Publications & Testimony

Incoming United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet (pic­tured), has con­demned the mass tri­al of more than 700 pro­test­ers in a Cairo, Egypt, crim­i­nal court, in which 75 defen­dants were sen­tenced to death. The court also imposed life sen­tences on 47 oth­ers on September 8 and sen­tenced anoth­er 612 defen­dants to prison terms of 15, 10, or 5 years. The defen­dants faced charges rang­ing from ​“ille­gal gath­er­ing” to murder…

The Louisiana Supreme Court has unan­i­mous­ly over­turned the con­vic­tion of death-row pris­on­er Brian Douglas Horn (pic­tured), after Horn’s lawyer con­ced­ed — over Horn’s explic­it objec­tion — that his client had killed and also may have molest­ed 12-year-old Justin Bloxom. The September 7, 2018 rul­ing is the lat­est fall­out in Louisiana from the U.S. Supreme Court’s deci­sion ear­li­er this year in McCoy v. Louisiana, which declared that…

Defense attor­neys for Sayfullo Saipov (pic­tured), the man accused of killing eight peo­ple by dri­ving a truck onto a Manhattan bike path on October 31, 2017, have asked a New York fed­er­al dis­trict court to bar the U.S. gov­ern­ment from seek­ing the death penal­ty against Saipov. Arguing that President Donald Trump has uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly inject­ed ​“naked­ly polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions” into the Department of Justice’s charg­ing deci­sion, Saipov’s lawyers on September 6, 2018, filed a…

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…