Publications & Testimony

In the latest episode of the Discussions with DPIC podcast, Emmy- and Oscar-winner Edward Zwick speaks about his new movie, Trial By Fire. The film, which Zwick co-produced and directed, tells the story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1992 for the deaths of his three children in a house fire that prosecutors wrongly claimed had been intentionally set. As Willingham’s execution approached in 2004, evidence came to light that arson investigators had relied…

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued an advisory memorandum declaring that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “lacks jurisdiction” to regulate execution drugs, including enforcing federal laws that prohibit the import of such drugs from abroad. The memorandum, authored by Assistant Attorney General Steven A. Engel (pictured) for the Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, places the administration squarely in conflict with a 2012 federal district court order requiring the FDA to…

In the wake of sharp criticism of several controversial death-penalty decisions, the five conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court issued three opinions on May 13, 2019, explaining their votes in those earlier cases. The opinions, issued in connection with the apparently inconsistent orders in religious discrimination claims brought by two death-row prisoners and a decision declining to review the case of an Alabama death-row prisoner who had challenged the state’s execution process…

Facing a May 16, 2019 execution date, Alabama death-row prisoner Michael Brandon Samra (pictured) has asked the United States Supreme Court and Governor Kay Ivey to halt his execution and for the Court to consider the constitutionally of imposing the death penalty upon 19-year-old offenders. In a petition filed on April 27, Samra — a teenage offender with borderline intellectual functioning — asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the appropriate age cutoff for banning the execution of youthful…

Proponents of capital punishment have long argued for the death penalty on the grounds that it brings closure to family members of homicide victims. But science suggests that achieving closure through execution may be a myth, says family and child therapist Linda Lewis Griffith (pictured) in a May 6, 2019 column in the San Luis Obispo Tribune, and that capital punishment may actually make matters worse. To underscore that point, Griffith cites studies in the Personality and Social Psychology…

A new study of Louisiana’s death penalty reports that the state’s capital punishment system costs taxpayers at least $15.6 million a year more than a system with life without parole as the maximum sentence. The study by retired New Orleans district Chief Judge Calvin Johnson (pictured, left) and Loyola Law Professor William Quigley (pictured, right), released on May 2, 2019, found that Louisiana has spent more than $200 million on its death-penalty system in the last 15 years, resulting in a…

A federal appeals court has declared that Virginia for many years housed its death-row prisoners in unconstitutional conditions and has barred the state from reverting to its prior practices. On May 3, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the Commonwealth’s former policy of 23- or 24-hour per day solitary confinement of death-row prisoners constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The 2 – 1 decision upheld a ruling by the U.S.

A two-week federal trial on the constitutionality of Arkansas’s lethal-injection protocol came to a close May 2, 2019, as the parties presented legal arguments to the court after eight days of testimony. U.S. District Judge Kristine G. Baker must now determine whether the state’s three-drug protocol beginning with the sedative midazolam is allowable. Lawyers representing a group of death-row prisoners presented testimony from witnesses of recent executions, as well as medical experts who said…

Sometimes you need a joke about a cute but very angry desert rain frog to prepare an unsuspecting audience for a serious discussion of lethal-injection executions in the United States. That was the approach undertaken by Last Week Tonight, the satirical weekly HBO comedy-news show hosted by John Oliver, as Oliver addressed the deadly serious issue of lethal injection in the show’s May 5, 2019 episode. Oliver called the death penalty “a wrong, bad thing the government should not be able to do,”…

A Texas trial court judge has formally declared Alfred Dewayne Brown (pictured) “actually innocent” of the murder charges that led to his wrongful conviction and death sentence in 2005. The order, issued on May 3, 2019 by Harris County District Court Judge George Powell, paves the way for Brown to receive compensation from the state for the ten years he was wrongfully incarcerated on death row for the killing of a Houston police officer. Brown was exonerated in 2015 after evidence showed that…