Publications & Testimony

As Edmund Zagorski faces a November 1, 2018 execution in Tennessee, the courts have required him to choose between death by lethal injection and electrocution. His lawyers argue that both methods, as well as the forced choice between the two, are unconstitutional. In a lawsuit filed in federal district court on October 26, 2018 and appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on October 30, Zagorski’s attorney, Kelley Henry, wrote of electrocution, ​“while better than lethal…

The Florida Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence imposed on William Roger Davis, III (pictured), even though Davis’s death sentence violates both the Florida and federal constitutions. In a decision issued on October 25, 2018, the court refused to redress the unconstitutionality of the death sentence — imposed by a trial court judge after a bare 7 – 5 majority of jurors had recommended death — ruling that during post-conviction proceedings before the trial court, Davis had waived review of all…

The South Dakota Supreme Court has denied motions that sought to delay the October 29, 2018 execution of Rodney Berget (pictured). As the state prepared to execute Berget, the former public defender who represented him at trial took action to fight a prospective legal guardian’s efforts to keep the former Special Olympics participant from being put to death. On Friday, October 26, Juliet Yackel, a Chicago-based lawyer who had been retained in Berget’s state post-conviction proceedings as a…

A Virginia jury has spared the life of Iraq war veteran Ronald Hamilton (pictured, right, with his father) in the 2016 killings of his wife and a rookie police officer. The jury split 6 – 6 on whether to impose the death penalty for Hamilton’s murder of his wife, Crystal Hamilton, but unanimously agreed to impose a life sentence for the death of Officer Ashley Guindon, who was killed while she responded to Crystal Hamilton’s 911 call. Under Virginia law, the court must impose a life sentence if…

“[T]he issue of race and the death penalty is not unique to the death penalty, it’s part of the broader problem with the criminal justice system,” says Bharat Malkani (pictured), author of the 2018 book Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition, in a new Discussions With DPIC podcast. In the October 2018 DPIC podcast, Malkani — a senior lecturer in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom — speaks with DPIC’s executive director Robert Dunham and Ngozi…

A study of more than three decades of homicide arrests suggests that racial disparities in arrests and policing practices introduce an additional layer of bias in the application of the death penalty in the United States. While earlier research has documented that the race of victims affects prosecutors’ decisions to seek the death penalty, and juries’ and judges’ decisions to impose death sentences, a new study by Professors Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University (pictured, left) and Amanda…

Following the Washington Supreme Court’s October 11, 2018 decision declaring the state’s death penalty unconstitutional, news outlets have questioned what comes next. Op-ed writers in North Carolina, Texas, and California have responded, urging their states to reconsider their capital punishment laws. The Washington court cited racial bias, ​“arbitrary decision-making, random imposition of the death penalty, unreliability, geographic rarity, and excessive delays” as reasons why it struck down…

Fewer than half of Americans now believe the death penalty is fairly applied in the United States, according to the 2018 annual Gallup crime poll of U.S. adults, conducted October 1 – 10. The 49% of Americans who said they believed the death penalty was ​“applied fairly” was the lowest Gallup has ever recorded since it first included the question in its crime poll in 2000. The percentage of U.S. adults who said they believe the death penalty is unfairly applied rose to 45%, the highest since…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on October 19, 2018 stayed the execution of Kwame Rockwell (pictured), a severely mentally ill death-row prisoner suffering from schizophrenia, who had been scheduled to die on October 24. The court found that Rockwell had raised ​“substantial doubt that he is not competent to be executed” and reversed a ruling by the Tarrant County District Court that had rejected Rockwell’s competency claim without an evidentiary hearing and without providing funds for him…