Publications & Testimony

At the urging of the victim’s family, Rapid City, South Dakota prosecutors have withdrawn their request for the death penalty against two murder defendants in the only capital trials pending in the state. On April 16, Pennington County State’s Attorney Mark Vargo withdrew the state’s notice of intent to seek the death penalty against Jonathon Klinetobein — charged with arranging the May 2015 murder-for-hire of his ex-girlfriend, Jessica Rehfeld — after her father, Michael Rehfeld told the court the…

Death row is aging and increasingly infirm and, as a series of recent death warrants suggest, that phenomenon is raising legal, practical, and humanitarian concerns. One year after executing 75-year-old Thomas Arthur, Alabama on April 19 executed 83-year-old Walter Moody (pictured, left), the oldest person and only octogenarian put to death in the United States since executions resumed in 1977. Attempts to execute prisoners debilitated by physical and cognitive impairments exacerbated by aging…

In 1764, Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria wrote the treatise, Dei delitti e delle pene, which author John Bessler (pictured) says spawned global movements for fair and proportional punishment and against practices such as torture and the death penalty. Beccaria’s book was a best-seller that swept across Europe and, translated into English in 1767 as An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, into the American colonies, shaping the beliefs of America’s founding fathers, and influencing leaders…

Mexican national Vicente Figueroa Benavides (pictured), wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in Kern County, California for supposedly raping, sodomizing, and murdering his girlfriend’s 21-month-old daughter, will soon be freed after nearly 26 years on death row. He will be the 162^nd person and fifth foreign national exonerated from a U.S. death row since 1973. In a media advisory on April 17, 2018, Kern District Attorney Lisa Green announced on April 17, 2018 that her office would be…

As the sister of a murder victim and the wife of a death-row exoneree, LaShawn Ajamu has a unique perspective on what victims’ families need and how they are treated as criminal cases wend their way through the legal process. And the co-chair of the Murder Victims Families Support Project at Ohioans to Stop Executions strongly believes that the death penalty fails victims’ family members. Ajamu, the wife of 150^th U.S. death-row exoneree Kwame Ajamu, spoke in London, England on April 7 at a…

A fractured Washington Supreme Court unanimously found that a death-row prisoner’s constitutional rights had been violated under circumstances that had always before required overturning a conviction and granting a new trial, but nevertheless voted to uphold his conviction and death sentence. In five opinions spanning 254 pages published on April 12, 2018, the nine justices agreed that Conner Schierman’s (pictured) rights to be present and to a public trial were violated during the jury…

Use of the death penalty declined worldwide in 2017, according to the Amnesty International’s annual global report on capital punishment. The human rights organization recorded 2,591 death sentences imposed in 53 countries in 2017, down 17% from the 3,117 death sentences it recorded from 55 countries in 2016. Executions also fell, with 23 nations carrying out a recorded 993 executions, off 4% from the 1,032 executions recorded in 2016 and 39% below the 1,634 executions reported in 2015. Two…

Nine years after New Mexico prospectively abolished capital punishment, lawyers for the state’s two remaining death-row prisoners argued to the New Mexico Supreme Court that the death penalty was unconstitutionally disproportionate punishment as applied to Timothy Allen (pictured, left) and Robert Fry (pictured, right), and that they should not be executed. The lengthy oral argument on April 10, 2018 turned on how the court should go about determining whether a death sentence is arbitrary and…

Twenty-two years after Walter Ogrod (pictured) was sentenced to death for a murder he insists he did not commit, a new Philadelphia District Attorney’s administration has dropped the office’s long-time opposition to Ogrod’s request for DNA testing and has referred the case for review by a revitalized Conviction Integrity Unit. As that review proceeds, an hour-long documentary on the case — aired April 8 as part of CNN’s Headline News Network series Death Row Stories — presents what Philadelphia…