Publications & Testimony

Prosecutors in Mohave County, Arizona announced in February that they will drop the pur­suit of the death penal­ty in two mur­der cas­es in the coun­ty. Justin Rector and Darrell Ketchner were sep­a­rate­ly charged with first-degree mur­der, and offi­cials said their defense teams had already spent over $2.2 mil­lion prepar­ing for tri­als that are still far from tak­ing place. Mohave County Attorney Matt Smith said, ​“Everybody’s look­ing to save mon­ey and these death penal­ty cases are…

Less than a week after Alabama halt­ed the failed exe­cu­tion of a ter­mi­nal­ly ill pris­on­er whose veins were not suit­able for intra­ve­neous injec­tion, the U.S. Supreme Court has decid­ed to hear the case of anoth­er Alabama pris­on­er whose med­ical con­di­tion, his lawyers say, make him con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly unfit for…

Three states—Alabama, Florida, and Texas—pre­pared to car­ry out con­tro­ver­sial exe­cu­tions on Thursday, February 22, all sched­uled for 7 PM Eastern time, but by the end of the night, two had been…

Thirty-three Tennessee death-row pris­on­ers have filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty and legal­i­ty of the state’s new exe­cu­tion pro­to­col, after Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery (pic­tured) asked the state supreme court to expe­dite exe­cu­tions before one of the state’s exe­cu­tion drugs expires. On February 14, Slatery asked the court to sched­ule eight exe­cu­tion to be car­ried out before June 1. Attorneys for the death-row pris­on­ers, who were…

BuzzFeed News inves­ti­ga­tion has dis­closed that Missouri car­ried out sev­en­teen exe­cu­tions between 2014 and 2017 using sup­plies of the drug pen­to­bar­bi­tal it secret­ly obtained from a phar­ma­cy the Food and Drug Administration had clas­si­fied as ​“high risk” because of repeat­ed seri­ous health vio­la­tions. The February 20 exposé describes a com­plex sys­tem of clan­des­tine meet­ings, code names, and undoc­u­ment­ed cash pay­ments that Missouri employed to con­ceal the identity of…

A Guantánamo mil­i­tary com­mis­sion judge has indef­i­nite­ly sus­pend­ed pro­ceed­ings in the death-penal­ty tri­al of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, accused of plan­ning al-Qaida’s alleged 2000 bomb­ing of the Navy war­ship USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. Expressing exas­per­a­tion over his con­tin­u­ing inabil­i­ty to com­pel civil­ian death-penal­ty lawyers to return to the case, Air Force Colonel Vance Spath (pic­tured) halt­ed the pro­ceed­ings on February 16. ​“I am…

Arizona death-row pris­on­er Barry Jones (pic­tured) has said for the twen­ty-three years he has been on death row that he nev­er raped or mur­dered his girl­friend’s 4‑year-old daugh­ter, Rachel Gray. In a pair of recent arti­cles for The Intercept, reporter Liliana Segura describes the incon­sis­tent med­ical tes­ti­mo­ny, police ​“tun­nel vision,” inept defense lawyer­ing, and oth­er ​“hall­marks of wrong­ful con­vic­tions” that led to a fed­er­al court evidentiary hearing…

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 deci­sion in Atkins v. Virginia cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly bars states from exe­cut­ing any per­son who has Intellectual Disability. (Daryl Atkins is pic­tured.) However, as report­ed in recent sto­ries in Pacific Standard Magazine and the news­pa­per, The Atlanta Black Star, some states have attempt­ed to cir­cum­vent the Atkins rul­ing by using social stereo­types and race as grounds to argue that defen­dants of col­or are not intellectually…

A bipar­ti­san bill to abol­ish the death penal­ty in Washington passed the state Senate on February 14 on a 26 – 22 vote. SB 6052 now moves to the House of Representatives, where the chair­woman of the House Judiciary Committee has said it will be giv­en a hear­ing. ​“Today, the Washington State Senate took an his­toric, bipar­ti­san vote, pass­ing Attorney General-request­ed leg­is­la­tion to elim­i­nate the death penal­ty and replace it with life in prison without possibility…

The sud­den fir­ing by U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis (left) of the Pentagon offi­cial who over­saw mil­i­tary com­mis­sion tri­als at Guantánamo Bay has raised con­cerns of polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence in the already tumul­tuous legal pro­ceed­ings in the death-penal­ty tri­als of the five men charged with plot­ting the 9/​11 attacks on the United…