Publications & Testimony

Texas executed Juan Castillo (pictured) on May 16, 2018, after its state courts stayed his execution to address whether his conviction and death sentence for a botched robbery and murder had been a product of false testimony, but then denied him an evidentiary hearing necessary to prove that claim. No physical evidence implicated Castillo in the murder, and he consistently asserted his innocence. To convict him, Bexar County prosecutors presented testimony from several admitted perpetrators…

State and federal prosecutors have agreed to withdraw the death penalty in exchange for guilty pleas by defendants charged with multiple killings in two unrelated high-profile murder cases. On May 4, Lake County, Indiana prosecutors dropped the death penalty against Darren Vann (pictured, left), who had killed seven women. On May 1, federal prosecutors announced they would not pursue the death penalty against Esteban Santiago (pictured right), who killed five people and wounded six others in a…

lllinois Governor Bruce Rauner has conditionally vetoed a gun-control initiative unless the legislature agrees to reinstate capital punishment in the state. Exercising an amendatory veto — a power some governors are granted that permits them to amend legislation in lieu of an outright veto — Rauner called for making the killing of a police officer or any murder in which more than one person was killed a new crime of ​“death penalty murder.” In a May 14, 2018 news conference at the Illinois State…

The United States Supreme Court has granted a new trial to Louisiana death-row prisoner Robert McCoy (pictured), whose lawyer admitted his guilt despite McCoy’s ​“adament” and ​“vociferous” insistence that he was innocent. Facing what counsel believed was overwhelming evidence of guilt and hoping to persuade the jury to spare McCoy’s life, defense lawyer Larry English told jurors his client had ​“committed three murders… . [H]e’s guilty.” In a 6 – 3 opinion for the Court on May 14, Justice Ruth…

As support for the death penalty has declined in America, the process of ​“death-qualification” — which screens potential jurors in death-penalty cases based upon their views about capital punishment — produces increasingly unrepresentative juries from which African Americans are disproportionately excluded and, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, increasingly biases juries in favor of conviction and death sentences. Death-qualification, the researchers say…

Voters in North Carolina added their voices to an expanding movement for local criminal justice reform, ousting sheriffs who closely cooperated with federal authorities seeking to detain and deport immigrants and nominating reform candidates in local district attorney races. In Durham County, considered the state’s most progressive county, voters in the Democratic primary opted for a candidate who advocated more rapid reform and said she would never pursue the death penalty, replacing…

Finding that prosecutors withheld evidence that the family of murder victim Jonas Cherry opposed the death penalty for his accused killer and then lied to jurors that Cherry’s family supported the death penalty, a trial judge in Tarrant County, Texas has recommended overturning the death sentence imposed on Paul David Storey (pictured) and replacing it with a sentence of life without parole. Storey was convicted and sentenced to death in 2008 for murdering Cherry during a 2006 robbery of a…

The nation’s death rows continue to shrink more rapidly than new defendants are being sentenced to death, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) statistical brief, ​“Capital Punishment, 2016,” released April 30, 2018. (Click image to enlarge.) The statistical brief, which analyzes information on those under sentence of death in the United States as of December 31, 2016, contains official government figures documenting continuing declines in executions, new death sentences, and…

As legislators and the media have pressed Nebraska for information on its secretive execution practices, the executive branch has responded — the state’s leading newspapers say — with obfuscation and with a lawsuit that has created a state constitutional crisis. After adopting a new execution policy that the Lincoln Journal Star reported ​“was written in a single draft without input from the governor, attorney general, Corrections director, outside experts or other state officials,” the state…

In 2005, Alfred Dewayne Brown (pictured left) was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a Houston, Texas police officer based on false testimony Harris County prosecutors obtained through coercion and threats. After spending a decade on death row for a crime he did not commit, Brown was finally released with the help of his attorney Brian Stolarz (pictured right), who is the guest on DPIC’s latest podcast and author of Grace and Justice on Death Row, a book about Brown’s…