Publications & Testimony

A phar­ma­cy that has received more than $125,000 in cash pay­ments from Missouri for pro­vid­ing lethal injec­tion drugs that the state has used in 16 exe­cu­tions has argued in a court fil­ing that its iden­ti­ty should remain secret, claim­ing that sell­ing exe­cu­tion drugs to the state’s Department of Corrections is polit­i­cal speech pro­tect­ed by the First Amendment. The sup­pli­er’s infor­ma­tion was request­ed in a sub­poe­na by Mississippi death row inmates who are chal­leng­ing that state’s…

As vot­ers get set to cast bal­lots on death penal­ty ques­tions in California, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, U.S. death row exonerees from across the coun­try have been scour­ing those states in an effort to inform the pub­lic of the risks of wrong­ful exe­cu­tions. On September 19, 17 of the nation’s 156 death-row exonerees appeared at a California press con­fer­ence advo­cat­ing approval of Proposition 62, which would replace the death…

The death-sen­tenc­ing rate per homi­cide in Caddo Parish, Louisiana was near­ly 8 times greater between 2006 and 2015 than the rest of the state, mak­ing a parish with only 5% of Louisiana’s pop­u­la­tion respon­si­ble for 38% of the death sen­tences imposed statewide. Caddo cur­rent­ly has more peo­ple on death row than any oth­er parish in the…

A poll of like­ly California vot­ers con­duct­ed joint­ly by The Field Poll and the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley has found con­tin­u­ing ero­sion of sup­port for the death penal­ty in the state and near-major­i­ty sup­port for Proposition 62, a bal­lot ques­tion to replace the state’s death penal­ty with a sys­tem of life impris­on­ment with­out parole, plus resti­tu­tion. The poll found sig­nif­i­cant vot­er con­fu­sion about a rival bal­lot measure,…

Semon Frank Thompson (pic­tured), a for­mer super­in­ten­dent at the Oregon State Penitentiary, over­saw both of the exe­cu­tions car­ried out under Oregon’s death penal­ty statute. He now believes that ​“cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is a failed…

A September 20 report by the Texas Defender Service says that Texas ​“has failed to ensure effec­tive coun­sel” for appel­lants in cap­i­tal cas­es and that the state’s sys­tem of review­ing death penal­ty cas­es on direct appeal is ​“in dire need of reform.” The report, titled Lethally Deficient, reviewed all 84 cap­i­tal direct appeals decid­ed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) from 2009 to 2015 and iden­ti­fied numer­ous ​“per­sis­tent…

Newspaper edi­to­r­i­al boards in California are over­whelm­ing­ly sup­port­ing a November bal­lot ini­tia­tive to abol­ish the state’s death penal­ty and replace it with life with­out parole plus resti­tu­tion, and are uni­form­ly reject­ing an oppos­ing ini­tia­tive that pur­ports to speed up the appeals process. At least eight California news­pa­pers have pub­lished edi­to­ri­als sup­port­ing Proposition 62 and oppos­ing Proposition 66, and Ballotpedia reports that it is aware of no edi­to­r­i­al boards that…

Judicial over­ride of jury rec­om­men­da­tions of life, the impo­si­tion of death sen­tences after non-unan­i­mous jury sen­tenc­ing rec­om­men­da­tions, and pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct, race bias, and inef­fec­tive defense coun­sel have made Mobile County, Alabama one of the most pro­lif­ic death sen­tenc­ing coun­ties in the United…

For the first time in two decades, Oklahoma will go at least two years with­out an exe­cu­tion. As part of an agree­ment in a fed­er­al law­suit brought by the state’s death row pris­on­ers, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (pic­tured) has said the state will not request exe­cu­tion dates for at least five months after the state adopts a new exe­cu­tion pro­to­col. Because of this, when the Oklahoma Board of Corrections met on September 13, 2016, the state already…

Today, DPIC launch­es a new pod­cast series, ​“Discussions With DPIC,” which will fea­ture month­ly, unscript­ed con­ver­sa­tions with death penal­ty experts on a wide vari­ety of top­ics. The inau­gur­al episode fea­tures a con­ver­sa­tion between Texas Defender Services staff attor­ney Kate Black (pic­tured) and DPIC host Anne Holsinger, who dis­cuss the case of Jeffery Wood and Texas’ unusu­al legal doc­trine known as the ​“law of…