Publications & Testimony

The last three men scheduled for execution in Georgia said they did not commit the killing and that DNA testing that was not available at the time of trial could prove it. In two of the cases, victim family members supported the request for testing. Prosecutors opposed the requests, and the courts refused to allow the testing. Two of the three men were executed, with doubts still swirling as to their guilt. Shawn Nolan, a federal defender who represented Georgia prisoner Ray “Jeff” Cromartie…

Three groups, representing prosecutors, the Catholic Church, and political conservatives, have filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the efforts of Florida death-row prisoner James Dailey (pictured) to obtain judicial review of his innocence claim. Dailey filed a petition for certiorari on January 10, 2020 asking the Supreme Court to hear his case, after the Florida courts refused to consider evidence that another man had confessed to the murder. Dailey, a veteran who served three…

NEWS (2/6/20): Texas executed Abel Ochoa on February 6, 2020. Ochoa unsuccessfully sought clemency on the grounds that he had shown great remorse for his crime and been rehabilitated. Ochoa had sought a stay of execution alleging that Texas unconstitutionally interfered in the clemency proceedings in his case by preventing him from submitting evidence in support of his clemency application. Although Texas routinely permits members of the media to film death row prisoners for their news stories…

NEWS (2/6/20): Sonny Boy Oats will come off Florida’s death row after 39 years, prosecutors announced on February 6. Oats was convicted and sentenced to death in Marion County in 1981. His lawyers have argued that executing Oats would be unconstitutional because he is intellectually disabled. With eight of nine psychiatrists and psychologists who evaluated Oats concluding that he is intellectually disabled, State Attorney Ric Ridgway told the court that his office would no longer contest Oats’…

NEWS (2/5/20): The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction and death sentence of Marine Corps veteran John Thuesen, who sustained combat-related PTSD from his service in the war in Iraq. In an unsigned, unpublished opinion on February 5, the appeals court adopted all but a handful of the trial court’s findings of fact and conclusions of law, which had rejected Thuesen’s claim that his trial lawyer had been ineffective in failing to investigate and present available evidence of the…

As the death penalty continues to wilt across the country, whatever penological justification it once purportedly served is dying as well, say capital punishment scholars Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker (pictured). In their new article The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of the Death Penalty in the United States in the January 2020 Annual Review of Criminology, the Steikers examine four central issues in the rise and fall of the death penalty in the United States and explore what an American…

Calling the death penalty “a failed government program,” 21 current and former Virginia prosecutors have signed on to a letter to the commonwealth’s General Assembly urging the legislature to abolish capital punishment. The letter was signed by former Attorneys General Mark L. Earley, Sr., a Republican who presided over 36 executions during 13 years in office, and Democrat William G. Broaddus, nine current or former Commonwealth’s Attorneys elected across the state, and 12 other former homicide…

For the third consecutive year, the Washington State Senate has voted to remove the death penalty from the state’s statute books. In a 28 – 18 vote praised by abolition advocates for its bipartisanship, four senate Republicans joined 24 of their Democratic colleagues on January 30, 2020 to formally repeal Washington’s capital punishment law. With a new Speaker replacing Democratic leadership who had prevented the bill from coming up for a vote in the House in 2018 and 2019, the prospects of the…

In legislative votes 1,600 miles apart on January 30, 2020, state senates in Colorado and Virginia took historic steps toward abolishing or reforming their state death-penalty systems. After hours of emotional debate on the floor of the state senate in Denver, Colorado senators voted 19 – 15 to repeal the state’s death-penalty statute. Hours earlier, in Richmond, the Virginia state senate passed a bill that would bar the death penalty for individuals who were suffering from severe mental illness…