Publications & Testimony

The Kentucky Supreme Court has struck down the Commonwealth’s death-penal­ty intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty law, which required proof of an IQ score of 70 or below before a death-row pris­on­er or cap­i­tal defen­dant could be found inel­i­gi­ble for the death penal­ty. The court ruled on June 14, 2018, in the case of Robert Keith Woodall (pic­tured) that the Commonwealth’s use of a strict IQ cut­off as a pre­req­ui­site to find­ing a defen­dant intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled vio­lates the…

A new study shows that the Mississippi District Attorney’s office that has pros­e­cut­ed Curtis Flowers for cap­i­tal mur­der six times — strik­ing almost all black jurors in each tri­al — has dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly exclud­ed African Americans from jury ser­vice for more than a quar­ter cen­tu­ry. Reviewing the exer­cise of dis­cre­tionary jury strikes in 225 tri­als between 1992 and 2017, American Public Media Reports dis­cov­ered that dur­ing the tenure of Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit…

The Ohio Parole Board held a hear­ing on June 14, 2018 to con­sid­er clemen­cy for death-row pris­on­er Raymond Tibbetts, whose February 13 exe­cu­tion was halt­ed by Governor John Kasich to con­sid­er a juror’s request that Tibbets be spared. Ross Geiger, one of the twelve jurors who sen­tenced Tibbetts to death in 1997, wrote to Governor Kasich on January 30 express­ing ​“deep con­cerns” about a ​“very flawed” tri­al and say­ing he ​“would not have…

A new doc­u­men­tary air­ing on ABC tells the sto­ries of Darlie Lynn Routier and Julius Jones, two death-row pris­on­ers who have long argued they were wrongfully…

Just under 54% of Americans say they sup­port the death penal­ty and 39% say they are opposed, accord­ing to the results of a Pew Research poll released June 11, 2018. The poll — admin­is­tered between April 25 and May 1, one month after President Trump called for the death penal­ty for drug traf­fick­ing — reflects a five-point increase in sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, up from the record-low 49% record­ed in Pew’s 2016…

In the midst of a sharp decline in death sen­tences in the state, the Georgia Supreme Court on June 4 heard a direct appeal in a cap­i­tal case for the first time in two years. In March 2018, Georgia reached the four-year mark since it had last imposed a death sen­tence, a dra­mat­ic change for a state that once hand­ed down 15 death sen­tences in a sin­gle year. The decline in Georgia’s death penal­ty exem­pli­fies broad­er nation­al death-penal­ty trends.

An attempt by Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner (pic­tured) to rein­state Illinois’ death penal­ty by attach­ing it as an ​“amenda­to­ry veto” to pro­posed gun-con­trol leg­is­la­tion has failed. Rather than accede to a plan that would con­di­tion stricter gun reg­u­la­tion upon rein­tro­duc­ing the death penal­ty for mur­ders of police offi­cers and any mur­der with more than a sin­gle vic­tim, the state leg­is­la­ture rewrote the gun-con­trol mea­sure the gov­er­nor had amend­ed, drop­ping any men­tion of…

In a rul­ing three dis­senters crit­i­cized as an ​“out­lier,” and after hav­ing been rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 for ignor­ing the med­ical con­sen­sus defin­ing intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, a sharply divid­ed (5 – 3) Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) has upheld the death sen­tence imposed on Bobby James Moore (pic­tured) 38 years ago. On June 6, 2018, the CCA ruled that Bobby Moore is not intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled under the most recent clin­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of the…

A severe­ly men­tal­ly ill Texas death-row pris­on­er who gouged out his eyes and ate one of them has asked a fed­er­al appeals court to allow him to appeal a low­er court deci­sion that upheld his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence and found that he had been com­pe­tent to stand…

A gay man on death row in South Dakota has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case and to rule that it is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al for jurors to impose the death penal­ty based upon anti-gay ani­mus and stereo­types. Charles Rhines (pic­tured) argues that South Dakota’s courts improp­er­ly refused to con­sid­er evi­dence — includ­ing an affi­davit from one of his jurors that the jury ​“knew that he was a homo­sex­u­al and thought that he shouldn’t be able to spend his life…