Publications & Testimony

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…

Texas has scheduled executions on consecutive nights of two prisoners who have long asserted their innocence. Troy Clark (pictured, left), who is scheduled to be executed on September 26, 2018, was convicted and sentenced to death based on the changing statements of a former girlfriend who could have faced the death penalty under the Texas law of parties but was tried as an accomplice and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Daniel Acker (pictured, right), scheduled to be executed September 27, was…

The FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2017, released by the U.S. Department of Justice, reports that murder rates stabilized across the United States in 2017, decreasing marginally compared to adjusted homicide figures from 2016 but remaining above the record lows recorded earlier in the decade. The initial FBI crime figures for 2017 report 17,284 murders across the United States in 2017, compared to 17,413 in 2016, dropping the nationwide murder rate from 5.4 murders per 100,000 people to 5.3. The…

Sixteen years after a notorious and now-discredited forensic witness told a Mississippi jury that Jeffrey Havard had sexually abused and shaken his girlfriend’s six-month-old daughter to death, Havard’s death sentence — but not his conviction — has been overturned. On September 14, 2018, Adams County Circuit Judge Forrest Johnson ruled that state pathologist Steven Hayne’s recantation of his diagnosis that infant Chloe Britt had been a victim of Shaken Baby Syndrome was “not sufficient to undermine…

Women face “widespread discriminatory practices in the capital prosecution and detention” in death-penalty countries around the world, according to a new report by the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The report, Judged for More Than Her Crime: A Global Overview of Women Facing the Death Penalty — released at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on September 18, 2018 — examines the use of capital punishment against women…

For the first time in more than a quarter century, fewer than 2,500 prisoners across the United States now face active death sentences. According to the latest Death Row USA national census by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), released in early September 2018, 2,743 people were on death rows in 32 states and the U.S. federal and military death rows on April 1, 2018. That total includes 249 people who were previously sentenced to death but face the possibility of a capital resentencing after a…

A landmark article in the Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy provides a “compilation of milestones in the American experience with capital punishment,” tracking more than 400 years of the “inglorious experience with capital punishment” in what is now the United States. Authors Rob Warden (pictured, left), Executive Director Emeritus at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Daniel Lennard (pictured, right), a lawyer at…

In a period of less than one week, four former death-row prisoners in four separate states learned that they no longer face execution, contributing to the continuing decline in the number of people on death rows across the U.S. The result of the unrelated court proceedings — a resentencing hearing in Pennsylvania, a non-capital grand jury indictment in Louisiana, a prosecutor’s decision to drop death in Indiana, and a court ruling on intellectual disability in Alabama — illustrate the ongoing…

Four years after intellectually disabled brothers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were exonerated of the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in North Carolina, jurors in McCollum’s case met with members of his defense team and reflected on how they sentenced an innocent man to death. In a September 6 op-ed in the Raleigh News & Observer, Kristin Collins — Associate Director of Public Information for North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation and a former News & Observer…