Publications & Testimony

A new study shows that the Mississippi District Attorney’s office that has prosecuted Curtis Flowers for capital murder six times — striking almost all black jurors in each trial — has disproportionately excluded African Americans from jury service for more than a quarter century. Reviewing the exercise of discretionary jury strikes in 225 trials between 1992 and 2017, American Public Media Reports discovered that during the tenure of Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit Court District Attorney Doug Evans…

The Ohio Parole Board held a hearing on June 14, 2018 to consider clemency for death-row prisoner Raymond Tibbetts, whose February 13 execution was halted by Governor John Kasich to consider a juror’s request that Tibbets be spared. Ross Geiger, one of the twelve jurors who sentenced Tibbetts to death in 1997, wrote to Governor Kasich on January 30 expressing ​“deep concerns” about a ​“very flawed” trial and saying he ​“would not have recommended the death penalty” had the jury been provided…

A new documentary airing on ABC tells the stories of Darlie Lynn Routier and Julius Jones, two death-row prisoners who have long argued they were wrongfully convicted. The Last Defense, produced by Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress Viola Davis and her husband Julius Tennon, focuses its first four episodes on Routier, a Texas woman convicted of killing her young son, then highlights Jones, a Black man who was a 19-year-old college student when he was arrested for the murder of a White…

Just under 54% of Americans say they support the death penalty and 39% say they are opposed, according to the results of a Pew Research poll released June 11, 2018. The poll — administered between April 25 and May 1, one month after President Trump called for the death penalty for drug trafficking — reflects a five-point increase in support for capital punishment, up from the record-low 49% recorded in Pew’s 2016 poll. The results, which are in line with the 55% support level found by the Gallup…

In the midst of a sharp decline in death sentences in the state, the Georgia Supreme Court on June 4 heard a direct appeal in a capital case for the first time in two years. In March 2018, Georgia reached the four-year mark since it had last imposed a death sentence, a dramatic change for a state that once handed down 15 death sentences in a single year. The decline in Georgia’s death penalty exemplifies broader national death-penalty trends. In 1987, when Georgia handed down those 15 death…

An attempt by Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner (pictured) to reinstate Illinois’ death penalty by attaching it as an ​“amendatory veto” to proposed gun-control legislation has failed. Rather than accede to a plan that would condition stricter gun regulation upon reintroducing the death penalty for murders of police officers and any murder with more than a single victim, the state legislature rewrote the gun-control measure the governor had amended, dropping any mention of capital punishment. In…

In a ruling three dissenters criticized as an ​“outlier,” and after having been rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 for ignoring the medical consensus defining intellectual disability, a sharply divided (5 – 3) Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) has upheld the death sentence imposed on Bobby James Moore (pictured) 38 years ago. On June 6, 2018, the CCA ruled that Bobby Moore is not intellectually disabled under the most recent clinical definition of the disability and may be executed…

A severely mentally ill Texas death-row prisoner who gouged out his eyes and ate one of them has asked a federal appeals court to allow him to appeal a lower court decision that upheld his conviction and death sentence and found that he had been competent to stand trial. Andre Thomas (pictured, left when arrested; center, after gouging out his right eye prior to trial; right, after gouging out and eating his left eye while on death row); is seeking review of his claims that his conviction and…

A gay man on death row in South Dakota has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case and to rule that it is unconstitutional for jurors to impose the death penalty based upon anti-gay animus and stereotypes. Charles Rhines (pictured) argues that South Dakota’s courts improperly refused to consider evidence — including an affidavit from one of his jurors that the jury ​“knew that he was a homosexual and thought that he shouldn’t be able to spend his life with men in prison” — showing that…

Over a strong dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor (pictured), the United States Supreme Court on June 4 declined to review the case of Texas condemned prisoner Carlos Trevino, who had argued that his lawyer was ineffective for failing to investigate and present mitigating evidence of Trevino’s brain damage and developmental delays from his extensive prenatal exposure to alcohol. Having failed to investigate, Trevino’s lawyer presented only a single witness whom he met for the first time the day…