Publications & Testimony

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…

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…