Publications & Testimony

The Missouri Supreme Court has ordered a new sentencing trial for Marvin D. Rice (pictured), a former sheriff’s deputy whose trial judge sentenced him to death despite the votes of 11 of his 12 jurors to sentence him to life. On April 2, 2019, the court vacated the death sentence imposed by St. Charles County Judge Kelly Wayne Parker in 2017 under the state’s controversial “hung jury” sentencing provision. Under that law, the trial judge has authority to independently evaluate the evidence and…

Executions worldwide have fallen to their lowest levels in a decade, according to a new report released April 9, 2019 by Amnesty International. In its annual Global Report: Death Sentences and Executions 2018, the human rights organization says it recorded at least 690 executions in 20 countries in 2018, a 31% decline from the 993 executions it recorded in 23 nations in 2017 and 58% below the 1,634 reported executions in 2015. Five countries accounted for 84% of all recorded executions — Iran…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has stayed the execution of Mark Robertson (pictured), a Dallas death-row prisoner whom Texas had scheduled for execution on April 11, 2019. The court’s April 8 stay order did not specify the reason it halted the execution, but Robertson’s lawyers had filed an appeal seeking review of their claim that his court-appointed trial lawyer, Michael Byck, had “engaged in purposeful discrimination” by deliberately excluding African Americans from serving on his jury.

A Tennessee murder victim’s daughter is asking Governor Bill Lee to honor their shared faith by sparing the life of her mother’s killer. In what they describe as an “exceptional” clemency plea, lawyers for Tennessee death-row prisoner Don Johnson (pictured) write that Cynthia Vaughn, the daughter of Connie Johnson, has requested a meeting with Gov. Lee to tell him her story of “Christian forgiveness” and ask that he commute Johnson’s sentence to life without parole. The clemency petition…

Legal scholars and commentators across the political spectrum have criticized the U.S. Supreme Court for its seemingly contradictory actions, less than two months apart, in two nearly identical religious freedom claims from death-row prisoners. On February 7, 2019, the Court vacated a stay of execution and permitted Alabama to execute death-row prisoner Domineque Ray (pictured, left), who had claimed that the Alabama Department of Corrections was violating his First Amendment rights by refusing…

Citing “damning revelations” that police and prosecutors have used bribes and threats to secure testimony in a three-decades-old capital case, the Utah Supreme Court has ordered a Utah County court to conduct a hearing to determine whether death-row prisoner Douglas Stewart Carter should receive a new trial. Carter has spent 33 years on Utah’s death row. Although police found fingerprints and blood at the crime scene, no physical evidence tied Carter to the crime. Carter, who is African…

As human rights activists raise alarms about a new law in Brunei that would punish homosexuality by death by stoning, the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether to hear a case in which jurors who exhibited anti-gay bigotry sentenced a gay defendant to death. Charles Rhines (pictured), a South Dakota death-row prisoner, is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case, after a lower federal court denied him the opportunity to present juror statements showing that homophobic prejudice played a…

In a divisive 5 – 4 decision that exposed rancor and deep rifts among the justices, the U.S. Supreme Court has given Missouri the go-ahead to execute a prisoner whose blood-filled tumors in his head, neck, and mouth could burst if the state carries out his execution by its chosen method. Russell Bucklew (pictured), who suffers from the rare medical condition, cavernous hemangioma, had argued that Missouri’s lethal injection procedures would subject him to unnecessarily torturous and excruciating…

Within two weeks of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s announcement that he was halting executions in the state, the decision to issue the moratorium has been bolstered from two unrelated and independent sources. A statewide poll underway at the time of Newson’s moratorium announcement and released by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) on March 27, 2019 found that by a record 2:1 margin, Californians preferred life without possibility of parole over the death penalty as the…

Forty-two years after he and his nephew were wrongfully convicted of murder in Florida and he was sentenced to death, Clifford Williams, Jr. (pictured) has been exonerated. Submitting a report from its Conviction Integrity Unit that found “no credible evidence of guilt and … credible evidence of innocence,” Duval County prosecutors asked a Jacksonville trial court to dismiss all charges against Williams, now 76 years old, and his nephew, Nathan Myers, now 61. Williams is the 165^th former…