Publications & Testimony

According to Amnesty International’s annu­al death penal­ty report for 2023, 16 coun­tries car­ried out the 1,153 known exe­cu­tions last year, con­sti­tut­ing the low­est num­ber of exe­cut­ing coun­tries on record with the orga­ni­za­tion but the high­est record­ed exe­cu­tion num­bers since 2015. The 31% glob­al increase in record­ed exe­cu­tions is attrib­ut­able to the 48% rise in exe­cu­tions in Iran (at least 853 exe­cu­tions), which account­ed for 74% of recorded executions…

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the impact of men­tal ill­ness is keen­ly felt on death row: at least two in five peo­ple exe­cut­ed have a doc­u­ment­ed seri­ous men­tal ill­ness, and research sug­gests that many more death-sen­­tenced pris­on­ers are undi­ag­nosed. A nation­al major­i­ty, 60% of Americans, oppos­es exe­cut­ing peo­ple with seri­ous men­tal ill­ness. In the past two decades, sci­ence and med­i­cine have con­tributed to a much bet­ter under­stand­ing of how serious…

Madison County,…

Robert Roberson with daugh­ter Nikki. Courtesy of the…

Delaware County, Pennsylvania…

On May 20, 2024, Jefferson County, Alabama District Attorney Danny Carr asked a cir­cuit judge to grant a new tri­al to Toforest Johnson (cen­ter), an Alabama death row pris­on­er whose con­vic­tion DA Carr believes is​“fun­da­men­tal­ly unre­li­able.” This extra­or­di­nary request is the lat­est in a series of appeals for Mr. Johnson, who was sen­tenced to death in 1998 for the 1995 mur­der of Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff William Hardy but has always main­tained his inno­cence.​“A…

As of October 2023, the num­ber of peo­ple in the United States sen­tenced to death or fac­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a death sen­tence con­tin­ued its more than two-decade decline, accord­ing to the lat­est report issued by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund…

On May 9, Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a bill autho­riz­ing the death penal­ty for aggra­vat­ed rape of a child, fol­low­ing Florida’s pas­sage of a sim­i­lar law last year. Both laws con­tra­dict long­stand­ing Supreme Court prece­dent hold­ing the death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al for non-homi­­cide crimes. Tennessee’s law takes effect on July 1. The state has had a death penal­ty mora­to­ri­um in place since May 2022 after Governor Lee learned that state offi­cials had failed to…

On Tuesday, the Death Penalty Information Center released a new report that con­nects Ohio’s racial his­to­ry to the mod­ern use of the death penal­ty in the state. Broken Promises: How a History of Racial Violence and Bias Shaped Ohio’s Death Penalty doc­u­ments how racial dis­crim­i­na­tion is the through­line that runs from the state’s found­ing to its appli­ca­tion of capital punishment…