Publications & Testimony

With newly discovered confessions and DNA evidence pointing to the prosecution’s chief witness as the actual killer, prosecutors dropped all charges against Clemente Javier Aguirre (pictured, center, at his exoneration) in a Seminole County, Florida courtroom on November 5, 2018. The dismissal of the charges made Aguirre the 164^th wrongfully convicted death-row prisoner to be exonerated in the United States since 1973 and the 28^th in Florida. The announcement that prosecutors were dropping all…

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review whether a prosecutor with a long history of racially discriminatory jury-selection practices unconstitutionally struck black jurors in the trial of Mississippi death-row prisoner Curtis Giovanni Flowers (pictured). On November 2, 2018, the Court granted certiorari in the Flowers’s case on the question of “[w]hether the Mississippi Supreme Court erred in how it applied Batson v. Kentucky,” the landmark 1986 Supreme Court decision barring the use of…

A divided Arkansas Supreme Court has struck down the state’s death-penalty mental competency law, holding that statutory provisions giving the state’s prison director exclusive authority to determine a death-row prisoner’s competency to be executed violate due process. The 4 – 3 rulings on November 1, 2018 were a victory for two mentally ill death-row prisoners, Bruce Ward (pictured, left) and Jack Greene (pictured, right), who had come within days of execution in 2017. The appeals court directed…

Lawyers for Marcus Dansby (pictured), a defendant facing capital murder charges in Allen County, Indiana, have filed a motion asking the trial judge to declare Indiana’s death penalty unconstitutional and to bar prosecutors from seeking death in his case. In pleadings submitted to the court on October 30, 2018 in support of Dansby’s Motion to Declare Indiana’s Capital Sentencing Statute Unconstitutional, lawyers Michelle Kraus and Robert Gevers allege that systemic defects in the administration…

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…