Publications & Testimony

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has reversed a rul­ing by a Texas fed­er­al dis­trict court that had denied Scott Panetti (pic­tured), a severe­ly men­tal­ly ill death-row pris­on­er, the appoint­ment of coun­sel and fund­ing for a men­tal health expert and inves­ti­ga­tor to eval­u­ate his com­pe­ten­cy to be exe­cut­ed. In a 2 – 1 rul­ing issued July 11, 2017, the Fifth Circuit, not­ing that ​“a decade has now passed since the last deter­mi­na­tion of whether this…

As a psy­chi­a­trist in the Wayne Unit of Texas’ Huntsville prison from 1960 to 1963, Dr. Lee Hartman presided over 14 elec­tric-chair exe­cu­tions. When his grand­son, Ben Hartman, a jour­nal­ist, began inves­ti­gat­ing Dr. Hartman’s life, he dis­cov­ered jour­nals that chron­i­cle those exe­cu­tions and the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll they took, pos­si­bly con­tribut­ing to Dr. Hartman’s sui­cide in 1964. Dr. Hartman’s jour­nals con­tain basic data on the men who were exe­cut­ed, includ­ing their names, race, a sum­ma­ry of the…

Something went wrong dur­ing the exe­cu­tion of Ricky Gray (pic­tured), who was put to death in Virginia on January 18, 2017, accord­ing to an inde­pen­dent expert who reviewed the offi­cial autop­sy report of Gray’s death. Dr. Mark Edgar, asso­ciate direc­tor of bone and soft tis­sue pathol­o­gy at the Emory University School of Medicine, reviewed the offi­cial autop­sy report, which Gray’s fam­i­ly obtained from the Virginia med­ical exam­in­er’s office. Dr. Edgar says Gray…

In 1989, William Henry Bell, Jr. was con­vict­ed of mur­der­ing an ele­men­tary school prin­ci­pal. Nearly 30 years lat­er, South Carolina’s Free Times reports that the rever­sal of his death sen­tence because of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty pro­vides evi­dence of the death penal­ty’s con­tin­u­ing decline in the state and across the coun­try. At the time of the mur­der, Bell main­tained that he was inno­cent, but after four days in jail, he con­fessed to the mur­der. Prior appeals — includ­ing one alleg­ing a…

Orange County, California Sheriff Sandra Hutchens appeared before Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals (pic­tured) on July 5 to explain her depart­men­t’s 4 – 1/​2‑year fail­ure to com­ply with court orders direct­ing the depart­ment to pro­duce doc­u­ments relat­ed to a mul­ti-decade prac­tice in the coun­ty of mis­us­ing prison infor­mants to ille­gal­ly obtain incrim­i­nat­ing state­ments from accused…

Three thou­sand vials of the anes­thet­ic sodi­um thiopen­tal that three states attempt­ed to ille­gal­ly import into the United States for use in exe­cu­tions have now expired, accord­ing to an inves­tiga­tive report by BuzzFeed News. Arizona, Nebraska, and Texas each pur­chased 1000 vials of the drug in 2015 from a ques­tion­able sup­pli­er in India called Harris Pharma, despite warn­ings from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that impor­ta­tion of the drug would vio­late federal…

Lynching has long been regard­ed as a region­al phe­nom­e­non, but in an updat­ed edi­tion of its land­mark 2015 report ​“Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has now doc­u­ment­ed more than 300 lynch­ings of African Americans in states out­side the Deep South. ​“Racial ter­ror lynch­ing was a nation­al prob­lem,” said EJI Director Bryan Stevenson (pic­tured). More than six mil­lion African American migrants fled ​“as refugees and exiles…

As we reach the mid-point of the year, exe­cu­tions and new death sen­tences are on pace to remain near his­toric lows in 2017, con­tin­u­ing the long-term his­toric decline in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment across the United States. As of June 30, six states have car­ried out 13 exe­cu­tions, with 30 oth­er exe­cu­tions that had been sched­uled for that peri­od halt­ed by judi­cial stays or injunc­tions, guber­na­to­r­i­al reprieves or com­mu­ta­tion, or resched­uled. By con­trast, at the midpoint…

A divid­ed U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on June 28 reversed the deci­sion of a fed­er­al dis­trict court that had stayed exe­cu­tions in Ohio. In an 8 – 6 en banc deci­sion, the court vot­ed to allow Ohio to pro­ceed with exe­cu­tions using a pro­posed com­bi­na­tion of the con­tro­ver­sial seda­tive mida­zo­lam, the par­a­lyt­ic drug pan­curo­ni­um bro­mide, and the heart-stop­ping drug potas­si­um chlo­ride. Midazolam has been impli­cat­ed in botched…

In DPIC’s lat­est pod­cast, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Litigation Director Christina Swarns (pic­tured, cen­ter, out­side the U.S. Supreme Court fol­low­ing the argu­ment in Buck v. Davis) dis­cuss­es the issues of race, future dan­ger­ous­ness, and inef­fec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion pre­sent­ed in the land­mark case. She calls the case — in which a Texas tri­al lawyer who rep­re­sent­ed 21 clients sent to death row pre­sent­ed an expert wit­ness who tes­ti­fied that his own client was…