Publications & Testimony

The use of the death penalty as a political weapon was on display in late December 2019 in an extraordinary series of four unrelated cases in Pakistan and the Middle East. In Pakistan, a special tribunal tried and convicted the nation’s former leader, General Pervez Musharraf (pictured), of high treason and sentenced him to death. Days later, a Pakistani civilian court convicted a Muslim professor of blasphemy and sentenced him to death. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, after a secret trial that…

In a year of declining death-penalty usage across the United States, nowhere was the erosion of capital punishment as sustained and pronounced in 2019 as it was in the western United States. Continuing a wave of momentum from Washington’s judicial abolition of capital punishment in October 2018, one state halted executions and dismantled its death chamber, another cleared its death row, two cut back on the circumstances in which the death penalty could be sought and imposed, and the entire…

Alabama sentenced Toforest Johnson to death, his lawyers and national experts say, because of prosecutorial misconduct, false eyewitness testimony, and inadequate representation. In an amicus brief filed in a Birmingham trial court on December 12, 2019, the Innocence Project says, “If ever a case bore the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction, Toforest Johnson’s is it.” Johnson (pictured center) was convicted in 1999 of murdering Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputy William Hardy, who was working…

As the capital punishment trial of accused Parkland, Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz was postponed until at least the summer of 2020, the father of one of the victims of the attack has urged the prosecution to end the case now by dropping the death penalty. Michael Schulman’s son, Scott Beigel, was the track coach and a geography teacher at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (pictured). He was one of 14 students and three teachers killed in the February 14, 2018 mass shooting at the…

Paul Skalnik is a sex offender and con man whose jailhouse “snitch” testimony was used by Florida and Texas prosecutors to convict more than 37 defendants, including four who were sentenced to death. His testimony that James Dailey (pictured) allegedly confessed to the brutal 1985 stabbing and drowning death of 14-year-old Shelley Boggio contributed to Dailey’s conviction and death sentence, despite the prosecution’s admission that no “physical evidence,” “no fingerprints,” and “no hair or…

The death penalty has now disappeared from whole regions of the country and continues to erode in others, according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s 2019 Year End Report. With New Hampshire’s repeal of its capital punishment statute in May, 21 states have now abolished the death penalty, with nine having done so since 2004. In March, California Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions on the nation’s largest death row, joining governors in Oregon, Colorado, and…

A Mississippi trial judge has released Curtis Flowers on $250,000 bail, while prosecutors decide whether to attempt to try him a seventh time for a quadruple murder he has long maintained he did not commit. Flowers (pictured right, with defense co-counsel Henderson Hill) was freed on December 16, 2019, after an anonymous donor posted his bond. He had spent the last 23 years in jail, most of it on death row. In July 1996, four employees of a white-owned furniture store in Winona, Mississippi…

NEWS — December 20: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled against Ohio death-row prisoners in their challenge to the state’s lethal injection process. The ruling came in connection with an appeal by Warren Keith Henness of an Ohio district court’s decision denying his request for an injunction and for a stay of execution. NEWS — December 20: Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has granted a reprieve to has granted a reprieve to Melvin Bonnell, rescheduling Bonnell’s Feb. 12, 2020…

Lawyers for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (pictured) sought to overturn his conviction and federal death sentence on Thursday, arguing in a federal appeals court that he could not get a fair trial in a city still traumatized by the attack. During the two-hour argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston on December 12, 2019, they also claimed Tsarnaev was denied an impartial jury when the trial court prohibited him from asking jurors about their exposure…

In his last series of acts before leaving office, outgoing Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin (pictured) has commuted the sentences of two of the state’s longest serving death-row prisoners to life with the possibility of parole. On Friday, December 6, 2019, Bevin commuted the death sentence of Gregory Wilson, whose trial proceedings had been described as a travesty of justice. Then on Monday, December 9 — the governor’s last day in office — he commuted Leif Halvorsen’s death sentence in response to…