Publications & Testimony

A Utah judge has exco­ri­at­ed the Utah Department of Corrections for prac­tices he called​“sneaky” and​“deceit­ful” and a state pros­e­cu­tor has dropped the death penal­ty after learn­ing that state prison offi­cials had with­held near­ly 1,600 pages of prison records from a defen­dant fac­ing cap­i­tal charges in a prison killing. Despite a court order to pro­duce all prison records, the depart­ment had failed to dis­close med­ical and men­tal health records detailing…

The University of Virginia School of Law has cre­at­ed a new inter­ac­tive web resource (click on map) that allows researchers and the pub­lic to visu­al­ly explore death-sen­­tenc­ing prac­tices in the United States from 1991 through 2017. The inter­ac­tive map pro­vides coun­­ty-lev­­el data on death sen­tences imposed across the United States, draw­ing from a new data­base cre­at­ed by University of Virginia Law Professor Brandon Garrett (pic­tured) for his recent book, End of Its…

Multiple fac­tors — from declin­ing mur­der rates to the aban­don­ment of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment by many rur­al coun­ties and sub­stan­tial­ly reduced usage in out­lier coun­ties that had aggres­sive­ly imposed it in the past — have col­lec­tive­ly led to an​“aston­ish­ing plunge” in death sen­tences over the last twen­ty years, accord­ing to a new study, Lethal Rejection, pub­lished in the 2017/​2018 Albany Law Review. Using data on death-eli­gi­ble cas­es from 1994, 2004,…

About half of all death penal­ty states include the mur­der of a child as an aggra­vat­ing cir­cum­stance that can sub­ject a defen­dant to the death penal­ty. As of January 2022, four­teen states autho­rized the death penal­ty for the mur­der of a child vic­tim, and five states that lat­er abol­ished the death penal­ty also had a child-victim aggravating…

One month after Alabama called off its two-and-a-half hour attempt­ed exe­cu­tion of Doyle Hamm, the state reached a con­fi­den­tial set­tle­ment agree­ment in which it agreed not to seek anoth­er exe­cu­tion date and Hamm’s attor­ney dis­missed his client’s pending civil-rights…

In his new book Surviving Execution: A Miscarriage of Justice and the Fight to End the Death Penalty, Sky News reporter Ian Woods tells the sto­ry of his rela­tion­ship with con­demned Oklahoma pris­on­er Richard Glossip, whose case gained promi­nence after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review his chal­lenge to the state’s lethal-injec­­tion pro­ce­dures. Although Glossip’s case is most frequently associated…

The Tennessee Supreme Court has denied a request from the state’s attor­ney gen­er­al to sched­ule eight exe­cu­tions before the June 1, 2018 expi­ra­tion date of Tennessee’s sup­ply of one of its exe­cu­tion drugs. Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery had filed the request on February 14, say­ing that sched­ul­ing exe­cu­tions​“after June 1, 2018 is uncer­tain due to the ongo­ing dif­fi­cul­ty in obtain­ing the nec­es­sary lethal injection…

Ohio Governor John Kasich has com­mut­ed the death sen­tence of 52-year-old William Montgomery (pic­tured) to life with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole. Montgomery was sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on April 11. The one-page procla­ma­tion grant­i­ng clemen­cy (pic­tured right, click to enlarge) did not spec­i­fy the grounds for Kasich’s action and was not accom­pa­nied by a news release or state­ment to the media. The order, issued March 26,…

Americans of all ages, races, and polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions over­whelm­ing­ly oppose the Trump admin­is­tra­tion plan to pur­sue cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment for drug over­dose deaths and believe it will have no effect on address­ing the opi­oid pub­lic health cri­sis, accord­ing to a March 16 – 21, 2018 nation­wide Quinnipiac University…

New court fil­ings argue that Columbus, Georgia pros­e­cu­tors had a pat­tern and prac­tice of sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly strik­ing black prospec­tive jurors because of their race, dis­crim­i­na­to­ri­ly empan­elling all- or near­­ly-all-white juries to try black defen­dants on tri­al for their lives in…