Publications & Testimony

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…