Publications & Testimony

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has stayed the execution of Texas death-row prisoner Dexter Darnell Johnson one day before he was scheduled to die. The ruling, issued late in the day on August 14, 2019, permits Johnson to litigate his claim that he is ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. The stay marked the second time in four months that federal courts intervened in Johnson’s case to halt a looming execution. On April 30, 2019, the U.S. District…

The high cost of meeting its obligation to provide constitutionally-mandated effective representation for indigent defendants in capital cases continues to generate controversy in Utah’s fourth largest county. With two capital trials pending and a lengthy post-conviction proceeding underway on whether a court-appointed lawyer in a third capital case provided ineffective representation, the Salt Lake Tribune reports that Weber County is facing bills for defense costs that will run into the…

Sister Helen Prejean, the acclaimed author of Dead Man Walking, has written a new spiritual memoir, River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey. The book, released August 13, 2019 by Random House publishers, tells the story of her spiritual development from joining the Congregation of St. Joseph at age 18 to becoming a leading voice in the movement to abolish the death penalty. The “spark at the heart of [her death-penalty activism],” Prejean told The New York Times, was when, in her forties, she…

Advocates from a variety of backgrounds are urging Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to stop the August 15, 2019 execution of Stephen West (pictured), saying that West did not commit the murder and urging the governor not to execute a man who is severely mentally ill. [UPDATE: Governor Lee denied clemency and West was executed on August 15.] In a July clemency petition that is pending before the governor, West’s lawyers argue for mercy based upon his innocence of murder and his debilitating…

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…