Publications & Testimony

Michael Graczyk (pictured), who witnessed more than 400 executions as an Associated Press reporter in Texas, has retired after nearly 46 years with the news service. On March 14, 1984, Texas executed James Autry — the second person put to death in Texas since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state’s capital punishment statute in 1976. According to a non-exhaustive list of execution witnesses maintained by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, it was the first of at least 429 executions…

Calling the death penalty a wasteful “big government” policy that is “inept, biased, and corrupt,” a libertarian think tank and a New Orleans columnist have joined the chorus of conservative voices calling for the end of the death penalty. In Conservative doesn’t mean supporting death penalty, New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Tim Morris (pictured) argues that being a conservative requires neither “an unyielding fealty to a party or person [or] simply finding the polar opposite of some…

State lethal-injection practices may have collateral consequences that place public health at risk, according to briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court on July 23, 2018 by public health experts and an association representing generic drug manufacturers. In amicus (or friend-of-the-court) briefs filed in connection with a challenge brought by death-row prisoner Russell Bucklew (pictured) to Missouri’s use of lethal injection, the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM) — a professional…

Lloyd Barrus (pictured, left) will not become the first person sentenced to death in Montana this century, after prosecutors dropped their pursuit of the death penalty for the killing of a sheriff’s deputy. In a motion filed July 19, 2018, Broadwater County Attorney Cory Swanson (pictured, right) wrote that, “after extensive analysis of the Defendant’s history of … mental illness,” the state would no longer seek the death penalty in the case. Doctors at the Montana State Hospital had diagnosed…

Juries in two Broward County, Florida death-penalty trials have handed down life sentences for four capital defendants in the span of one week, highlighting the effect of a new Florida law requiring the unanimous agreement of the jury before a defendant can be sentenced to death. On July 16, a Broward County jury spared three defendants — Eloyn Ingraham, Bernard Forbes, and Andre Delancy — whom it had convicted in March of murdering a Broward sheriff’s deputy. Three days later, another Broward jury…

Unable to legitimately purchase lethal-injection drugs or carry out executions without revealing who manufactured its drugs, Arkansas has suspended efforts to obtain a new supply of execution drugs until state law is amended to keep secret the identity of the drug manufacturers. The Arkansas Department of Corrections confirmed on July 17, 2018 that it had halted its search for execution drugs earlier this year following a November 2017 Arkansas Supreme Court decision requiring the state to…

Four African-American death-row prisoners in North Carolina whose death sentences had been overturned for racial discrimination have challenged the constitutionality of subsequent state court rulings that reinstated their death sentences and then denied them a new hearing on their discrimination claims. The four — Marcus Robinson (pictured), Tilmon Golphin, Quintel Augustine, and Christina Walters — had overturned their death sentences in 2012 under the North Carolina Racial Justice Act (RJA)…

Ohio Governor John Kasich (pictured, left) has commuted the death sentence imposed on Raymond Tibbetts (pictured, right) to life without parole, in response to a juror’s concerns about the unfairness of the sentencing proceedings in the case. It was the seventh time Kasich had commuted a prisoner’s death sentence. The July 20, 2018, news release announcing the commutation explained that Kasich had granted clemency because “fundamental flaws in [the] sentencing phase of [Tibbetts’s] trial …

A Louisiana federal court judge has ordered that executions in the state be stayed for at least another year. On July 16, 2018, in proceedings brought by Louisiana death-row prisoners challenging the state’s lethal-injection protocol, U.S. District Court Judge Shelly Dick granted a request by state officials to extend by one year the temporary stay of execution that has been in effect in Louisiana since 2014. Jeffrey Cody, the state’s lawyer in the case, told the court that continuing the…