Publications & Testimony

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on May 12 grant­ed a stay of Tilon Carter​’s May 16 exe­cu­tion to con­sid­er his claim that he was con­vict­ed based on ​“false or mis­lead­ing tes­ti­mo­ny by the State Medical Examiner” con­cern­ing the cause of the vic­tim’s death. Carter (pic­tured) was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death based upon tes­ti­mo­ny by a local med­ical exam­in­er that the 89-year-old vic­tim, James Tomlin, had died of suf­fo­ca­tion. His lawyers say that new scientific…

The Florida Supreme Court has direct­ed that Ralph Daniel Wright, Jr. (pic­tured) be acquit­ted of the mur­der charges for which he was sen­tenced to death in 2014, mak­ing him the 159^th per­son exon­er­at­ed from death row in the United States since…

Newly unsealed psy­chi­atric eval­u­a­tions and court tran­scripts in the case of Dylann Roof (pic­tured) — sen­tenced to death for the racial­ly moti­vat­ed killing of nine black church­go­ers in Charleston, South Carolina—raise addi­tion­al ques­tions as to whether Roof was com­pe­tent to waive rep­re­sen­ta­tion in his death penal­ty pro­ceed­ings and to forego pre­sent­ing men­tal health evi­dence in his…

The nation’s death rows are shrink­ing more rapid­ly than new defen­dants are being sen­tenced to death, accord­ing to a new Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) sta­tis­ti­cal brief, ​“Capital Punishment, 2014 – 2015.” The sta­tis­ti­cal brief, which ana­lyzes infor­ma­tion on those under sen­tence of death in the United States as of December 31, 2014 and December 31, 2015, doc­u­ments a con­tin­u­ing decline in exe­cu­tions, new death sen­tences, and death row pop­u­la­tions across the U.S. 2015 marked…

The Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct has issued a for­mal rep­ri­mand to a sit­ting Burnet County judge who post­ed on Facebook a pho­to of a black mur­der sus­pect accused of killing a police offi­cer with the com­ment, ​“Time for a tree and a rope.” Judge James Oakley (pic­tured), who is white, denied that the com­ment about Otis Tyrone McKane was a race-based ref­er­ence to lynch­ing. ​“My com­ment was intend­ed to reflect my per­son­al feel­ings that this sense­less mur­der of a police…

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia has over­turned the death sen­tence imposed on Lawrence Jefferson, say­ing that his tri­al coun­sel had been inef­fec­tive for fail­ing to inves­ti­gate and present avail­able mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence in his case, includ­ing evi­dence relat­ed to ​“a head injury he sus­tained as a child when an auto­mo­bile rolled over his head.” The court also found that the state courts had denied Jefferson a ​“full and fair” hearing on…

Soon after pass­ing leg­is­la­tion to make death penal­ty tri­als fair­er by pre­vent­ing judges from over­rid­ing jury rec­om­men­da­tions of life sen­tences, the Alabama leg­is­la­ture is tak­ing steps to enact a bill that crit­ics say would make cap­i­tal appeals far less fair. The bill, denom­i­nat­ed the ​“Fair Justice Act,” would con­strict the amount of time death-row pris­on­ers have to file appeals, impose dead­lines for judges to rule on appeals, and require pris­on­ers to pursue…

The U.S. Supreme Court has vacat­ed the Alabama state courts’ rejec­tion of a pris­on­er’s claim that he is inel­i­gi­ble for the death penal­ty because of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, and direct­ed the state to recon­sid­er his claim in light of the Court’s recent deci­sion in Moore v. Texas requir­ing states to employ sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly accept­ed stan­dards in deter­min­ing whether a death-row pris­on­er is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled. On May 1, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court…

John Jackson, the for­mer Navarro County, Texas pros­e­cu­tor and judge, is on tri­al for ethics vio­la­tions in the 1992 cap­i­tal tri­al of Cameron Todd Willingham (pic­tured), which many believe led to the exe­cu­tion of an innocent…

An inde­pen­dent study of the costs of seek­ing and impos­ing the death penal­ty in Oklahoma, pre­pared for the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, has con­clud­ed that seek­ing the death penal­ty in Oklahoma ​“incurs sig­nif­i­cant­ly more time, effort, and costs on aver­age, as com­pared to when the death penal­ty is not sought in first degree mur­der cas­es.” The report — pre­pared by Seattle University crim­i­nal jus­tice pro­fes­sors Peter A. Collins and Matthew J. Hickman and law professor…