Publications & Testimony

Filming for the movie adap­ta­tion of Bryan Stevenson’s best-sell­ing book, Just Mercy, began August 27, 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama. The film will fea­ture Michael B. Jordan (Creed, Black Panther) as Stevenson and Oscar-win­ner Jamie Foxx (Ray, Django Unchained) as wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed death-row pris­on­er Walter…

“It is wide­ly rec­og­nized that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States of America con­tin­ues to be imbued with the lega­cy of slav­ery” and, to end it, American death-penal­ty abo­li­tion­ists ​“should draw on the rad­i­cal­ism of [anti-slav­ery] abo­li­tion­ists.” So argues British death-penal­ty schol­ar and abo­li­tion­ist Dr. Bharat Malkani, a Senior Lecturer at the Cardiff University School of Law and Politics, in his new book, Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in…

A Louisiana death-row pris­on­er is ask­ing the U.S. Supreme Court to review the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence a sec­ond time based upon alle­ga­tions that the tri­al judge had an undis­closed con­flict of inter­est. In his peti­tion to review his con­vic­tion for a triple-mur­der involv­ing the death of a New Orleans police offi­cer, Rogers Lacaze (pic­tured) argues that his right to due process was vio­lat­ed when his tri­al judge, Frank Marullo,…

The Nebraska Supreme Court heard oral argu­ment on August 30, 2018 in a case chal­leng­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the state’s cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing pro­ce­dure, which requires a three-judge pan­el to decide whether to impose a death sen­tence. Attorneys for death-row pris­on­er John Lotter said the state’s three-judge sen­tenc­ing vio­lates the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments as applied to Florida’s cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing law in Hurst v. Florida. In…

In high-pro­file cas­es in Sudan and Saudi Arabia, human rights advo­cates are protest­ing the threat­ened use of the death penal­ty against women for resist­ing oppres­sion. In the Sudan, pros­e­cu­tors are seek­ing to rein­state the death sen­tence against Noura Hussein (pic­tured), a teen girl forced into mar­riage who killed her abu­sive hus­band as he tried to rape her. The Saudi Arabian gov­ern­ment is seek­ing the death penal­ty against Israa…

Pope Francis’ recent dec­la­ra­tion com­mit­ting the Catholic Church to oppos­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in all cir­cum­stances has pro­duced an unusu­al pub­lic war of words about the prac­tices of Catholic pub­lic offi­cials in one of the coun­try’s most aggres­sive death-penalty…

The Congressional Black Caucus has urged Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin to review the case of death-row pris­on­er Julius Jones (pic­tured) and to use her author­i­ty to cor­rect what it char­ac­ter­ized as his ​“wrong­ful con­vic­tion.” In an August 21, 2018 let­ter to the Governor, the Black Caucus — an orga­ni­za­tion of African-American mem­bers of the U.S. House of Representatives — expressed its ​“deep con­cerns” about racial bias in the appli­ca­tion of the…

A new report by Amnesty International says Florida​’s approach to redress­ing the near­ly 400 uncon­sti­tu­tion­al non-unan­i­mous death sen­tences imposed in the state has deep­ened its sta­tus as an out­lier on death-penal­ty issues by ​“add[ing] an extra lay­er of arbi­trari­ness to [the state’s] already dis­crim­i­na­to­ry and error-prone cap­i­tal justice…

A new study by an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team of Arizona State University psy­chol­o­gy researchers has found a link between the actu­al and per­ceived scarci­ty of resources and sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The study, cur­rent­ly in press but avail­able online on August 10 in the sci­ence jour­nal, Evolution and Human Behavior, dis­cov­ered that coun­tries with greater resource scarci­ty were more like­ly to have a death penal­ty, as were U.S. states with low­er per capi­ta…

As lawyers for Nevada told their state supreme court that a con­tro­ver­sial Nebraska exe­cu­tion had been car­ried out with­out prob­lems, a fed­er­al judge issued a rul­ing allow­ing a law­suit to pro­ceed that would force California to allow media wit­ness­es to observe exe­cu­tions in that state in their entire­ty. The devel­op­ments in the cas­es in the two states high­light an ongo­ing con­tro­ver­sy over the lack of trans­paren­cy and account­abil­i­ty in recent…