Publications & Testimony

Kern County, California—one of five Southern California coun­ties that have been described as the ​“new Death Belt” — sent six peo­ple to death row between 2006 and 2015, more than 99.4% of U.S. coun­ties. Its death sen­tence-to-homi­cide rate dur­ing the 10-year-peri­od from 2006 to 2015 also was 2.3 times high­er than in the rest of the state. In this same time frame, Kern had the high­est rate of civil­ians killed by police of any coun­ty in the coun­try: between 2005…

In an October 10 state­ment com­mem­o­rat­ing World Day Against the Death Penalty, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon (pic­tured) urged the glob­al abo­li­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and called the death penal­ty inef­fec­tive and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive as an anti-ter­ror­ism tool. Saying that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment not only ​“has no place in the 21^st cen­tu­ry,” Secretary-General Ban also not­ed that exe­cu­tions of ter­ror sus­pects have been coun­ter­pro­duc­tive: ​“Experience has shown that putting ter­ror­ists to…

Lawyers for 30 Tennessee death row pris­on­ers argued before the state’s supreme court on October 6 that Tennessee’s lethal injec­tion pro­to­col vio­lates the Eighth Amendment pro­hi­bi­tion against cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. Tennessee, which has not car­ried out an exe­cu­tion since 2009, intends to use a one-drug pro­to­col of pen­to­bar­bi­tal that it says would be obtained from a com­pound­ing phar­ma­cy. The pris­on­ers argue that the Tennessee Department of Correction’s lethal-injection…

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argu­ment on October 5 in Buck v. Davis, a Texas case in which Duane Buck was sen­tenced to death after his own lawyer pre­sent­ed expert tes­ti­mo­ny from a psy­chol­o­gist who called Buck more like­ly to com­mit acts of vio­lence in the future because he is…

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund reports that America’s death rows have con­tin­ued to decline in size, with 2,905 men and women on death row across the United States as of July 1, 2016. The new fig­ures, report­ed in the orga­ni­za­tion’s Summer 2016 edi­tion of its quar­ter­ly pub­li­ca­tion, Death Row USA, rep­re­sent a 14% decline from the 3,366 pris­on­ers who were on death row one decade ear­li­er. The shrink­ing of death row pop­u­la­tions across the coun­try has exceed­ed the num­ber of…

In a deci­sion that could affect an esti­mat­ed 25 Arizona death penal­ty cas­es, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied Arizona’s request to review a fed­er­al appeals court deci­sion declar­ing uncon­sti­tu­tion­al an evi­den­tiary rule that lim­it­ed the types of mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence cap­i­tal defen­dants could present in their cas­es. The rul­ing in Ryan v. McKinney let stand a 6 – 5 deci­sion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in December 2015 that had reversed James…

Riverside County, California imposed more death sen­tences than any oth­er coun­ty in the United States in 2015, account­ing for more than half of the state’s new death sen­tences and 16% of new death sen­tences imposed nation­wide. Among oth­er states, only the 9 death sen­tences imposed in Florida out­stripped Riverside’s total of…

Public sup­port for the death penal­ty fell by 7 per­cent­age points in the last year, with few­er than half of Americans (49%) now say­ing they sup­port the death penal­ty, accord­ing to a nation­al Pew Research Center poll released on September 29. The poll marks the first time in 45 years that sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment polled below 50%, when a Gallup poll in released in November 1971 also report­ed that 49% of Americans sup­port­ed the death penal­ty. Opposition to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment reached a…

The Orange County, California Crime Lab has been accused of doc­tor­ing its tes­ti­mo­ny about DNA evi­dence to favor the pros­e­cu­tion, after a senior foren­sic ana­lyst offered con­flict­ing con­clu­sions that bol­stered the pros­e­cu­tion in two sep­a­rate murder…

Some pro­po­nents of the death penal­ty — includ­ing the late Justice Antonin Scalia and the 2016 Republican Party plat­form—have assert­ed that the Supreme Court can­not declare the death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because the Framers includ­ed ref­er­ence to the pun­ish­ment in the text of the Fifth Amendment. An arti­cle by Duke Law School Professor Joseph Blocher, pub­lished in the Northwestern University Law Review, crit­i­cal­ly ana­lyzes that argu­ment and con­cludes that the Fifth…