Publications & Testimony

Clemency, a film explor­ing the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll of the death penal­ty, has been award­ed the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the pres­ti­gious Sundance Film Festival on February 2, 2019. The movie, writ­ten and direct­ed by Nigerian-American film­mak­er Chinonye Chukwu, tells the sto­ry of prison war­den Bernadine Williams (por­trayed by Alfre Woodard) as she pre­pares to over­see her 12^th exe­cu­tion in the after­math of a botched execution.

According to new polling results, sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in North Carolina has fall­en dra­mat­i­cal­ly, with only 25% of vot­ers say­ing they pre­fer the death penal­ty for peo­ple con­vict­ed of first-degree mur­der. The poll, con­duct­ed the last week of January 2019 by Public Policy Polling, found that near­ly three quar­ters of North Carolina vot­ers reject­ed cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment for peo­ple con­vict­ed of mur­der, with 35% pre­fer­ring a com­bi­na­tion of life without…

Idaho offi­cials delib­er­ate­ly mis­led the pub­lic about the costs and appli­ca­tion of the state’s death penal­ty and prison offi­cials’ ques­tion­able efforts at obtain­ing exe­cu­tion drugs, accord­ing to evi­dence pre­sent­ed in week-long court hear­ings on the state’s exe­cu­tion secre­cy prac­tices. Testimony from January 28 through February 1, 2019 in an open-records law­suit against the Idaho Department of Corrections has revealed that Idaho paid $10,000 in cash to an undis­closed drug…

For the first time since Georgia brought back the death penal­ty in 1973, the state will go five years with­out impos­ing any death sen­tences. No jury has hand­ed down a death sen­tence since March 2014 and, with no cap­i­tal tri­als sched­uled for February or March, the state is near­ly cer­tain to reach the 5‑year mile­stone. The decline in death sen­tenc­ing is even more dra­mat­ic in light of the fact that, pri­or to 2015, Georgia had nev­er gone two con­sec­u­tive years with­out a death…

A fed­er­al appeals court has found 80-year-old Charles Ray Finch (pic­tured) ​“actu­al­ly inno­cent” of the mur­der for which he was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in North Carolina 42 years ago. The pro­nounce­ment came in a unan­i­mous rul­ing issued by a three-judge pan­el of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on January 25, 2019. In that deci­sion, Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory wrote that ​“Finch has over­come the exact­ing stan­dard for actu­al innocence…

Texas exe­cut­ed Robert Jennings (pic­tured) on January 30, 2019 for the 1988 mur­der of Houston police offi­cer Elston Howard, amid ques­tions as to his eli­gi­bil­i­ty for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of his death sen­tence. Jennings was con­vict­ed under a sen­tenc­ing pro­ce­dure that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down short­ly before his tri­al in 1989 because it did not ade­quate­ly allow jurors to con­sid­er evi­dence sup­port­ing a sen­tence less than death.

Stephen Curry (pic­tured, right, dur­ing a 2015 vis­it to the White House), star of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and exec­u­tive pro­duc­er of the upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary Emanuel, has pub­licly voiced his oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty. Emanuel tells the sto­ry of the mur­der of nine Black mem­bers of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by white suprema­cist Dylann Roof. It is…

The Missouri Supreme Court may soon rule on the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the state’s prac­tice of hav­ing the tri­al judge deter­mine whether a cap­i­tal defen­dant should live or die if the sen­tenc­ing jury is unable to reach a unan­i­mous ver­dict. Death-row pris­on­er Marvin Rice (pic­tured) was sen­tenced to death by the tri­al judge in August 2017, even though 11 of the 12 jurors in his case vot­ed for a life sen­tence. His appeal, which the state court heard on January 23,…

Citing a fed­er­al court’s con­cerns that Ohio’s lethal-injec­tion process is unnec­es­sar­i­ly tor­tur­ous, new­ly inau­gu­rat­ed Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (pic­tured, left) has issued a six-month reprieve to death-row pris­on­er Warren Keith Henness (pic­tured, right), delay­ing his exe­cu­tion from February 13 to September 12, 2019. In grant­i­ng the reprieve, DeWine also direct­ed the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction to review Ohio’s pos­si­ble alter­na­tive drugs to…