Publications & Testimony

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…

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released its annual report on issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. The new publication, The State of Criminal Justice 2018, includes a chapter by Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice, describing significant death penalty cases and capital punishment developments over the past year. Tabak reports that 2017 had the second…

An Arizona appeals court judge has urged the state’s supreme court to rule that the death penalty violates Arizona’s state constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In an August 16, 2018 opinion dissenting from the Arizona Supreme Court’s affirmance of death-row prisoner Jason Bush’s conviction and sentence, Court of Appeals Judge Lawrence Winthrop (pictured) — sitting by designation in the case because of the recusal of one of the high court’s justices — wrote that “[t]he…

A Guantánamo military commission judge has barred prosecutors from using statements five accused 9/11 plotters made to the FBI after they had been subjected to years of torture in CIA black sites. On August 17, 2018, the military judge, Army Colonel James L. Pohl (pictured), suppressed all use of the statements, ruling that restrictions prosecutors had placed on the ability of defense counsel to interview witnesses and investigate the torture made it impossible for the defense to meaningfully…

When the U.S. Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juvenile offenders in 2005 in Roper v. Simmons, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the Court acknowledged the inherent arbitrariness in selecting an age cutoff. “The qualities that distinguish juveniles from adults do not disappear when an individual turns 18,” he wrote. “However, a line must be drawn.” New neuroscience research suggests that the age-18 line may be too low. The court’s opinion in Roper found that a national consensus…

Nineteen years after having been sentenced to death in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, and five years after winning a new trial, Ronald Champney entered a no-contest plea to lesser charges in a plea deal that could soon set him free. Under the plea deal, which the court accepted on August 10, 2018, Champney agreed — without admitting guilt — that prosecutors had sufficient evidence for a jury to convict him of third-degree murder and possessing instruments of crime, and prosecutors withdrew…

Calling Oklahoma “the notorious home of ‘Hang ’Em High’ executions,” conservative commentator and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin (pictured) has urged the state to adopt sytemic reforms to address its “wretched record on wrongful convictions.” Malkin says that despite 35 exonerations in the last 25 years — including 7 death-row exonerations — and a “reign of prosecutorial terror and forensic error by the late Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy and rogue Oklahoma City police department…

On August 14, 2018, more than two decades after last putting a prisoner to death, Nebraska executed Carey Dean Moore (pictured). The execution — which used an untested drug formula of diazepam (the sedative Valium), fentanyl citrate (an opioid painkiller), cisatracurium besylate (a paralytic), and potassium chloride to stop the heart — took 23 minutes. It was the state’s first execution ever by lethal injection. The first drug, diazepam, was administered at 10:24 am, and Moore, who had spent 38…

The Florida Supreme Court has halted the execution of Jose Antonio Jimenez (pictured), scheduled for August 14, 2018. The unanimous one-page order issued by the court on August 10 did not explain the reasons the justices granted the stay. However, Jimenez’s motion for a stay referenced 80 pages of police records that, Jimenez’s lawyer said, had not previously been provided to the defense. Those records — which were part of 1,000 pages of documents turned over to the defense two weeks before the…