Publications & Testimony

As Edmund Zagorski faces a November 1, 2018 exe­cu­tion in Tennessee, the courts have required him to choose between death by lethal injec­tion and elec­tro­cu­tion. His lawyers argue that both meth­ods, as well as the forced choice between the two, are uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. In a law­suit filed in fed­er­al dis­trict court on October 26, 2018 and appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on October 30, Zagorski’s attor­ney, Kelley Henry, wrote of…

The Florida Supreme Court has upheld the death sen­tence imposed on William Roger Davis, III (pic­tured), even though Davis’s death sen­tence vio­lates both the Florida and fed­er­al con­sti­tu­tions. In a deci­sion issued on October 25, 2018, the court refused to redress the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the death sen­tence — imposed by a tri­al court judge after a bare 7 – 5 major­i­ty of jurors had rec­om­mend­ed death — rul­ing that dur­ing post-con­vic­tion pro­ceed­ings before the trial…

The South Dakota Supreme Court has denied motions that sought to delay the October 29, 2018 exe­cu­tion of Rodney Berget (pic­tured). As the state pre­pared to exe­cute Berget, the for­mer pub­lic defend­er who rep­re­sent­ed him at tri­al took action to fight a prospec­tive legal guardian’s efforts to keep the for­mer Special Olympics par­tic­i­pant from being put to death. On Friday, October 26, Juliet Yackel, a Chicago-based lawyer who had been retained in…

A Virginia jury has spared the life of Iraq war vet­er­an Ronald Hamilton (pic­tured, right, with his father) in the 2016 killings of his wife and a rook­ie police offi­cer. The jury split 6 – 6 on whether to impose the death penal­ty for Hamilton’s mur­der of his wife, Crystal Hamilton, but unan­i­mous­ly agreed to impose a life sen­tence for the death of Officer Ashley Guindon, who was killed while she respond­ed to Crystal Hamilton’s 911 call. Under…

“[T]he issue of race and the death penal­ty is not unique to the death penal­ty, it’s part of the broad­er prob­lem with the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem,” says Bharat Malkani (pic­tured), author of the 2018 book Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition, in a new Discussions With DPIC pod­cast. In the October 2018 DPIC pod­cast, Malkani — a senior lec­tur­er in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom — speaks with…

A study of more than three decades of homi­cide arrests sug­gests that racial dis­par­i­ties in arrests and polic­ing prac­tices intro­duce an addi­tion­al lay­er of bias in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty in the United…

Following the Washington Supreme Court’s October 11, 2018 deci­sion declar­ing the state’s death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, news out­lets have ques­tioned what comes next. Op-ed writ­ers in North Carolina, Texas, and California have respond­ed, urg­ing their states to recon­sid­er their cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment laws. The Washington court cit­ed racial bias, ​“arbi­trary deci­sion-mak­ing, ran­dom impo­si­tion of the death penal­ty, unre­li­a­bil­i­ty, geo­graph­ic rar­i­ty, and exces­sive delays” as reasons…

Fewer than half of Americans now believe the death penal­ty is fair­ly applied in the United States, accord­ing to the 2018 annu­al Gallup crime poll of U.S. adults, con­duct­ed October 1 – 10. The 49% of Americans who said they believed the death penal­ty was ​“applied fair­ly” was the low­est Gallup has ever record­ed since it first includ­ed the ques­tion in its crime poll in 2000. The per­cent­age of U.S. adults who said they believe the death penal­ty is unfair­ly applied rose to 45%, the…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on October 19, 2018 stayed the exe­cu­tion of Kwame Rockwell (pic­tured), a severe­ly men­tal­ly ill death-row pris­on­er suf­fer­ing from schiz­o­phre­nia, who had been sched­uled to die on October 24. The court found that Rockwell had raised ​“sub­stan­tial doubt that he is not com­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed” and reversed a rul­ing by the Tarrant County District Court that had reject­ed Rockwell’s competency…