Publications & Testimony

NEWS — August 15: Tennessee has executed Stephen Michael West after Governor Bill Lee denied his petition for clemency. West was the eleventh person executed in the United States in 2019 and the second in Tennessee. He was the first execution by electric chair this year. 1,501 prisoners have been executed in the United States since capital punishment resumed in the 1970s. Tennessee has carried out 11 executions in that period, five of them since August 2018. NEWS — August 16: The California…

A Dallas, Texas, county commissioner has called for a two-year halt on death-penalty trials, saying it would give the county time to study the financial and ethical costs of capital punishment. On August 6, 2019, Commissioner J.J. Koch (pictured) proposed a county moratorium on capital prosecutions, with cost savings from not pursuing the death penalty redirected toward investigating and prosecuting human trafficking cases. The proposal was notable coming in a county that has executed more…

Oklahoma’s practice of automatically housing death-row prisoners in solitary confinement and denying them communal religious services is unconstitutional and inhumane, a coalition of national and local civil rights organizations says. In a July 29, 2019 letter to interim Oklahoma Department of Corrections (ODOC) director Scott Crow, the coalition — headed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma — reported that its two-year investigation into the state’s housing of death-row prisoners…

Following the trends across most of the Midwest, the death penalty is waning in Indiana. Capital prosecutions are down, no jury has voted for death since 2013, and the state is closing in on its tenth consecutive year without an execution. An August 4, 2019 Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette review of the death penalty in the state reports that even high-profile murders that started out as death-penalty cases have recently been resolved with non-capital pleas. Several factors have contributed to the…

A federal appeals court has cleared the way for a civil lawsuit by two North Carolina death-row exonerees to advance to trial, rejecting a claim that police officers who allegedly violated their constitutional rights were immune from liability. On July 31, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a trial court ruling allowing Henry McCollum (pictured, left) and Leon Brown (pictured, right) to sue North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) agents Leroy Allen and…

A former high-ranking federal corrections official has warned that the federal government’s plan to execute five prisoners over a five-week period in December and January risks seriously traumatizing correctional workers. Allen Ault (pictured) is a former chief of the Justice Department’s National Institute of Corrections who also served as corrections commissioner in Georgia, Mississippi, and Colorado, and as chairman of the Florida Department of Corrections. In a July 31, 2019 op-ed in The…

NEWS — August 9: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has upheld a California federal district court’s denial of Steven Livaditis’s habeas corpus petition challenging his capital conviction and death sentence. The court ruled that U.S. Supreme Court caselaw barred it from considering mitigating evidence presented to the federal district court in support of Livaditis’s claim that he had been provided ineffective representation in the penalty phase of his trial. After excluding this…

Calling the state’s death penalty ​“dysfunctional,” ​“costly,” and ​“immoral,” Oregon Governor Kate Brown (pictured, left, at signing ceremony) on August 1, 2019 signed a bill significantly limiting the crimes for which capital punishment can be imposed in the state. The new law amends Oregon’s definition of death-eligible ​“aggravated murder,” reducing the categories of murder punishable by death from 19 to four. The new law restricts the death penalty to cases involving acts of terrorism in which…

Ohio cannot obtain drugs to carry out executions without putting public health at risk, Governor Mike DeWine (pictured) announced on July 31, 2019. DeWine told reporters that pharmaceutical manufacturers are unwilling to sell the state drugs for executions and have threatened to stop selling medicines to any state agency if they suspect the drugs might be diverted from therapeutic use to use in executions. A sales embargo could mean that the state would not be able to obtain medicines for…

Citing trial court interference in her right to present a defense, a federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of a Texas mother who was sentenced to death on charges that she had murdered her two-year-old daughter. In an unpublished, unsigned opinion issued on July 29, 2019, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said that trial court rulings that blocked Melissa Elizabeth Lucio (pictured) from calling an expert witness to challenge the…