Publications & Testimony

NEWS (2/17/20): A Kentucky public defender has been cleared of charges that she tampered with evidence in a capital case. On February 17, 2020, a Kentucky grand jury declined to indict Angela Elleman on a felony charge arising out of allegations that she and a defense investigator had dug up shell casings linked to a murder case and kept them in a safe for more than six years. Elleman represents Anthony Hogan, a co-defendant of James Mallory (pictured), who is facing the death penalty.

After a five-year hiatus, Oklahoma has announced plans to resume executions by returning to the same combination of lethal-injection drugs that were part of its execution protocol during a series of botched executions in 2014 and 2015. At a February 13, 2020 press conference, Governor Kevin Stitt, Attorney General Mike Hunter (pictured), and Department of Corrections Director Scott Crow announced that the state will return to a three-drug protocol of midazolam (a sedative), vecuronium bromide…

Rocky Myers (pictured) may be innocent and intellectually disabled, and his jury voted to sentence him to life. So why is he facing execution in Alabama? In the February 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, members of Myers’ legal team tell the story of how racial bias, poor representation, and judicial override led to the possible wrongful conviction of an intellectually disabled man. Assistant Federal Defender Kacey Keeton and Investigator Sara Romano speak with DPIC Managing Director Anne…

NEWS (2/13/20): The California Supreme Court has granted a new trial to Kenneth Earl Gay, who was sentenced to death in 1985 for the murder of a Los Angeles police officer. In a unanimous decision on February 13, 2020, the court ruled that Gay’s lawyer had “obtained appointment to represent Gay through fraud, counseled him to make damaging confessions to the prosecution without safeguards to ensure the confessions would not be used without a deal (while deceiving him as to whether such…

NEWS (2/13/20): The Florida Supreme Court issued opinions on February 13, 2020 denying relief to prisoners in three death penalty cases. The court upheld Anthony Mungin’s conviction and death sentence despite his assertion that prosecutors had unconstitutionally withheld exculpatory evidence and presented false testimony. Mungin had argued that prosecutors knowingly presented false testimony from an officer who claimed at trial that he had seen two spent shell casings in a stolen car linked to…

As state legislatures in Ohio and Washington contemplate the future of their death-penalty statutes, major newspapers in each of the states are advocating legislative repeal. On February 6, 2020, following a state senate vote to formalize the Washington Supreme Court’s judicial abolition of the state’s death penalty, The Seattle Times editorial board urged the state House of Representatives to complete the job. “The state Supreme Court has struck down Washington’s death-penalty law, but it…

NEWS (2/12/20): On February 12, 2020, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the death sentence imposed on Charles Brownlow, Jr. in Kaufman County in April 2016. The appeals court ruled that Brownlow’s jury had been prevented from properly evaluating his claim of intellectual disability. Brownlow had attempted to present evidence that he was ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. However, the trial judge instructed the jury that it was to evaluate his…

Andre Thomas (pictured) is a Texas death-row prisoner riven with schizophrenia so severe that, in separate incidents, he gouged out both of his eyes and ate one of them. The U.S. Court of Appeals heard oral argument on February 5, 2020, about whether his conviction and death sentence should be overturned because his lawyers failed to present evidence that he was incompetent to be tried, failed to present mitigating evidence of Thomas’ extensive history of mental illness, and failed to object to…

NEWS (2/11/20): The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania has stayed the execution of Jordan Clemons, which had been scheduled for March 13, 2020. As required by a law enacted by the Pennsylvania legislature in 1995, Clemons was the subject of a legally premature execution date, even though he had not yet had the opportunity to appeal his conviction and death sentence in state or federal post-conviction proceedings and was entitled to pursue those appeals. The…

Why is the death penalty pursued and imposed in some cases and not in others that, at first glance, seem facially indistinguishable? Surveying the academic literature, Daniel Medwed, the University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University School of Law, points to one of the factors that “seeps into charging and sentencing decisions in meaningful and disturbing ways“ — race: first, the race of the victim and then the race of the defendant. In a new article…