Publications & Testimony

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…

Former high-rank­ing law enforce­ment offi­cials from Arizona and Kansas have called on their states to end the death penal­ty. In sep­a­rate op-ed sto­ries one week apart, for­mer Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard (pic­tured, left) and for­mer Kansas Secretary of Corrections Roger Werholtz (pic­tured, right) con­clude that the cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment schemes in their states have failed and should be aban­doned. In a November 5 op-ed in…

Texas plans to exe­cute a Mexican nation­al on November 8, despite claims that he is inno­cent and that Texas vio­lat­ed U.S. inter­na­tion­al treaty oblig­a­tions by deny­ing him access to legal assis­tance from his gov­ern­ment. Senior Mexican diplo­mats called the death sen­tence imposed on Ruben Ramírez Cárdenas (pic­tured) ​“ille­gal” and a vio­la­tion of due process. In a news con­fer­ence in Mexico City on November 6, Carlos Sada, Mexico’s deputy for­eign minister for…