Publications & Testimony

Harris County (Houston), Texas, has exe­cut­ed 126 pris­on­ers since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Texas’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment statute in 1976, more than any oth­er coun­ty in the United States and, apart from the rest of Texas, more than any state. But in 2017, no one will be sen­tenced to death in Harris County and, for the first time since 1985, no one sen­tenced to death in the coun­ty will be…

The ALCU of Nebraska, the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, and the law firm O’Melveny & Myers, LLP, have filed a law­suit on behalf of the state’s eleven death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers seek­ing to bar Nebraska ​“from car­ry­ing out any exe­cu­tions or tak­ing steps toward car­ry­ing out any exe­cu­tions” under the November 2016 vot­er ref­er­en­dum that restored that state’s death-penal­ty law. The law­suit, filed in Lancaster County District Court on December 4, argues that…

Facing court chal­lenges for under­fund­ing the state’s pub­lic defend­er sys­tem and pres­sure from pros­e­cu­tors angered by the zeal­ous cap­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion pro­vid­ed in the state by non-prof­it cap­i­tal defense orga­ni­za­tions, the Louisiana leg­is­la­ture enact­ed a law last year redi­rect­ing $3 mil­lion to local pub­lic defend­ers that had pre­vi­ous­ly been allo­cat­ed to fund cap­i­tal defend­ers. As it has near­ly every win­ter, how­ev­er, the Louisiana pub­lic defend­er sys­tem has run out of money,…

From 1846 to 1870, more than 100 men and women were hanged on the branch­es of the noto­ri­ous ​“Hanging Tree” in Goliad, Texas. Many were Mexicans or Mexican Americans and many were killed by…

Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Scott Crichton (pic­tured) will not par­tic­i­pate in decid­ing the appeal of a pris­on­er sen­tenced to death in a con­tro­ver­sial, high-pro­file prison killing, after Crichton pub­licly com­ment­ed on the case dur­ing an appear­ance on a local radio pro­gram. On November 21, Crichton recused him­self from the pend­ing appeal of death-row pris­on­er David Brown, one day after Brown’s lawyers sought his removal from the case…

A senior United Nations human rights offi­cial has crit­i­cized the secre­cy with which coun­tries car­ry out the death penal­ty and called for greater trans­paren­cy by coun­tries that still employ cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. ​“There is far too much secre­cy,” United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour (pic­tured) said in an inter­view released November 21 by the U.N. News Centre, ​“and it’s quite indica­tive the fact that although many countries are…

In their new book, Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty, a team of researchers led by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor Frank Baumgartner uses forty years of empir­i­cal data to assess whether the mod­ern death penal­ty avoids the defects that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare in Furman v. Georigia (1972) that the nation’s appli­ca­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly arbi­trary and capri­cious. Their…

Claiming that a lack of lethal-injec­tion drugs was pre­vent­ing the state from exe­cut­ing Bobby Wayne Stone (pic­tured, right) on December 1, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster (pic­tured, left) urged state leg­is­la­tors to act quick­ly to enact an exe­cu­tion-drug secre­cy law. But as McMaster and Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling held a press con­fer­ence out­side barbed-wire fences at the Broad River Capital Punishment Facility in Columbia, South…

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,…