Publications & Testimony

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…

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…

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…

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,”…

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…

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…

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…

The Arkansas Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s Freedom of Information Act requires the Arkansas Department of Correction (ADC) to release copies of the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal drug and pack­ag­ing labels for the sup­ply of the drug mida­zo­lam that it intends to use in upcom­ing exe­cu­tions, but that the secre­cy pro­vi­sions of the state’s Methods of Execution Act per­mit the depart­ment to redact the batch and lot num­bers that appear…