Publications & Testimony

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the execution of Rodney Reed (pictured) on November 15, 2019, directing the Bastrop County district court to review Reed’s claims that prosecutors suppressed exculpatory evidence and presented false testimony and that he is actually innocent. The court’s action culminated a whirlwind of activity on the Friday preceding Reed’s scheduled November 20 execution. Earlier in the afternoon, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously recommended to…

Reform prosecutors made further inroads into the administration of American law enforcement, sweeping county elections in Northern Virginia and gaining control of prosecutor’s offices in Pennsylvania and California. Progressive prosecutors rode a blue wave of suburban votes on November 5, 2019 that solidified Democratic control of every state legislative and prosecutorial seat in the Northern Virginia counties bordering the nation’s capital and wrested control of county government from one of…

Hundreds of former state and federal judges, prosecutors, law enforcement and corrections officials, and family members of homicide victims have signed on to a series of letters urging the federal government to halt the five federal executions scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020. In four separate letters addressed to President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr, 175 family members of murder victims, 65 former state and federal judges, 59 current and former state and federal…

At least 166 wrongfully convicted death-row prisoners have been exonerated since the death penalty was reinstituted in the United States in 1973. That number, however, may only scratch the surface in assessing the degree to which innocent men and women are being sent to U.S. death rows. In the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC, Rob Warden (pictured, left) and John Seasly (pictured, right) speak with DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger about a body of death-penalty cases in which…

A federal district court has granted a stay of execution to a Buddhist death-row prisoner in Texas over allegations that the state is discriminatorily denying him access to religious services that would be available to Christian prisoners on the day of their execution. On November 7, 2019, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas stayed the November 13 execution of Patrick Murphy (pictured), marking the second time in 2019 that his execution has been stayed over…

NEWS — November 13: A Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio judge has imposed a death sentence on Matthew Nicholson for the murders of his girlfriend’s teenage children. It was the third death sentence imposed in Cuyahoga County in 2019, more than in any other county in the country. Cuyahoga County also imposed two death sentences in 2018, making it the only county to impose more than one death sentence in both of the last two years. The five death sentences in that period are also the most in the…

On March 16, 2017, saying that capital punishment is “not in the best interests of this community or in the best interests of justice,” Orange/Osceola County (FL) state prosecutor Aramis Ayala announced that her office would not pursue the death penalty in any case. That decision, announced in connection with the prosecution of a man charged with killing his ex-girlfriend, her unborn child, and a police officer responding to the crime, ignited a political firestorm in which then-Florida Gov.

Texas executed Justen Hall (pictured) on November 6, 2019 in the second Texas case of the year to present significant questions as to a prisoner’s competency to be executed. Hall, a mentally ill death-row prisoner who had given up his appeals, had attempted suicide and had told courts on multiple occasions that he wanted to be executed. His lawyers — with whom he had refused to speak since 2017 — said Hall exhibited symptoms of serious mental illness, including hallucinations, paranoia, and…

After being reversed twice by the United States Supreme Court, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) has resentenced intellectually disabled death-row prisoner Bobby James Moore to life in prison. In a three-page decision issued on November 6, 2019, 39 years after Moore was sentenced to death in Houston for a 1980 murder during a supermarket robbery, the CCA conceded that the U.S. Supreme Court has determined that “Moore … is a person with intellectual disability.” Given that determination…

The prosecutor who sent Thomas Creech, Idaho’s longest-serving death-row prisoner, to jail 37 years ago now says that Creech and others sentenced to death in the Gem State should not be executed. Jim Harris (pictured), former County Prosecutor for Ada County, sought the death penalty against Creech in 1982. Creech, who was first sentenced to death in another case in 1976, has spent more time in prison than any other person on the state’s death row, but in the years since Harris obtained a…