Publications & Testimony

For the second time in less than six months, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has upheld a death sentence that the trial court, lawyers for the prosecution and defense, and mental health experts all agree should not be carried out. On November 21, 2018, in an unpublished and unsigned opinion that misspelled death-row prisoner Jeffery Wood’s name, the court rejected a recommendation by the Kerr County District Court to overturn Wood’s death sentence and grant him a new sentencing…

On November 21, 2018, Kentucky marked 10 years since its last execution, becoming the eleventh current death-penalty state that has not carried out an execution in more than a decade. Another 20 states have legislatively or judicially abolished their death-penalty laws, bringing the number of states that do not actively use the death penalty to 31. On the day before Kentucky reached its 10-year milestone, a lawsuit filed in federal court highlighted some of the greatest dangers of capital…

The Tennessee Supreme Court has set execution dates for six men on the state’s death row, scheduling their executions for between May 16, 2019 and April 9, 2020. This mass execution schedule, issued on November 16, 2018, comes in the wake of the controversial executions of Billy Ray Irick and Edmund Zagorski earlier this year and as the state prepares to execute David Earl Miller on December 6. If all seven scheduled executions take place, Tennessee will have conducted more executions in a…

The Death Penalty Information Center has released a major new report, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States, examining the scope and consequences of secrecy in the application of the death penalty in the United States. The report, released on November 20, 2018, tells the story of the expansion of execution secrecy and the questionable practices that states have attempted to keep from public view. It details how, in their efforts to obtain execution drugs…

(Washington, D.C.) The Death Penalty Information Center today released a new report, “Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States.” The intensive study documents the laws and policies that states have adopted to keep information about executions inaccessible to the public, to pharmaceutical companies, and to prisoners facing execution. Among the key findings: Since January 2011, 13 states have enacted new secrecy statutes that conceal vital information about the…

On November 13, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review seven death-penalty cases in which Florida courts had upheld death sentences imposed with unconstitutional sentencing procedures. The Court’s decision not to hear the seven Florida cases prompted opinions from three justices that highlight the deep substantive and procedural divide in the Court’s approach to capital cases. In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled in Hurst v. Florida that Florida’s sentencing scheme violated the Sixth…

During his election campaign, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner described the economic wastefulness of city prosecutors’ pursuit of the death penalty as “lighting money on fire.” A DPIC analysis of the outcomes of the more than 200 death sentences imposed in the city since 1978 (click here to enlarge image) and the last seven years of capital prosecution outcomes provides strong support for Krasner’s claim. Data tracking the final dispositions of cases in which Pennsylvania…

As Witness to Innocence (WTI), an organization of U.S. death-row exonerees and their families, prepared to mark its 15^th anniversary on November 15, 2018, two of the country’s most prominent exonerees — WTI’s acting director, Kirk Bloodsworth (pictured, left), and its board chair, Kwame Ajamu (pictured, right) — called for an end to the death penalty in the United States. In an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the two exonerees told the stories of their wrongful convictions and death sentences…

In a feature article in Politico, Lara Bazelon, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and author of the new book, Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction, describes an exoneration as “an earthquake [that] leaves upheaval and ruin in its wake.” Exonerees, she writes, “suffer horribly — both physically and mentally — in prison” and are revictimized following their release, “leav[ing] prison with no ready access to services or a support…

United Nations human rights officials have urged the government of the United States to halt the imminent execution of a Mexican national who was tried and sentenced to death in Texas in violation of U.S. treaty obligations. Texas is scheduled to execute Roberto Moreno Ramos (pictured) on November 14, in an action an international human rights court has said would violate the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Agnes Callamard, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on…