johnson (pictured) has a suggestion for states whose budgets have been gutted by declining tax revenue and rising costs related to the coronavirus pandemic: end the death penalty. In an April 23, 2020 op-ed for conservative news outlet Townhall, Johnson writes, “As state policymakers put programs on the chopping block in an attempt to balance budgets, there’s one failed policy that should be first to go: the death penalty.” Johnson, a Senior Scholar at the…

UPDATE: Arizona has experienced the first known COVID-19 death-row fatality and the coronavirus is spreading on the state’s death row, lawyers for the prisoners have said. Alfonso Salazar died from the virus on April 30, 2020, seven other death-row prisoners on death row in the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence have tested positive for coronavirus, and eleven others who have not been tested are showing symptoms of COVID-19, Dale Baich, chief of the federal defender capital habeas unit…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has stayed the May 6, 2020 execution of Edward Busby (pictured) for sixty days. Busby’s was the nation’s seventh execution postponed in the United States because of the coronavirus and the sixth in Texas. The stay, issued on April 27, marked the 26^th execution date in the first half of 2020 to be halted. By contrast, five executions have been carried out with three others — two in Texas and one in Missouri — still pending before the end of June. The court’s…