Publications & Testimony

As Americans become increasingly aware of the role of combat trauma in the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other mental health disorders, the shift in public perceptions towards veterans suffering from these disorders has played out in the courts in recent death penalty cases. In 2018, at least four military veterans facing death sentences have instead been sentenced to life in prison, and another two veterans won relief in their death-penalty cases. One military…

The Florida Supreme Court has overturned the death sentence imposed on Eriese Tisdale (pictured) in 2016 in violation of a Florida law that had been enacted in an attempt to fix constitutional flaws in the state’s death-penalty statute. The state court ruled on November 8, 2018, that St. Lucie County Circuit Judge Dan Vaughn’s decision to sentence Tisdale to death after three members of the jury had voted to spare his life violated both a Florida law that permitted a death sentence only if at…

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument on November 6, 2018 in Bucklew v. Precythe on whether the use of lethal injection to execute a Missouri prisoner with a rare medical condition would cause him unnecessary and excruciating pain and suffering and whether he was constitutionally required to provide the state with a different way for it to kill him. Media reports suggested that the Court was sharply divided on the issue with newly appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh likely to provide the…

The results of the November 6, 2018 mid-term elections reflected America’s deeply divided views on capital punishment, as voters elected governors who pledged not to resume executions in the three states with death-penalty moratoriums, defeated an incumbent who tried to bring back capital punishment in a non-death-penalty state (click on graphic to enlarge), and re-elected governors who had vetoed legislation abolishing capital punishment in two other states. Continuing a national trend, voters…

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…