Publications & Testimony

A fed­er­al judge in Vermont has accept­ed a plea deal between Donald Fell and fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors, per­ma­nent­ly remov­ing Fell from death row and end­ing a case that had raised seri­ous ques­tions about the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the fed­er­al death penal­ty. Under the terms of the deal, approved by U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford on September 28, 2018, Fell will serve a sen­tence of life with­out parole for the interstate…

An Arkansas ethics board has filed dis­ci­pli­nary charges against six mem­bers of the Arkansas Supreme Court alleg­ing that they vio­lat­ed the canons of judi­cial ethics in remov­ing a tri­al judge from all death-penal­­ty cas­es as a result of the judge’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in an anti-death-penalty…

Texas has sched­uled exe­cu­tions on con­sec­u­tive nights of two pris­on­ers who have long assert­ed their inno­cence. Troy Clark (pic­tured, left), who is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on September 26, 2018, was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death based on the chang­ing state­ments of a for­mer girl­friend who could have faced the death penal­ty under the Texas law of par­ties but was tried as an accom­plice and sen­tenced to 20 years in prison.

The FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2017, released by the U.S. Department of Justice, reports that mur­der rates sta­bi­lized across the United States in 2017, decreas­ing mar­gin­al­ly com­pared to adjust­ed homi­cide fig­ures from 2016 but remain­ing above the record lows record­ed ear­li­er in the decade. The ini­tial FBI crime fig­ures for 2017 report 17,284 mur­ders across the United States in 2017, com­pared to 17,413 in 2016, drop­ping the nationwide murder…

Sixteen years after a noto­ri­ous and now-dis­­­cred­it­ed foren­sic wit­ness told a Mississippi jury that Jeffrey Havard had sex­u­al­ly abused and shak­en his girl­friend’s six-month-old daugh­ter to death, Havard’s death sen­tence — but not his con­vic­tion — has been over­turned. On September 14, 2018, Adams County Circuit Judge Forrest Johnson ruled that state pathol­o­gist Steven Hayne’s recan­ta­tion of his diag­no­sis that infant Chloe Britt had been…

Women face​“wide­spread dis­crim­i­na­to­ry prac­tices in the cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion and deten­tion” in death-penal­­ty coun­tries around the world, accord­ing to a new report by the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The report, Judged for More Than Her Crime: A Global Overview of Women Facing the Death Penalty—released at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on September 18,…

For the first time in more than a quar­ter cen­tu­ry, few­er than 2,500 pris­on­ers across the United States now face active death sen­tences. According to the lat­est Death Row USA nation­al cen­sus by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), released in ear­ly September 2018, 2,743 peo­ple were on death rows in 32 states and the U.S. fed­er­al and mil­i­tary death rows on April 1, 2018. That total includes 249 peo­ple who were pre­vi­ous­ly sen­tenced to death but face the possibility of…

A land­mark arti­cle in the Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy pro­vides a​“com­pi­la­tion of mile­stones in the American expe­ri­ence with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment,” track­ing more than 400 years of the​“inglo­ri­ous expe­ri­ence with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment” in what is now the United States. Authors Rob Warden (pic­tured, left), Executive Director Emeritus at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic Center on Wrongful…

In a peri­od of less than one week, four for­mer death-row pris­on­ers in four sep­a­rate states learned that they no longer face exe­cu­tion, con­tribut­ing to the con­tin­u­ing decline in the num­ber of peo­ple on death rows across the U.S. The result of the unre­lat­ed court pro­ceed­ings — a resen­tenc­ing hear­ing in Pennsylvania, a non-cap­i­­tal grand jury indict­ment in Louisiana, a prosecutor’s deci­sion to drop death in Indiana, and…

Four years after intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled broth­ers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were exon­er­at­ed of the 1983 rape and mur­der of an 11-year-old girl in North Carolina, jurors in McCollum’s case met with mem­bers of his defense team and reflect­ed on how they sen­tenced an inno­cent man to death. In a September 6 op-ed in the Raleigh News & Observer, Kristin Collins — Associate Director of Public…