Publications & Testimony

The Chairman of a state task force to reform Ohio’s death penal­ty and two for­mer state Attorney Generals have joined a diverse coali­tion of pub­lic offi­cials, death-row exonerees, fam­i­ly mem­bers of mur­der vic­tims, for­mer cor­rec­tions offi­cials, and reli­gious lead­ers urg­ing Ohio Governor John Kasich to halt the state’s planned resump­tion of exe­cu­tions. Citing leg­isla­tive inac­tion on crit­i­cal reforms, the high risk of error, and botched exe­cu­tions, the groups held a press…

A new gen­er­a­tion of pros­e­cu­tors, elect­ed across the coun­try on a plat­form of crim­i­nal jus­tice reform, are tak­ing a dif­fer­ent approach to crim­i­nal jus­tice poli­cies than their pre­de­ces­sors, includ­ing a reduc­tion in the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. A Christian Science Monitor pro­file of these pros­e­cu­tors — focus­ing on Mark Gonzalez (pic­tured), the Nueces County, Texas, dis­trict attor­ney — says “[f]rom Texas to Florida to Illinois, many of these young pros­e­cu­tors are eschew­ing the death…

Utah is not pro­vid­ing suf­fi­cient fund­ing to com­pe­tent­ly rep­re­sent death-row pris­on­ers dur­ing their appeals, accord­ing to a motion filed on behalf of Douglas Lovell, the man most recent­ly sen­tenced to death in the state. Because of that, Lovell’s lawyer Samuel Newton says, Lovell’s death sen­tence should be vacat­ed and he should be resen­tenced to life in…

Four coun­ties that rank among the most aggres­sive users of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States have pro­longed pat­terns of pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct, accord­ing to a new report by the Harvard-based Fair Punishment Project. The report, ​“The Recidivists: Four Prosecutors Who Repeatedly Violate the Constitution,” exam­ined state appel­late court deci­sions in California, Louisiana, Missouri, and Tennessee from 2010 – 2015, and found that pros­e­cu­tors in Orange County, CA;…

The lega­cies of Scharlette Holdman (pic­tured) and Marie Deans—two women who changed the land­scape of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States — are memo­ri­al­ized in a recent sto­ry in the Marshall Project and a new book sched­uled for release in…

The num­ber of pris­on­ers on Florida’s death row is now low­er than it was on June 30, 2005, as the pace of death sen­tenc­ing slows and courts reverse the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al non-unan­i­mous death sen­tences by which numer­ous cap­i­tal defen­dants had been con­demned. Applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 rul­ing in Hurst v. Florida and sub­se­quent Florida Supreme Court deci­sions in Hurst v. State and Perry v. State, state courts…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has reversed a rul­ing by a Texas fed­er­al dis­trict court that had denied Scott Panetti (pic­tured), a severe­ly men­tal­ly ill death-row pris­on­er, the appoint­ment of coun­sel and fund­ing for a men­tal health expert and inves­ti­ga­tor to eval­u­ate his com­pe­ten­cy to be exe­cut­ed. In a 2 – 1 rul­ing issued July 11, 2017, the Fifth Circuit, not­ing that ​“a decade has now passed since the last deter­mi­na­tion of whether this…

As a psy­chi­a­trist in the Wayne Unit of Texas’ Huntsville prison from 1960 to 1963, Dr. Lee Hartman presided over 14 elec­tric-chair exe­cu­tions. When his grand­son, Ben Hartman, a jour­nal­ist, began inves­ti­gat­ing Dr. Hartman’s life, he dis­cov­ered jour­nals that chron­i­cle those exe­cu­tions and the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll they took, pos­si­bly con­tribut­ing to Dr. Hartman’s sui­cide in 1964. Dr. Hartman’s jour­nals con­tain basic data on the men who were exe­cut­ed, includ­ing their names, race, a sum­ma­ry of the…

Something went wrong dur­ing the exe­cu­tion of Ricky Gray (pic­tured), who was put to death in Virginia on January 18, 2017, accord­ing to an inde­pen­dent expert who reviewed the offi­cial autop­sy report of Gray’s death. Dr. Mark Edgar, asso­ciate direc­tor of bone and soft tis­sue pathol­o­gy at the Emory University School of Medicine, reviewed the offi­cial autop­sy report, which Gray’s fam­i­ly obtained from the Virginia med­ical exam­in­er’s office. Dr. Edgar says Gray…

In 1989, William Henry Bell, Jr. was con­vict­ed of mur­der­ing an ele­men­tary school prin­ci­pal. Nearly 30 years lat­er, South Carolina’s Free Times reports that the rever­sal of his death sen­tence because of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty pro­vides evi­dence of the death penal­ty’s con­tin­u­ing decline in the state and across the coun­try. At the time of the mur­der, Bell main­tained that he was inno­cent, but after four days in jail, he con­fessed to the mur­der. Prior appeals — includ­ing one alleging a…