Publications & Testimony

As Arkansas moves toward attempt­ing to con­duct an unprece­dent­ed eight exe­cu­tions in eleven days, for­mer cor­rec­tions offi­cials from across the coun­try are warn­ing Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson of the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll the com­pressed exe­cu­tion sched­ule could take on prison…

In a joint op-ed for The Washington Post, for­mer gov­er­nors Bob Taft (pic­tured, l.) and Joseph E. Kernan (pic­tured, r.) have expressed bipar­ti­san sup­port for pro­posed leg­is­la­tion that would pro­hib­it the use of the death penal­ty against peo­ple who have severe men­tal ill­ness. Taft, a for­mer Republican gov­er­nor of Ohio, and Kernan, a for­mer Democratic gov­er­nor of Indiana, call the exe­cu­tion of men­tal­ly ill defen­dants ​“an inhu­mane prac­tice that fails to respect com­mon stan­dards of decency…

Maricopa County, Arizona County Attorney Bill Montgomery has sought the death penal­ty so fre­quent­ly that the coun­ty has run up mil­lions of dol­lars in defense costs and run out of defense lawyers qual­i­fied to han­dle new cap­i­tal­ly-charged cas­es. The Arizona Republic reports that, with 65 active death-penal­ty cas­es and more new cap­i­tal cas­es charged than the 35 that have been resolved since July 1, 2014, the coun­ty ran out of the spe­cial­ized lawyers…

The U.S. Supreme Court has unan­i­mous­ly struck down Texas’ stan­dard for eval­u­at­ing intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty in death penal­ty cas­es, call­ing the state’s approach an ​“out­lier” that, “[b]y design and in oper­a­tion, … create[s] an unac­cept­able risk that per­sons with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty will be…

“We live in a gen­dered soci­ety,” says Dr. Mary Atwell (pic­tured), one of the nation’s fore­most experts on women and cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, and the men and women who go to death row are dif­fer­ent. In the lat­est pod­cast episode of ​“Discussions with DPIC,” com­mem­o­rat­ing Women’s History Month, Dr. Atwell says why that is…

Judy and Glenn Cherry (pic­tured), the par­ents of Jonas Cherry, have asked Texas state and local offi­cials not to exe­cute Paul Storey, the man con­vict­ed of killing their son. The state has sched­uled Storey’s exe­cu­tion for April…

The Florida Legislative Black Caucus has joined more than 100 lawyers and legal experts and the par­ents of mur­der vic­tim Sade Dixon in urg­ing Governor Rick Scott to rescind his order remov­ing Orange-Osceola County State Attorney Aramis Ayala (pic­tured) from a high-pro­file dou­ble mur­der case in which she decid­ed to not seek the death penal­ty. The oth­er vic­tim in the case, Lt. Debra Clayton, was an Orlando police offi­cer. Governor Scott did not speak with…

Lawyers for Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, the man accused of plot­ting the bomb­ing of the USS Cole in 2000, are seek­ing U.S. Supreme Court inter­ven­tion to pre­vent his tri­al before a mil­i­tary tri­bunal in which Nashiri faces the death penal­ty if con­vict­ed. The peti­tion for a writ of cer­tio­rari asks the Court to allow Nashiri’s lawyers to chal­lenge his mil­i­tary deten­tion — and efforts to try him in a mil­i­tary tri­bunal rather than a civil­ian court — because the CIA…

A fea­ture sto­ry in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine explores the grow­ing con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment against the death penal­ty, with a focus on the group Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty and its nation­al advo­ca­cy coor­di­na­tor, Marc Hyden (pic­tured). Hyden, who pre­vi­ous­ly worked on Republican cam­paigns and was a field rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the NRA, explained the gen­e­sis of his views against the death penal­ty. His oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty came…

After prison per­son­nel took more than a half hour to set the IV line dur­ing Virginia​’s January 18 exe­cu­tion of Ricky Gray, the Commonwealth’s Department of Corrections has changed its exe­cu­tion pro­ce­dures to con­duct more of the exe­cu­tion prepa­ra­tions out of view of…