Publications & Testimony

The U.S. Air Force has announced that the Guantánamo military commission’s USS Cole death-penalty judge, Air Force Colonel Vance Spath (pictured) is retiring, injecting new uncertainty into war court proceedings already steeped in chaos. In a one-sentence email to the McClatchey news service on July 5, an Air Force spokesperson confirmed that Spath ​“has an approved retirement date of Nov. 1, 2018,” well before the controversial trial proceedings in the capital prosecution of Abd al Rahim al…

Alabama will not execute eight death-row prisoners by means of the problematic lethal-injection protocol they have been challenging, but will instead carry out the executions using lethal gas. In a Joint Motion to Dismiss the prisoners’ federal litigation over the state’s execution protocol, filed on July 10, 2018, the parties agreed that the lawsuit had been rendered moot by the state’s passage of legislation authorizing execution by nitrogen gas and the prisoners’ election to die by nitrogen…

In response to a lawsuit filed by pharmaceutical manufacturer Alvogen, Inc., a Clark County, Nevada District Judge has stayed the July 11, 2018, execution of Scott Dozier and issued a temporary restraining order barring Nevada from using drugs produced by Alvogen to execute Dozier. Saying Nevada had obtained a supply of the drug-maker’s sedative midazolam ​“by subterfuge,” the multibillion-dollar generic drug company sued Nevada and the state Department of Corrections on July 10 to prevent the…

A new study of Tennessee’s death penalty concludes that the state’s capital-punishment system is ​“a cruel lottery” that is ​“riddled with arbitrariness.” The study, published in the summer 2018 issue of the Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy, examined every first-degree murder case in Tennessee since 1977 to determine whether the state had redressed the arbitrariness that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the nation’s death-penalty laws unconstitutional in 1972. In their article…

A joint committee of the Kentucky legislature conducted a hearing on July 6, 2018 on the Commonwealth’s rarely used death penalty, including a presentation by supporters and opponents of a bill to abolish capital punishment. The General Assembly’s Interim Joint Committee on Judiciary took testimony from prosecutors, defense attorneys, correctional officials, and legislators on issues ranging from costs and arbitrariness to the length of the appeal process. Though Kentucky currently has 31…

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s votes swung both to the right and to the left on death-penalty issues, professors Carol Steiker (pictured, l.) of Harvard Law School and her brother, Jordan Steiker (pictured, r.) of the University of Texas School of Law write in a commentary for SCOTUSblog, ​“but [he] declined to swing for the fences.” The Steikers, who co-authored the acclaimed book, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment, recount Justice Kennedy’s nuanced interpretation of the…

A Colorado Springs jury rejected a death sentence for Glen Law Galloway (pictured), marking the third high-profile case since 2015 in which Colorado jurors have selected a life sentence over death. The verdict brought to an end El Paso County’s first capital prosecution in more than a decade, after a six-week trial in a courtroom with a $50,000 makeover that included new audio and video technology and a remodeled jury box enlarged to accommodate six alternate jurors. 2,800 potential jurors had…

Eight days before the scheduled July 11, 2018 execution of Scott Dozier, the Nevada Department of Corrections issued a new lethal-injection protocol, switching the drugs the state intends to use in carrying out his execution. On July 3, the Department announced that it plans to use an untested three-drug protocol of the sedative midazolam, the opioid fentanyl, and the paralytic cisatracurium. The last-minute change prompted an emergency filing by the ACLU of Nevada seeking additional…

Lindy Isonhood (click to enlarge picture) served on the Mississippi jury that sentenced Bobby Wilcher to death in 1994. In a commentary published on Medium, she writes that the decision to condemn Wilcher ​“continue[s] to haunt me today.” Isonhood — whose experience as a death-penalty juror is the subject of a new documentary film, Lindy Lou, Juror Number 2 — explains how little she and her fellow jurors knew about the death-penalty system when they were tasked with determining Wilcher’s fate. They…

As its 2017 – 2018 term came to a close, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review two Mississippi cases that presented significant challenges to capital punishment as implemented in that state and across the country. Over the dissent of Justice Stephen Breyer (pictured), who renewed his call for the Court to review the constitutionality of the death penalty as a whole, the Court on June 29 denied certiorari in the cases of Timothy Evans and Richard Jordan. Reiterating concerns he first voiced in…