Publications & Testimony

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…

The Movement for Black Lives has called for abolishing the death penalty in the United States, asserting that capital punishment is a racist legacy of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow that “devalues Black lives.” A Spring 2018 article in the University of Chicago’s philosophy journal Ethics, co-authored by Michael Cholbi, Professor of Philosophy at California State Polytechnic University and Alex Madva, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona, examines the philosophical…

A federal district court has ordered the Alabama Department of Corrections to release its lethal-injection protocol and unseal transcripts and pleadings related to the failed execution of Doyle Hamm. In a May 30, 2018, order, Judge Karon Owen Bowdre, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama said “how Alabama carries out its executions” is “a matter of great public concern,” and ruled that the public’s “common law right of access to the sealed records…

Facing an August 2018 expiration date for two of the drugs in Nebraska’s experimental execution protocol, state Attorney General Douglas Peterson (pictured) has asked the Nebraska Supreme Court to expedite consideration of the prosecutor’s request to set a July execution date for condemned prisoner Carey Dean Moore. The attorney general has petitioned the court to schedule Moore’s execution for July 10 “or alternatively for a date in mid-July,” despite the pendency of several lawsuits, which…

In his May 20 column in the Sunday New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nicholas Kristof (pictured, left) focused national attention on the troubling case of California death-row prisoner, Kevin Cooper (pictured, right) and the disturbing evidence suggesting that San Bernardino police planted blood and other evidence to frame him for murder. Kristof joined DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham for a Discussions with DPIC podcast to talk about his recent column, Was Kevin Cooper…

Courts in Idaho and Indiana are grappling with how to respond to legal challenges to lethal-injection secrecy laws after corrections officials in both states refused to release execution information requested under state public records laws. In both states, officials refused to provide details about execution drugs and their sources, saying that state law insulates the information from public disclosure. In Idaho, Judge Lynn Norton ordered the Department of Corrections to release information…

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review a federal appeals court decision vacating the conviction of Patrick Dwayne Murphy (pictured), a Native-American prisoner sentenced to death in Oklahoma state court for a murder he argues could only be prosecuted by the federal government. On May 21, 2018, the Court granted Oklahoma’s petition to review an August 2017 decision by the U.S Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruling that Murphy — a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation — should not have…

State-court factfinding by judges in Harris County, Texas death-penalty cases is “a sham” that “rubberstamps” the views of county prosecutors, according to a study of the county’s capital post-conviction proceedings published in the May 2018 issue of the Houston Law Review. In The Problem of Rubber Stamping in State Capital Habeas Proceedings: A Harris County Case Study, researchers from the University of Texas School of Law Capital Punishment Center examined factfinding orders in 191 Harris…

More than twenty years after being convicted and sentenced to death for a murder he has long said he did not commit, Corey Williams (pictured, center, with his defense team) walked free from prison in Louisiana on May 22, 2018. The deal was bittersweet for Williams, for despite the evidence of innocence, he had to agree to plead guilty to lesser charges of manslaughter and obstruction of justice to obtain his freedom. In a statement released to the media, Amir Ali (pictured, left), Williams’…