Publications & Testimony

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has reinstated the death sentence of Paul Storey (pictured), after a Tarrant County judge had reduced his sentence to life because a prosecutor had lied at trial about the victim’s family’s views on the death penalty. In a divided opinion issued October 2, 2019, the court did not address the merits of Storey’s claim that his death sentence should be overturned because the prosecution had presented false evidence and argument to the jury, instead ruling that…

NEWS — October 11: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed a Nevada district court’s decision to uphold death-row prisoner Zane Floyd’s conviction and death sentence. Among other issues, the court found that the prosecutor’s misconduct by telling the jury that Floyd’s killing of four people was ​“the worst massacre in the history of Las Vegas” and eliciting extensive unconstitutional testimony by the mother of one of the victims rights about her son’s difficult life and…

Texas state courts have halted the executions of two condemned prisoners who had been facing imminent execution dates. On October 4, 2019, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the October 10 execution of Randy Halprin (pictured, left) and directed a Dallas trial court to consider his claim that the religious bigotry of the judge who presided over his case denied him a fair trial before an impartial tribunal. The previous day, a Henderson County District Court judge withdrew the death…

Jurors in South Carolina report that they are experiencing profound psychological effects from their exposure to graphically violent images, testimony, and argument during the death-penalty trial of Tim Jones, Jr. (pictured). Three months after the June 13, 2019 conclusion of the penalty phase of a trial in which jurors sentenced Jones to death for killing his five young children, nine of the 18 Lexington County jurors and alternates from the case agreed to speak with the local newspaper, The…

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has granted a reprieve to Cleveland Jackson, delaying his execution date from November 13, 2019 to January 13, 2021, because of a misconduct complaint filed against his previous appellate attorneys. The ethics complaint alleges that John Gibbons and James Jenkins, who were appointed in 2007 to represent Jackson during his habeas corpus appeal, missed critical filing deadlines, did not meet with their client for years, and even failed to inform him when an execution…

A Kentucky man who languished in jail for nearly six years because of bail he could not afford has been acquitted of capital murder and related charges. Eugene ​“Red” Mitchell (pictured) faced the death penalty on charges that he had raped, sodomized, and murdered Sheila Devine, a Louisville grandmother. On September 18, 2019, a Jefferson County jury found Mitchell not guilty of all charges against him. He had spent five years, eight months and ten days in pretrial custody, unable to post a…

In a 7 – 2 decision, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Curtis Giovanni Flowers, a Mississippi death row prisoner who has been tried six times for a notorious 1996 quadruple murder in Winona, Mississippi. Three of the first five trials ended in convictions that were overturned on appeal and two trials resulted in hung juries. The lead prosecutor for all six trials was Doug Evans, the District Attorney in Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit Court District. In the sixth trial, the defense…

A Missouri death-row prisoner whose rare medical condition, he says, risks making his execution by lethal injection a gruesome and grisly spectacle is seeking clemency from Missouri Governor Mike Parson ahead of his October 1, 2019 execution date. Russell Bucklew (pictured) suffers from cavernous hemangioma, a condition that causes blood-filled tumors to form in his head and neck. His lawyers have asked Parson to commute his death sentence on humanitarian grounds, saying his tumors are likely…

NEWS — October 3 – 4, 2019: In the span of two days, three new death sentences were imposed and three executions were halted across the United States. On October 3, a federal jury in South Carolina sentenced Brandon Council (pictured) to death for the murders of two white female bank employees during the course of a bank robbery. The same day, an Ohio three-judge panel sentenced George Brinkman to death for the murders of a Stark County couple. Brinkman had waived a jury trial and asked for the…

Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery (pictured) has asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to set execution dates for an unprecedented nine death-row prisoners, the largest execution request in the modern history of Tennessee’s death penalty. On the same day, September 20, 2019, Slatery attempted to intervene in the case of death-row prisoner Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman to reactivate his death warrant and undo a court-approved plea deal with Nashville prosecutors that would overturn his death…