Publications & Testimony

From October 2016 to October 2017, sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment among those iden­ti­fy­ing them­selves as Republicans fell by ten perc­etage points. Two op-eds pub­lished towards the end of the year illus­trate the grow­ing con­ser­v­a­tive oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty. Writing in The Seattle Times on December 27, Republican State Senator Mark Miloscia (pic­tured, l.) called for bipar­ti­san efforts to repeal Washington’s death-penal­ty statute. In a December…

Saying that the death penal­ty should ​“be reserved for the ​‘worst of the worst in our soci­ety,’” retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General John Castellaw (pic­tured) has urged the Tennessee state leg­is­la­ture to adopt pend­ing leg­is­la­tion that would bar the death penal­ty for peo­ple with severe men­tal ill­ness­es. In an op-ed in the Memphis news­pa­per, The Commercial Appeal, General Castellaw writes that the death penal­ty ​“should not be pre­scribed for those…

Saying “[a] move­ment was sworn in today,” long-time civ­il-rights lawyer Larry Krasner (pic­tured) — who pledged to end Philadelphia’s use of the death penal­ty — took the oath of office on January 2 as dis­trict attor­ney in a coun­ty that only five years ago had the third largest death row of any coun­ty in the…

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe com­mut­ed the sen­tence of men­tal­ly incom­pe­tent death-row pris­on­er William Joseph Burns (pic­tured) on December 29, 2017, after mul­ti­ple men­tal-health experts said Burns was unlike­ly to regain suf­fi­cient com­pe­ten­cy for his death sen­tence to ever be car­ried out. Burns, whose sen­tence was con­vert­ed to life in prison with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole, became the fifth death-row pris­on­er to have been grant­ed clemen­cy in the…

Former Illinois death-row pris­on­er Gabriel Solache (pic­tured), a Mexican nation­al whose death sen­tence was one of 157 com­mut­ed by Governor George Ryan in January 2003, was exon­er­at­ed on December 21, 2017 after twen­ty years of wrong­ful impris­on­ment, but imme­di­ate­ly seized by agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement…

A New Jersey U.S. dis­trict court judge has barred fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors from seek­ing the death penal­ty against Farad Roland, find­ing that Roland is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled and there­fore inel­i­gi­ble for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. After an eigh­teen-day evi­den­tiary hear­ing fea­tur­ing six­teen wit­ness­es, Judge Esther Salas ruled on December 18 that Roland — accused of five killings in con­nec­tion with a drug-traf­fick­ing gang — had ​“abun­dant­ly sat­is­fied his bur­den of proving his…

When Anthony Graves (pic­tured) was exon­er­at­ed from death row in Texas in 2010, he decid­ed that he would use his per­son­al expe­ri­ence as a cat­a­lyst for redress­ing the ​“injus­tice of the jus­tice sys­tem.” After receiv­ing $1.45 mil­lion as com­pen­sa­tion for the 18 years he was wrong­ly incar­cer­at­ed, includ­ing twelve years on death row, the nation’s 138^th death-row exoneree cre­at­ed the Anthony Graves Foundation. Over the past two…