Publications & Testimony

Texas pros­e­cu­tors have dropped their pur­suit of the death penal­ty against a severe­ly men­tal­ly ill cap­i­tal defen­dant charged with what they char­ac­ter­ized as the ​“ambush mur­der” of a Harris County sheriff’s deputy. Special pros­e­cu­tor Brett Ligon (pic­tured, left) — the Montgomery County District Attorney who was han­dling the pros­e­cu­tion because Houston pros­e­cu­tors had a con­flict that pre­vent­ed them from par­tic­i­pat­ing in the case — announced on September 13 that he had agreed to a plea deal in which…

A coali­tion of 23 human rights groups, includ­ing Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, and Reprieve, has urged the United States gov­ern­ment to issue sanc­tions against for­eign gov­ern­ment offi­cials who they say have used the death penal­ty to repress polit­i­cal dis­sent by tor­tur­ing peace­ful pro­test­ers into con­fess­ing to cap­i­tal offens­es they did not…

Ohio exe­cut­ed Gary Otte on September 13 after both the United States Supreme Court and the Ohio Supreme Court declined to review his chal­lenge to the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of apply­ing the death penal­ty against peo­ple who were younger than age 21 at the time of the…

A Death Penalty Information Center analy­sis of U.S. mur­der data from 1987 through 2015 has found no evi­dence that the death penal­ty deters mur­der or pro­tects police. Instead, the evi­dence shows that mur­der rates, includ­ing mur­ders of police offi­cers, are con­sis­tent­ly high­er in death-penal­ty states than in states that have abol­ished the death penal­ty. And far from expe­ri­enc­ing increas­es in mur­der rates or open sea­son on law enforce­ment, the data show that states that have abol­ished the death…

Sixteen years lat­er, the alleged per­pe­tra­tors of the September 11, 2001 hijack­ings and attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and the down­ing of Flight 93, have yet to be tried, and issues relat­ing to the use of evi­dence obtained by tor­ture, the appro­pri­ate­ness and legal­i­ty of tri­als by mil­i­tary com­mis­sion, and where and how they should be tried raise ques­tions as to whether and when a tri­al may take place. The five men charged in the attack — alleged mas­ter­mind Khalid Sheikh…

Death rows are shrink­ing nation­wide, and the expe­ri­ence in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania helps explain why. Virginia’s death row has fall­en from a report­ed high of 58 in 1995 to four in September 2017, the low­est it has been since 1979. Pennsylvania’s death row of 160 pris­on­ers is its small­est in near­ly 25 years — down from 175 last December and from a report­ed 247 in April…

For the sec­ond time in as many years, Georgia is prepar­ing to exe­cute an intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled African-American man, despite evi­dence that the death ver­dict in his case may have been taint­ed by a white juror’s profound racial…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has issued a rul­ing reviv­ing a law­suit brought by Alabama death-row pris­on­ers that chal­lenged the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the state’s three-drug exe­cu­tion pro­to­col using the con­tro­ver­sial lethal-injec­tion drug mida­zo­lam. The unan­i­mous deci­sion by the three-judge fed­er­al appeals pan­el on September 1 reversed a fed­er­al dis­trict court rul­ing against sev­er­al death-row pris­on­ers who sued the Alabama…

On the third anniver­sary of their ground­break­ing exon­er­a­tion, a new report by the Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL) reviews in-depth the long path from wrong­ful con­vic­tions and death sen­tences to free­dom trav­eled by for­mer North Carolina death-row pris­on­ers Henry McCollum and Leon…

Almost all of the 26 men sched­uled for exe­cu­tion in Ohio over the next three years suf­fer from men­tal, emo­tion­al, or cog­ni­tive impair­ments or lim­i­ta­tions that raise ques­tions as to whether they should have been sen­tenced to death, accord­ing to a new report released August 30 by Harvard’s Fair Punishment Project. While the U.S. Constitution requires that the death penal­ty be reserved for the worst crimes and the worst offend­ers, the report—Prisoners on…