Publications & Testimony

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…

A divided Missouri Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the state’s death-penalty statute against a challenge to its requirement that the trial judge decide a capital defendant’s sentence in cases of a penalty-phase hung jury. In a 4 – 3 decision issued on July 16, 2019, the court rejected a claim brought by Craig Wood (pictured) that hung-jury judicial sentencing violated his Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury. A 5 – 2 majority of the court also denied relief on Wood’s claims that…

In a highly publicized death-penalty trial, Brendt Christensen (pictured) was sentenced to life in prison without parole on July 18, 2019 for the rape and murder of Chinese graduate student Yingying Zhang when a federal jury in Peoria, Illinois did not reach a unanimous decision on what sentence was appropriate for his crime. The trial attracted broad national and international attention as a result of the sensational circumstances surrounding the murder, Ms. Zhang’s status as an international…

NEWS: July 23 — The U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that Wyoming prosecutors may seek the death penalty in resentencing proceedings against 74-year-old Dale Wayne Eaton. Eaton had been the only person on Wyoming’s death row between 2004, when he was sentenced to death for a 1988 killing, and 2014, when a federal district court reversed his death sentence for ineffective penalty-phase representation. At that time, Eaton sought to bar a capital resentencing trial, arguing that the death of…

Calling Governor Gavin Newsom’s moratorium on executions a “paradigm shift” in the death-penalty landscape, a defendant facing the death penalty in Los Angeles has petitioned the California Supreme Court to halt capital prosecutions in the state. On July 1, 2019, lawyers for Cleamon Johnson — whose death penalty trial is scheduled to begin in January 2020 — have filed a pretrial petition for review, arguing that capital juries “cannot be expected to provide a fair and reasoned penalty-phase…

Citing race disparities, ineffective representation by court-appointed lawyers, and arbitrary case outcomes, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office has asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to strike down the state’s death penalty. In a brief filed on July 15, 2019 in the consolidated appeals of Philadelphia death-row prisoner Jermont Cox and Northumberland County’s Kevin Marinelli, the District Attorney’s office argued that Pennsylvania’s death penalty “has repeatedly been handed out in an…

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who described his deciding vote to uphold the constitutionality of capital punishment in 1976 as the one court vote he most regretted, has died. He was 99 years old. A media advisory released by the Supreme Court on July 16, 2019, said that Stevens died of complications from a stroke he suffered the day before. “He brought to our bench an inimitable blend of kindness, humility, wisdom, and independence,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in…

Amidst an ongoing lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of South Carolina’s death-row conditions, the state has moved its death-row prisoners to a different prison. On July 11, 2019, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDOC) moved the state’s 38 death-row prisoners from Kirkland Correctional Institution to the nearby Broad River Correctional Institution (pictured), into a facility that had originally been built to house death-row prisoners in 1988. In a press release, SCDOC said…

Rick Unklesbay served as a prosecutor in the Pima County Attorney’s Office in Arizona for nearly four decades, prosecuting more than 100 homicides, including sixteen in which death sentences were imposed. He put Don Miller on death row and, in November 2000, watched as Arizona put Miller to death. In Arbitrary Death: A Prosecutor’s Perspective on the Death Penalty, Unklesbay tells the story of nine of those death-penalty cases and how the arbitrary nature of the U.S. justice system has changed…