Publications & Testimony

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…

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…