Publications & Testimony

Saying that the death penal­ty should​“be reserved for the​‘worst of the worst in our soci­ety,’” retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General John Castellaw (pic­tured) has urged the Tennessee state leg­is­la­ture to adopt pend­ing leg­is­la­tion that would bar the death penal­ty for peo­ple with severe men­tal ill­ness­es. In an op-ed in the Memphis news­pa­per, The Commercial Appeal, General Castellaw writes that the death penal­ty​“should not be…

Saying “[a] move­ment was sworn in today,” long-time civ­il-rights lawyer Larry Krasner (pic­tured) — who pledged to end Philadelphia’s use of the death penal­ty — took the oath of office on January 2 as dis­trict attor­ney in a coun­ty that only five years ago had the third largest death row of any county…

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe com­mut­ed the sen­tence of men­tal­ly incom­pe­tent death-row pris­on­er William Joseph Burns (pic­tured) on December 29, 2017, after mul­ti­ple men­­tal-health experts said Burns was unlike­ly to regain suf­fi­cient com­pe­ten­cy for his death sen­tence to ever be car­ried out. Burns, whose sen­tence was con­vert­ed to life in prison with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole, became the fifth death-row prisoner to…

Former Illinois death-row pris­on­er Gabriel Solache (pic­tured), a Mexican nation­al whose death sen­tence was one of 157 com­mut­ed by Governor George Ryan in January 2003, was exon­er­at­ed on December 21, 2017 after twen­ty years of wrong­ful impris­on­ment, but imme­di­ate­ly seized by agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement…

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…