Publications & Testimony

The North Carolina Supreme Court announced on March 2 that it will hear appeals from three of the four pris­on­ers whose death sen­tences were reduced to life with­out parole under the state’s Racial Justice Act, then rein­stat­ed after the legislature…

Recently released poll results from two Florida coun­ties that have heav­i­ly used the death penal­ty sug­gest that vot­ers actu­al­ly prefer life-sentencing…

In what lawyers for Virginia death-row pris­on­ers have called​“a land­mark rul­ing,” a fed­er­al judge has issued an injunc­tion bar­ring the Commonwealth from sub­ject­ing pris­on­ers who have been sen­tenced to death to auto­mat­ic soli­tary con­fine­ment, phys­i­cal iso­la­tion from vis­i­tors and oth­er pris­on­ers, and other…

With 24 pris­on­ers cur­rent­ly con­demned to die, Hamilton County—home to Cincinnati—has the largest death row of any coun­ty in Ohio, despite a small­er pop­u­la­tion and a low­er mur­der rate than oth­er parts of the state. Ten of the 55 pris­on­ers exe­cut­ed in the state since the 1970s were sen­tenced to death in Hamilton County, again more than any…

On January 12, 2016, in an 8 – 1 deci­sion, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opin­ion in Hurst v. Florida, in which the Court struck down as uncon­sti­tu­tion­al Florida’s cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing statute. At the time of the opin­ion, Florida death-penal­­ty law required a jury to make a sen­tenc­ing rec­om­men­da­tion – on which only a bare major­i­ty of jurors had to agree – to the judge, who would then lat­er​“hold a separate…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…