Publications & Testimony

From the Appendix to Lauren Sudeall Lucas, An Empirical Assessment of Georgia’s Beyond A Reasonable Doubt Standard to Determine Intellectual Disability in Capital Cases, 33 Georgia State University Law Review 553, 607…

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…

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…

Alabama has set an exe­cu­tion date for Doyle Lee Hamm (pic­tured), a 60-year-old man with ter­mi­nal cra­nial and lym­phat­ic can­cer that his lawyer says has ren­dered his veins unus­able for lethal injec­tion. Hamm has received radi­a­tion and chemother­a­py, and was sched­uled for surgery to remove a can­cer­ous lesion on December 13, but Alabama prison offi­cials can­celled the surgery and instead informed Hamm that a death war­rant had been issued…

The racial­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry jury selec­tion prac­tices of the Clark County, Nevada, District Attorney’s office are now caus­ing it to lose con­vic­tions in cap­i­tal cas­es. In a December 18 arti­cle, the pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al watch­dog, The Open File, details repeat­ed vio­la­tions by Clark County death-penal­­ty pros­e­cu­tors of the con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­scrip­tion against strik­ing prospec­tive jurors from ser­vice on the basis of race. Four times in the past four…

Several months after Arizona set­tled a law­suit over the con­di­tions of con­fine­ment on the state’s death row, the state has end­ed the prac­tice of auto­mat­i­cal­ly hous­ing con­demned pris­on­ers in soli­tary con­fine­ment, and pris­on­ers and prison offi­cials alike are prais­ing the changes. Carson McWilliams (pic­tured), Division Director for Offender Operations in the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC), told the Arizona Republic that…

For the third time since 2012, no one in North Carolina was sen­tenced to death in 2017. All four tri­als in 2017 in which pros­e­cu­tors sought a death sen­tence end­ed with a jury either acquit­ting the defen­dant of cap­i­tal mur­der or return­ing a less­er sen­tence. Despite the his­tor­i­cal decline in death sen­tenc­ing in North Carolina, two state leg­isla­tive lead­ers, in a let­ter derid­ed by edi­to­r­i­al boards as polit­i­cal pos­tur­ing, used the recent killing…

The Supreme Court of Kenya has declared the nation’s manda­to­ry death sen­tenc­ing pro­ce­dures uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. In a December 14, 2017 rul­ing that could affect 7,000 death-row pris­on­ers, the high court over­turned Section 204 of Kenya’s Penal Code, which required that judges impose death sen­tences upon con­vic­tion of mur­der or armed rob­bery. The deci­sion resolves con­flict­ing rul­ings by the coun­try’s low­er courts of appeal, and grants new sentencing…

On December 17, 2007, New Jersey abol­ished the death penal­ty. On the tenth anniver­sary of abo­li­tion, the edi­to­r­i­al board of the New Jersey Law Journal writes,​“On the Death Penalty, New Jersey Got it Right.” The edi­to­r­i­al board wrote,​“Abolition has proven its worth, in that there has been no surge of mur­ders, a sig­nif­i­cant decline of pros­e­cu­tion and appeal expens­es, and the elim­i­na­tion of unre­me­di­a­ble judicial mistakes.

Nearly one-third (31%) of the 39 new death sen­tences imposed in the United States in 2017 came from just three coun­ties, Riverside, California; Clark, Nevada; and Maricopa, Arizona, accord­ing to sta­tis­tics com­piled for DPIC’s annu­al year end report. In a press release accom­pa­ny­ing the annu­al report, DPIC said that the year’s sen­tences reflect​“the increas­ing geo­graph­ic iso­la­tion and arbi­trary nature of the death penalty.”…