Publications & Testimony

Joseph M. Giarratano (pic­tured), a for­mer Virginia death-row pris­on­er who came with­in two days of exe­cu­tion, has been been grant­ed parole after 38 years in jail for a rape and dou­ble mur­der that lawyers and sup­port­ers have long said he did not…

The life of Terry Ball (pic­tured) ​“is worth remem­ber­ing,” says his appeal lawyer, Elizabeth Hambourger. She says Ball’s life, which end­ed October 18 when he died of nat­ur­al caus­es on North Carolina​’s death row, ​“hold[s] keys to under­stand­ing the ori­gins of crime and our shared human­i­ty with peo­ple labeled the worst of the worst.” His ​“sto­ry of child­hood trau­ma and brain dam­age” is char­ac­ter­is­tic of the back­grounds of many on death row,…

Nevada has par­doned Fred Steese (pic­tured), who spent 21 years in prison after Las Vegas pros­e­cu­tors wrong­ly sought the death penal­ty against him while with­old­ing evi­dence that he was not even in the state at the time the mur­der occurred. In what news reports described as ​“a clear rebuke to the Las Vegas pros­e­cu­tors,” the Nevada Board of Pardons Commissioners vot­ed 8 – 1 on November 8 to grant Steese a full…

Having failed to find a suit­able vein in which to set an intra­venous exe­cu­tion line, Ohio called off the sched­uled November 15 exe­cu­tion of grave­ly ill and phys­i­cal­ly debil­i­tat­ed death-row pris­on­er, Alva Campbell…

A Utah coun­ty has fired an appeals lawyer who had pub­licly crit­i­cized the coun­ty’s under­fund­ing of death-penalty…

Ohio death-row pris­on­er Alva Campbell (pic­tured) is 69, suf­fers from severe chron­ic obstruc­tive pul­monary dis­or­der, is unable to walk with­out a walk­er, relies on a colosto­my bag that hangs out­side his body, requires four breath­ing treat­ments each day, may have lung can­cer, and is report­ed­ly aller­gic to mida­zo­lam, the con­tro­ver­sial first drug in the state’s lethal-injec­tion process. Prison per­son­nel have been unable to find veins suit­able for insert­ing an…

A for­mer Florida death-row doc­tor says the expe­ri­ence of U.S. mil­i­tary vet­er­ans who have been sen­tenced to death pro­vides a lens through which the pub­lic can bet­ter under­stand some of the fail­ures of the state’s death penal­ty and iden­ti­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties for mean­ing­ful reform of the crim­i­nal justice…

As Nebraska announced its inten­tion to use a nev­er-before-tried four-drug exe­cu­tion com­bi­na­tion fea­tur­ing the opi­od pain med­ica­tion fen­tanyl and the par­a­lyt­ic drug cisatracuri­um, a Nevada judge issued a stay of exe­cu­tion that put off the nation’s first attempt­ed exe­cu­tion using those…

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—the nation’s third largest death-penal­ty coun­ty—has elect­ed as its new dis­trict attor­ney a can­di­date who ran on a plat­form of end­ing mass incar­cer­a­tion and eschew­ing use of the death penal­ty. Democrat Lawrence Krasner (pic­tured), a long­time civ­il rights lawyer and oppo­nent of the death penal­ty, who once joked that he’d ​“spent a career becom­ing com­plete­ly une­lec­table,” received 75% of the…

Two recent high court rul­ings have raised ques­tions of whether death-row pris­on­ers are suf­fi­cient­ly men­tal­ly impaired to be deemed incom­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed and who gets to make that deter­mi­na­tion. On November 7, the Arkansas Supreme Court issued an order stay­ing the exe­cu­tion of death-row pris­on­er Jack Greene (pic­tured, left) to resolve whether that state’s mech­a­nism to deter­mine com­pe­ten­cy — giv­ing the direc­tor of the Arkansas Department of…