Publications & Testimony

On May 20, 2024, Jefferson County, Alabama District Attorney Danny Carr asked a cir­cuit judge to grant a new tri­al to Toforest Johnson (cen­ter), an Alabama death row pris­on­er whose con­vic­tion DA Carr believes is​“fun­da­men­tal­ly unre­li­able.” This extra­or­di­nary request is the lat­est in a series of appeals for Mr. Johnson, who was sen­tenced to death in 1998 for the 1995 mur­der of Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff William Hardy but has always main­tained his inno­cence.​“A…

As of October 2023, the num­ber of peo­ple in the United States sen­tenced to death or fac­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a death sen­tence con­tin­ued its more than two-decade decline, accord­ing to the lat­est report issued by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund…

On May 9, Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a bill autho­riz­ing the death penal­ty for aggra­vat­ed rape of a child, fol­low­ing Florida’s pas­sage of a sim­i­lar law last year. Both laws con­tra­dict long­stand­ing Supreme Court prece­dent hold­ing the death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al for non-homi­­cide crimes. Tennessee’s law takes effect on July 1. The state has had a death penal­ty mora­to­ri­um in place since May 2022 after Governor Lee learned that state offi­cials had failed to…

On Tuesday, the Death Penalty Information Center released a new report that con­nects Ohio’s racial his­to­ry to the mod­ern use of the death penal­ty in the state. Broken Promises: How a History of Racial Violence and Bias Shaped Ohio’s Death Penalty doc­u­ments how racial dis­crim­i­na­tion is the through­line that runs from the state’s found­ing to its appli­ca­tion of capital punishment…

Oklahoma pris­on­er Wade Lay (pic­tured) will not be exe­cut­ed on June 6, 2024 as sched­uled because a Pittsburg County judge has found him men­tal­ly incom­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed.​“The avail­able evi­dence demon­strates, by a pre­pon­der­ance or greater weight of the evi­dence, that Mr. Lay is cur­rent­ly incom­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed accord­ing to the gov­ern­ing legal stan­dards,” Judge Tim Mills wrote. Defense and state experts who exam­ined Mr. Lay found that, due to his…

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled on May 7 to extend the inter­val between exe­cu­tions to occur approx­i­mate­ly 90-days apart, spec­i­fy­ing that exe­cu­tions should be sched­uled for Thursdays, and that the Department of Corrections must be pro­vid­ed notice at least 35 days in advance. The Court also denied the Attorney General’s motion to set exe­cu­tion dates for groups of pris­on­ers, as has been done in the past, instead choos­ing to schedule executions…

Los Angeles Times edi­to­r­i­al, May…

A new arti­cle,​“Gender Matters: Women on Death Row in the United States,” explores the cas­es of 48 women who were sen­tenced to death in the United States between 1990 and 2023.​“We believe that women’s cap­i­tal sen­tences are best explained by exam­in­ing the events of their lives with­in a larg­er social con­text, and by ana­lyz­ing how those expe­ri­ences — and the women them­selves — were treat­ed with­in the legal sys­tem,” said the authors, who include Sandra Babcock (pic­tured…

On April 30, 2024, a week after the par­ties in Glossip v. Oklahoma filed mer­its briefs at the United States Supreme Court, sev­er­al ami­ci filed briefs in sup­port of the par­ties’ joint posi­tion, ask­ing the Court to grant Richard Glossip (pic­tured) a new tri­al. Ken Cuccinelli, the for­mer Virginia Attorney General and Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump, said in his brief that the con­se­quences of fail­ing to over­turn Mr. Glossip’s conviction…