Publications & Testimony

“It is widely recognized that capital punishment in the United States of America continues to be imbued with the legacy of slavery” and, to end it, American death-penalty abolitionists ​“should draw on the radicalism of [anti-slavery] abolitionists.” So argues British death-penalty scholar and abolitionist Dr. Bharat Malkani, a Senior Lecturer at the Cardiff University School of Law and Politics, in his new book, Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition. Malkani’s book explores the…

A Louisiana death-row prisoner is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of his conviction and death sentence a second time based upon allegations that the trial judge had an undisclosed conflict of interest. In his petition to review his conviction for a triple-murder involving the death of a New Orleans police officer, Rogers Lacaze (pictured) argues that his right to due process was violated when his trial judge, Frank Marullo, failed to disclose that the judge had…

The Nebraska Supreme Court heard oral argument on August 30, 2018 in a case challenging the constitutionality of the state’s capital sentencing procedure, which requires a three-judge panel to decide whether to impose a death sentence. Attorneys for death-row prisoner John Lotter said the state’s three-judge sentencing violates the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments as applied to Florida’s capital sentencing law in Hurst v. Florida. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the Sixth…

In high-profile cases in Sudan and Saudi Arabia, human rights advocates are protesting the threatened use of the death penalty against women for resisting oppression. In the Sudan, prosecutors are seeking to reinstate the death sentence against Noura Hussein (pictured), a teen girl forced into marriage who killed her abusive husband as he tried to rape her. The Saudi Arabian government is seeking the death penalty against Israa al-Ghomgham, an activist who has sought equal rights for Shiite…

Pope Francis’ recent declaration committing the Catholic Church to opposing capital punishment in all circumstances has produced an unusual public war of words about the practices of Catholic public officials in one of the country’s most aggressive death-penalty counties. Hamilton County, Ohio, has produced more death sentences and executions than any other county in Ohio, and is one of the 2% of U.S. counties responsible for a majority of death sentences and executions in the United States.

The Congressional Black Caucus has urged Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin to review the case of death-row prisoner Julius Jones (pictured) and to use her authority to correct what it characterized as his ​“wrongful conviction.” In an August 21, 2018 letter to the Governor, the Black Caucus — an organization of African-American members of the U.S. House of Representatives — expressed its ​“deep concerns” about racial bias in the application of the death penalty in Oklahoma and the risk of executing…

A new report by Amnesty International says Florida’s approach to redressing the nearly 400 unconstitutional non-unanimous death sentences imposed in the state has deepened its status as an outlier on death-penalty issues by ​“add[ing] an extra layer of arbitrariness to [the state’s] already discriminatory and error-prone capital justice system.” The report, released on August 23, 2018, examines the impact of Florida’s reponse to U.S. and Florida Supreme Court rulings in Hurst v. Florida and…

A new study by an interdisciplinary team of Arizona State University psychology researchers has found a link between the actual and perceived scarcity of resources and support for capital punishment. The study, currently in press but available online on August 10 in the science journal, Evolution and Human Behavior, discovered that countries with greater resource scarcity were more likely to have a death penalty, as were U.S. states with lower per capita income. Building on theories of human…

As lawyers for Nevada told their state supreme court that a controversial Nebraska execution had been carried out without problems, a federal judge issued a ruling allowing a lawsuit to proceed that would force California to allow media witnesses to observe executions in that state in their entirety. The developments in the cases in the two states highlight an ongoing controversy over the lack of transparency and accountability in recent lethal-injection executions. Attorneys representing the…

In his recent article, Reckoning with History: The legacy of lynching in the West, historian Adam Sowards challenges the view romanticized in American popular mythology that ​“frontier justice” was a necessary community response in ​“a violent frontier where the need for justice sometimes preceded an established legal system.” In fact, he says, although Westerners created an elaborate rhetoric of a ​“Western vigilante tradition” to differentiate their posse killings from lynchings in the South…