Publications & Testimony

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 In an unpublished, unsigned opinion issued on July 29, 2019, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said that trial court rulings that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…

The announcement by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that it intends to resume federal executions after a 16-year hiatus has sparked commentary from across the political spectrum and emboldened the Arizona Attorney General to seek a resumption of executions in that state. Responses from conservative pundits demonstrated the increasing bipartisan skepticism towards the death penalty. Catholic bishops reasserted the Church’s now unequivocal opposition to capital punishment. Editorial boards…

A former Pennsylvania death-row prison superintendent says working on death row makes corrections personnel feel “less human” and “can be profoundly damaging” psychologically. Cynthia Link (pictured) served as the Superintendent of Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Graterford from 2015 to 2018, during a period in which the prison housed more than 20 of the Commonwealth’s death row prisoners. In a July 16, 2019 op-ed for Penn Live, Link describes the psychological toll that…

NEWS: July 30 — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has upheld a federal district court ruling permitting a civil lawsuit by North Carolina death-row exonerees Henry McCollum and Leon Brown to proceed to trial. McCollum and Brown, two intellectually disabled brothers who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl, allege that police coerced false confessions from them and then failed to investigate alternative suspects, and that they were…

The U.S. Supreme Court has said the death penalty must be reserved for the worst of the worst murders and be imposed only on the worst of the worst offenders. But what of an accomplice to a felony in which someone was killed but the accomplice neither committed the killing nor intended that a killing would take place? Those co-defendants are not even the worst of the worst participants in the offense for which they are charged. Yet, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported on July…

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced its intent to adopt a new federal execution protocol using a single execution drug and has issued death warrants setting execution dates for five federal death-row prisoners. In a July 25, 2019 press release, the DOJ said that Attorney General William P. Barr had directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to adopt an addendum to the federal execution protocol specifying that federal executions will be carried out using the drug pentobarbital…

The decline in the U.S. death-row population continued for a 17^th consecutive year in 2017, according to newly released findings by the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics. The data in the Bureau’s annual death-penalty report, Capital Punishment, 2017: Selected Findings, confirm the long-term findings of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund showing that death row has fallen in size every year since 2001. BJS reviewed data relating to every person under sentence of death who was…