Publications & Testimony

Two Texas prisoners took steps away from death row as state courts ruled in their favor on issues involving false or faulty scientific evidence and argument. On October 5, 2018, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) granted a stay of execution to Juan Segundo (pictured, left), directing a Tarrant County trial court to reconsider a claim of intellectual disability that the courts had previously rejected based on an unconstitutional, unscientific standard for measuring his functioning. Four…

Ignoring declarations by six jurors in Edmund Zagorski’s 1984 trial that they would have spared Zagorski (pictured) if they could have sentenced him to life without parole, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam rejected Zagorski’s petition for clemency on October 5, 2018. In conjunction with the Tennessee Supreme Court’s October 8 ruling upholding the constitutionality of the state’s lethal-injection protocol, Haslam’s decision moved the state closer to executing Zagorski on October 11. At the time of…

Junk science is “enabling and perpetuating grave miscarriages of justice” in Texas death-penalty cases. So concludes Professor James Acker in his article, Snake Oil With A Bite: The Lethal Veneer of Science and Texas’s Death Penalty, published in the latest issue of the Albany Law Review. Acker’s article highlights the heightened risks of injustice from pseudo-science and junk science in capital cases in Texas, one of the few states that conditions death eligibility upon a finding of the…

The Tennessee Supreme Court heard oral argument on October 3, 2018 of an appeal brought by 32 death-row prisoners challenging the constitutionality of the state’s execution protocol. In a move criticized by one of the court’s justices as a “rocket docket,” the court removed the case from a lower court and set argument for one week before Tennessee’s scheduled October 11 execution of Edmund Zagorski. Previously, the court denied a stay of execution to Billy Ray Irick, allowing him to be executed…

In a case highlighting congressional limitations on the federal judiciary’s ability to redress miscarriages of justice, a Texas federal judge has denied relief to a death-row prisoner who the court believes was denied a fair trial and may well be innocent. U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison (pictured) wrote on September 26, 2018, that he “would almost certainly have granted” a new trial to Robert Will, but the “constraints” imposed by 1990’s‑era amendments to federal habeas corpus law left…

The U.S. Supreme Court heard argument in Madison v. Alabama on October 2, 2018 on whether an Alabama death-row prisoner who has vascular dementia, brain damage, cognitive deficits, and memory loss from two near-fatal strokes is competent to be executed. During oral argument, Bryan Stevenson (pictured), the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, told the justices that, as a result of severe and progressively worsening dementia, Vernon Madison lacks a rational understanding of why…

Florida lawyer Patrick Megaro is facing an official complaint by the North Carolina State Bar for allegedly defrauding death-row exonerees Henry McCollum (pictured, right) and Leon Brown (pictured, left), and taking a third of the compensation granted to the two men. Half-brothers McCollum and Brown were exonerated in 2014 after spending 30 years in prison, some on death row, for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. Both men are intellectually disabled, a factor that made them more…

Finding that the Nevada Department of Corrections acted in “bad faith” to obtain the drug midazolam through “subterfuge,” a Las Vegas trial court has issued a preliminary injunction barring the state from using its supply of that drug in carrying out any execution. The 43-page ruling issued by Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez (pictured) on September 28, 2018 effectively freezes efforts by Nevada prosecutors to execute Scott Dozier, who has waived his appeals and asked to be put to death. Judge…

A federal judge in Vermont has accepted a plea deal between Donald Fell and federal prosecutors, permanently removing Fell from death row and ending a case that had raised serious questions about the constitutionality of the federal death penalty. Under the terms of the deal, approved by U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford on September 28, 2018, Fell will serve a sentence of life without parole for the interstate kidnapping and murder of Teresca King in 2000. Fell and his co-defendant…

An Arkansas ethics board has filed disciplinary charges against six members of the Arkansas Supreme Court alleging that they violated the canons of judicial ethics in removing a trial judge from all death-penalty cases as a result of the judge’s participation in an anti-death-penalty vigil. On September 20, 2018, the Arkansas Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission announced that it had filed formal disciplinary charges against state Supreme Court Chief Justice John Dan Kemp and Justices…