Publications & Testimony

The Nebraska Supreme Court has ruled that the 2015 legislative repeal of the state’s death-penalty statute did not invalidate the death sentences of the prisoners on the state’s death row because the repeal bill never became law before it was rejected by a statewide voter referendum. In a decision issued January 3, 2020, the court dismissed a claim brought by death-row prisoner Marco Torres (pictured) that the legislature’s repeal of the death-penalty law changed his death sentence to life…

After having been rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2019 for his pattern of racially biased jury selection in the capital prosecutions of Curtis Flowers and sued in federal court to bar future race-based jury strikes, Mississippi prosecutor Doug Evans has voluntarily recused himself from future involvement in Flowers’ case. Evans has been the driving force in Flowers’ case for more than 20 years, personally prosecuting Flowers (pictured, right, with defense co-counsel Henderson Hill)…

On January 7, 2020, Louisiana marked the passage of ten years since its last execution. As a result of the milestone, two-thirds of U.S. states have now either abolished the death penalty or gone at least a decade without an execution. Twenty-one U.S. states have judicially or legislatively abolished capital punishment. With Louisiana joining their ranks, 12 of the 29 states that still authorize the death penalty (41.4%) have gone more than a decade without carrying out an execution. (Click…

With executions on hold due to problems with the lethal-injection protocol, the future of capital punishment in Ohio is uncertain. High-ranking Ohio officials have expressed concerns about the effectiveness and viability of the state’s death penalty, and two recent columns in leading Ohio newspapers have argued that the state should end capital punishment. In a year-end interview with the Toledo Blade, Governor Mike DeWine intimated that Ohio’s death penalty was both unworkable in practice and…

Death sentences imposed in the United States fell by more than half over the course of the 2010s, continuing a steep nationwide decline that has seen death sentences fall by more than 89% since the peak death sentencing years of the mid 1990s. Fewer death sentences were imposed in the second half of the 2010s than in any other five-year period since capital punishment resumed in the United States in 1973. [Click here to enlarge image] A Death Penalty Information Center analysis of sentencing…

Families who have a loved one on death row, or who have experienced the execution of a loved one, suffer a variety of adverse mental health effects, including depression, anxiety, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to a new report by the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP). The report, Nobody to Talk to, describes the mental health challenges faced by family members of death row prisoners and the special difficulties those family members experience in seeking mental health…

NEWS — January 3: In Florida, a trial judge in Fort Myers accepted the jury’s recommendation and sentenced Mark Sievers to death for the murder of his wife. In Oklahoma, the court formally sentenced Byron Shepard to death for the murder of a Pottawatomie County police officer. They were the first death sentences of the new decade. Before his sentencing, Sievers told the court: “Although a jury found me guilty, I’m innocent of all charges as I have maintained since the day this crime took place.

At least 99 men and one woman are on death row in eight U.S. states, condemned to death by judges without the prior authorization of a jury, according to a 2019 study by researchers Michael Radelet and Ben Cohen (pictured) published in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Another 18 prisoners sentenced to death since the resumption of capital punishment in the U.S. in the 1970s, the study shows, have been executed after judges disregarded or overrode jury votes in favor of life.

In the December 2019 edition of the Discussions with DPIC podcast, Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham and Managing Director Anne Holsinger discuss DPIC’s 2019 Year End Report. The podcast explores the major themes presented in the year’s death-penalty news and developments, including innocence, declining use of capital punishment, and systemic problems revealed by the new death sentences and executions in 2019. The two major themes of the 2019 report, Dunham…

Billy Joe Wardlow (pictured) was 18 years old, when he killed 82-year-old Carl Cole during a botched attempt to steal Cole’s car so that Wardlow and his girlfriend could pursue their fantasy of running away from their abusive homes in Carson, Texas to start a new life in Montana. Wardlow, who had no prior history of violence, has regretted his action ever since. In the cover story for the Winter 2020 issue of the magazine The American Scholar, Wardlow told veteran journalist and legal…