Publications & Testimony

A new doc­u­men­tary air­ing on ABC tells the sto­ries of Darlie Lynn Routier and Julius Jones, two death-row pris­on­ers who have long argued they were wrongfully…

Just under 54% of Americans say they sup­port the death penal­ty and 39% say they are opposed, accord­ing to the results of a Pew Research poll released June 11, 2018. The poll — admin­is­tered between April 25 and May 1, one month after President Trump called for the death penal­ty for drug traf­fick­ing — reflects a five-point increase in sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, up from the record-low 49% record­ed in Pew’s 2016…

In the midst of a sharp decline in death sen­tences in the state, the Georgia Supreme Court on June 4 heard a direct appeal in a cap­i­tal case for the first time in two years. In March 2018, Georgia reached the four-year mark since it had last imposed a death sen­tence, a dra­mat­ic change for a state that once hand­ed down 15 death sen­tences in a sin­gle year. The decline in Georgia’s death penal­ty exem­pli­fies broad­er nation­al death-penalty trends.

An attempt by Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner (pic­tured) to rein­state Illinois’ death penal­ty by attach­ing it as an ​“amenda­to­ry veto” to pro­posed gun-con­trol leg­is­la­tion has failed. Rather than accede to a plan that would con­di­tion stricter gun reg­u­la­tion upon rein­tro­duc­ing the death penal­ty for mur­ders of police offi­cers and any mur­der with more than a sin­gle vic­tim, the state leg­is­la­ture rewrote the gun-con­trol mea­sure the gov­er­nor had amend­ed, drop­ping any mention of…

In a rul­ing three dis­senters crit­i­cized as an ​“out­lier,” and after hav­ing been rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 for ignor­ing the med­ical con­sen­sus defin­ing intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, a sharply divid­ed (5 – 3) Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) has upheld the death sen­tence imposed on Bobby James Moore (pic­tured) 38 years ago. On June 6, 2018, the CCA ruled that Bobby Moore is not intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled under the most recent clin­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of the…

A severe­ly men­tal­ly ill Texas death-row pris­on­er who gouged out his eyes and ate one of them has asked a fed­er­al appeals court to allow him to appeal a low­er court deci­sion that upheld his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence and found that he had been com­pe­tent to stand…

A gay man on death row in South Dakota has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case and to rule that it is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al for jurors to impose the death penal­ty based upon anti-gay ani­mus and stereo­types. Charles Rhines (pic­tured) argues that South Dakota’s courts improp­er­ly refused to con­sid­er evi­dence — includ­ing an affi­davit from one of his jurors that the jury ​“knew that he was a homo­sex­u­al and thought that he shouldn’t be able to spend his life…

Over a strong dis­sent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor (pic­tured), the United States Supreme Court on June 4 declined to review the case of Texas con­demned pris­on­er Carlos Trevino, who had argued that his lawyer was inef­fec­tive for fail­ing to inves­ti­gate and present mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence of Trevino’s brain dam­age and devel­op­men­tal delays from his exten­sive pre­na­tal expo­sure to alco­hol. Having failed to inves­ti­gate, Trevino’s lawyer pre­sent­ed only a single witness…

The Movement for Black Lives has called for abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty in the United States, assert­ing that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is a racist lega­cy of slav­ery, lynch­ing, and Jim Crow that ​“deval­ues Black lives.” A Spring 2018 arti­cle in the University of Chicago’s phi­los­o­phy jour­nal Ethics, co-authored by Michael Cholbi, Professor of Philosophy at California State Polytechnic University and Alex Madva, Assistant Professor of…

A fed­er­al dis­trict court has ordered the Alabama Department of Corrections to release its lethal-injec­tion pro­to­col and unseal tran­scripts and plead­ings relat­ed to the failed exe­cu­tion of Doyle Hamm. In a May 30, 2018, order, Judge Karon Owen Bowdre, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama said ​“how Alabama car­ries out its exe­cu­tions” is ​“a mat­ter of great pub­lic con­cern,” and ruled that the…