Publications & Testimony

Texas plans to exe­cute Joseph Garcia on December 4, 2018, for the mur­der of a police offi­cer dur­ing a rob­bery in which Garcia nei­ther killed any­one nor intend­ed or expect­ed that a killing would take place. His case renews ques­tions about a Texas law called the ​“law of par­ties” that allows defen­dants to be sen­tenced to death based upon the actions and intent of oth­ers, if the defen­dant played even a small role in a crime that result­ed in someone’s…

A three-judge pan­el of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has unan­i­mous­ly over­turned the death sen­tence imposed on Virginia death-row pris­on­er Mark E. Lawlor in 2011, rul­ing that the tri­al court had uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly pre­vent­ed Lawlor from pre­sent­ing expert men­tal health tes­ti­mo­ny that he posed a low risk of vio­lence in prison if the jury spared his life. On November 27, 2018, the court reversed a deci­sion of a Virginia fed­er­al district…

Twenty months after the Unites States Supreme Court unan­i­mous­ly struck down Texas​’s non-sci­en­tif­ic stan­dard for eval­u­at­ing intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty in death penal­ty cas­es, the land­mark case in which it made that deci­sion is back before the Court. On December 7, 2018, the Court will con­fer­ence Moore v. Texas, to decide if it will review whether the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) once again uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly relied on lay stereo­types and…

For the past three-and-a-half years, Texas has pur­chased exe­cu­tion drugs from a Houston-based com­pound­ing phar­ma­cy that, BuzzFeed News reports, ​“has been cit­ed for scores of safe­ty vio­la­tions” and whose license to oper­ate is cur­rent­ly on pro­ba­tion. In an exclu­sive sto­ry by inves­tiga­tive reporter Chris McDaniel, BuzzFeed dis­cov­ered that Texas secret­ly obtained exe­cu­tion drugs from the Greenpark Compounding Pharmacy, a phar­ma­cy that the Texas State Board of Pharmacy has cited…

As fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors dropped the death penal­ty against a Navajo man accused of killing a police offi­cer on Navajo land, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argu­ment in a sep­a­rate case on the sta­tus of a treaty estab­lish­ing the bor­ders of the Creek Nation reser­va­tion that could deter­mine whether Oklahoma has juris­dic­tion to car­ry out the death penal­ty against a cit­i­zen of the Muscogee (Creek) tribe. The two cas­es high­light issues of Native American…

For the sec­ond time in less than six months, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has upheld a death sen­tence that the tri­al court, lawyers for the pros­e­cu­tion and defense, and men­tal health experts all agree should not be car­ried out. On November 21, 2018, in an unpub­lished and unsigned opin­ion that mis­spelled death-row pris­on­er Jeffery Wood​’s name, the court reject­ed a rec­om­men­da­tion by the Kerr County District Court to overturn…

On November 21, 2018, Kentucky marked 10 years since its last exe­cu­tion, becom­ing the eleventh cur­rent death-penal­ty state that has not car­ried out an exe­cu­tion in more than a decade. Another 20 states have leg­isla­tive­ly or judi­cial­ly abol­ished their death-penal­ty laws, bring­ing the num­ber of states that do not active­ly use the death penal­ty to 31. On the day before Kentucky reached its 10-year mile­stone, a law­suit filed in fed­er­al court high­light­ed some of the greatest…

The Tennessee Supreme Court has set exe­cu­tion dates for six men on the state’s death row, sched­ul­ing their exe­cu­tions for between May 16, 2019 and April 9, 2020. This mass exe­cu­tion sched­ule, issued on November 16, 2018, comes in the wake of the con­tro­ver­sial exe­cu­tions of Billy Ray Irick and Edmund Zagorski ear­li­er this year and as the state pre­pares to exe­cute David Earl Miller on December 6. If all sev­en scheduled…

The Death Penalty Information Center has released a major new report, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States, exam­in­ing the scope and con­se­quences of secre­cy in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty in the United…