Publications & Testimony

Georgia death-row prisoner Keith Tharpe (pictured, left) and Oklahoma death-row prisoner Julius Jones (pictured, right) are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to grant them new trials after evidence showed that white jurors who described the defendants with racist slurs participated in deciding their cases. The involvement of the racist jurors, the prisoners say, violated their Sixth Amendment rights to impartial juries. A juror in Tharpe’s trial gave a sworn affidavit years after voting to convict…

In a 5 – 4 decision that Justice Elena Kagan characterized as “profoundly wrong,” the U.S. Supreme Court on February 7, 2019 permitted Alabama to execute a Muslim death-row prisoner, Domineque Ray (pictured), who had claimed that the state’s execution process discriminated against him because of his religion. Without explanation, the Court asserted that Ray had waited too long to challenge a provision in Alabama’s execution protocol that made a Christian chaplain part of the state’s execution…

Clemency, a film exploring the psychological toll of the death penalty, has been awarded the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival on February 2, 2019. The movie, written and directed by Nigerian-American filmmaker Chinonye Chukwu, tells the story of prison warden Bernadine Williams (portrayed by Alfre Woodard) as she prepares to oversee her 12^th execution in the aftermath of a botched execution. Chukwu said she was inspired to write the script after the…

According to new polling results, support for capital punishment in North Carolina has fallen dramatically, with only 25% of voters saying they prefer the death penalty for people convicted of first-degree murder. The poll, conducted the last week of January 2019 by Public Policy Polling, found that nearly three quarters of North Carolina voters rejected capital punishment for people convicted of murder, with 35% preferring a combination of life without parole plus a requirement to work and pay…

Idaho officials deliberately misled the public about the costs and application of the state’s death penalty and prison officials’ questionable efforts at obtaining execution drugs, according to evidence presented in week-long court hearings on the state’s execution secrecy practices. Testimony from January 28 through February 1, 2019 in an open-records lawsuit against the Idaho Department of Corrections has revealed that Idaho paid $10,000 in cash to an undisclosed drug supplier, maintained a…

For the first time since Georgia brought back the death penalty in 1973, the state will go five years without imposing any death sentences. No jury has handed down a death sentence since March 2014 and, with no capital trials scheduled for February or March, the state is nearly certain to reach the 5‑year milestone. The decline in death sentencing is even more dramatic in light of the fact that, prior to 2015, Georgia had never gone two consecutive years without a death sentence. Experts…

A federal appeals court has found 80-year-old Charles Ray Finch (pictured) “actually innocent” of the murder for which he was convicted and sentenced to death in North Carolina 42 years ago. The pronouncement came in a unanimous ruling issued by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on January 25, 2019. In that decision, Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory wrote that “Finch has overcome the exacting standard for actual innocence through sufficiently alleging and…

Efforts to repeal the death penalty have often focused on the needs of murder victims’ families. For example, in Connecticut, 179 murder victims’ families signed a letter to legislators, which stated, Our direct experiences with the criminal justice system and struggling with grief have led us all to the same conclusion: Connecticut’s death penalty fails victims’ families…. In Connecticut, the death penalty is a false promise that goes unfulfilled, leaving victims’ families frustrated and…

Texas executed Robert Jennings (pictured) on January 30, 2019 for the 1988 murder of Houston police officer Elston Howard, amid questions as to his eligibility for capital punishment and the constitutionality of his death sentence. Jennings was convicted under a sentencing procedure that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down shortly before his trial in 1989 because it did not adequately allow jurors to consider evidence supporting a sentence less than death. The jury instructions given in his…

Stephen Curry (pictured, right, during a 2015 visit to the White House), star of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and executive producer of the upcoming documentary Emanuel, has publicly voiced his opposition to the death penalty. Emanuel tells the story of the murder of nine Black members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by white supremacist Dylann Roof. It is the first film produced by Curry’s production company, Unanimous Media, and was…