Publications & Testimony

In a departure from its prior editorial stand, the Orlando Sentinel published an editorial on November 22, 2019 calling for Florida to abolish the death penalty. Describing the state’s capital-punishment system as a “hopeless quagmire of inequities,” the Sentinel said “[t]oo many questions cannot be adequately answered for us to continue supporting the death penalty, and for Florida to continue administering it.” The Sentinel editorial board had previously raised concerns about specific…

Popular culture has the potential to change social attitudes, and actors in two eagerly anticipated movies focusing on the death penalty are hoping that their films will do just that. In recent interviews about their roles in the dramas Just Mercy and Clemency, actors Jamie Foxx, Alfre Woodard, and Aldis Hodge discuss how those films inspired them to open up about their past and affected their views on capital punishment. Just Mercy became highly personal for Foxx (pictured right, with Just…

For the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1985, a majority of Americans now say life imprisonment is a better approach for punishing murder than is the death penalty. According to the 2019 Gallup death-penalty poll (click here to enlarge graphic), 60% percent of Americans asked to choose whether the death penalty or life without possibility of parole “is the better penalty for murder” chose the life-sentencing option. 36% favored the death penalty. The response reflects a…

NEWS — November 29: The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed a federal district court ruling granting Arizona death-row prisoner Barry Lee Jones a new trial based on his trial lawyer’s failure to investigate and present evidence that he is innocent. Jones had been convicted of sexual assault, three counts of child abuse, and felony murder in connection with the death of a four-year-old girl, Rachel Gold. The court found that, as a result of Jones’s trial lawyer’s…

The number of people on death row or facing capital resentencing in the United States is at a 27-year low, according to a DPIC analysis of data from a new death-row census by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). The Summer 2019 edition of Death Row USA, released earlier this month, reports that 2,656 people were on death row as of July 1, 2019. That last time DRUSA reported a death-row population that small was in the Fall of 1992, when LDF found that 2,636 people across were…

A federal judge in Washington has issued a preliminary injunction barring the United States government from carrying out four executions scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020. The opinion, issued November 20, 2019, temporarily halts the federal executions pending completion of court challenges to the government’s execution process and is a major blow to the Trump administration’s plan to resume carrying out the federal death penalty after a sixteen-year hiatus. The U.S. Department of…

Pennsylvania has agreed to end its policy of mandatory incarceration of death-row prisoners in permanent solitary confinement. The policy change was part of a proposed settlement agreement of a federal class action lawsuit brought by a coalition of prisoners’ rights organizations on behalf of the Commonwealth’s 136 death-row prisoners, most of whom are housed in the State Correctional Institution-Greene (pictured from Google Earth image). The federal settlement agreement, filed with the…

Two civil rights organizations have filed a class action lawsuit against Mississippi prosecutor Doug Evans (pictured) seeking an end to what they describe as a “policy, custom, and usage of racially discriminatory jury selection.” The lawsuit, filed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the MacArthur Justice Center on November 18, 2019 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi on behalf of black prospective jurors in Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit Court District, asks the…

A Tennessee death-row prisoner who is facing execution in early December is seeking to reverse his 1992 conviction and death sentence in light of new information that a juror who served on his case failed to disclose that she was biased against him. Lee Hall (pictured), who is scheduled to be executed December 5, 2019, was convicted of killing his estranged girlfriend, Traci Crozier, and sentenced to death. However, in a November 14 hearing in Hamilton County Criminal Court, he says his…

NEWS — November 24: Six states set a total of 8 execution dates for November 2019. Three death warrants were carried out — Charles Rhines (South Dakota), Justen Hall (Texas), and Ray Cromartie (Georgia); 4 warrants were stayed; and one execution was halted by reprieve. Through November 24, 11 states and the federal government have scheduled 65 execution dates for 2019. There have been 20 executions, with four potential executions still pending. The map above shows where executions have been…