Publications & Testimony

Executions and new death sen­tences remained near his­toric lows in 2017, and pub­lic sup­port for the death penal­ty polled at its low­est lev­el in 45 years, accord­ing to DPIC’s annu­al report,​“The Death Penalty in 2017: Year End Report,” released December 14. Both the 23 exe­cu­tions and the 39 pro­ject­ed new death sen­tences in 2017 were the sec­ond low­est totals in more than a quar­ter-cen­­tu­ry. Four more peo­ple were exon­er­at­ed from death row in 2017, bringing…

As U.S. phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies have strength­ened dis­tri­b­u­tion con­trols on their med­i­cines to pre­vent their use in exe­cu­tions, states have been chang­ing their exe­cu­tion pro­to­cols in search of new or more read­i­ly avail­able drugs. That search has led Nebraska and Nevada to build their exe­cu­tion pro­to­cols around fen­tanyl—the drug known for its role in the cur­rent opi­oid cri­sis in America — and…

The cer­tain­ty of appre­hen­sion, not the sever­i­ty of pun­ish­ment, is more effec­tive as a deter­rent. So argues Daniel S. Nagin (pic­tured), one of the nation’s fore­most schol­ars on deter­rence and crim­i­nal jus­tice pol­i­cy, in his chap­ter on Deterrence in the recent­ly released Academy for Justice four-vol­ume study, Reforming Criminal Justice. Reviewing deter­rence schol­ar­ship since the 1960s and five lead­ing studies from…

There will be no death penal­ty in the first cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion autho­rized under the admin­is­tra­tion of Orange and Osceola County, Florida, State Attorney Aramis Ayala. In a case that rekin­dled the polit­i­cal con­fronta­tion between State Attorney Ayala and Governor Rick Scott over the use of the death penal­ty, Emerita Mapp (pic­tured) plead­ed no con­test on December 8 to one count of mur­der and a sec­ond count of attempt­ed murder in…

The Texas pros­e­cu­tor who sought and obtained the death penal­ty almost 20 years ago against Jeffery Wood (pic­tured), a man who nev­er killed any­one, has now asked that his sen­tence be reduced to life in prison. In a let­ter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole, sent in August and obtained December 7 by the Texas Tribune, Kerr County District Attorney Lucy Wilke asked the board to rec­om­mend that Governor Greg Abbott grant…

Two of the co-chairs of the bipar­ti­san Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission have praised orga­ni­za­tions in the state for tak­ing​“essen­tial steps” towards imple­ment­ing some of the Commission’s rec­om­men­da­tions to reform Oklahoma’s death-penal­­ty sys­tem. In an arti­cle pub­lished December 7 in the Tulsa World, for­mer Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry (pic­tured, left) and Andy Lester (pic­tured, right),…

The Academy for Justice has recent­ly released a new four-vol­ume study, Reforming Criminal Justice, fea­tur­ing research and analy­sis by lead­ing aca­d­e­mics and a wide range of pro­pos­als for crim­i­nal jus­tice reform. The project, fund­ed with a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation and pro­duced with the sup­port of Arizona State University and ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, con­tains more than fifty chap­ters cov­er­ing a wide range of sub­jects with­in the areas…

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…

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…

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…