Publications & Testimony

Less than three months after the U.S. Supreme Court directed a federal appeals court to reconsider whether Georgia death-row prisoner Keith Tharpe (pictured) is entitled to federal-court review of his claim that he was unconstitutionally sentenced to death because he is Black, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has declined to review Tharpe’s appeal, saying he had never presented the issue to the state courts. Citing ​“principles of comity and federalism,” the court denied…

In response to what it calls ​“a critical and unmet need for education and training of both lawyers representing capital prisoners and decision makers who review petitions for clemency,” the American Bar Association (ABA) has created a new web resource devoted to the clemency process. The Capital Clemency Resource Initiative (CCRI) Clearinghouse — a joint project of the ABA Death Penalty Representation Project and Death Penalty Due Process Project — provides tools and resources for clemency decision…

Race discrimination exists at every stage of the death-penalty process, says veteran death-penalty and civil-rights lawyer Stephen B. Bright (pictured), but ​“the most pervasive discrimination that is going on is in jury selection.” In a new Discussions With DPIC podcast, Bright — the former President of the Southern Center for Human Rights who has argued jury discrimination cases three times in the U.S. Supreme Court — calls the ​“rampant” racial discrimination in jury selection ​“a matter of grave…

A Utah judge has excoriated the Utah Department of Corrections for practices he called ​“sneaky” and ​“deceitful” and a state prosecutor has dropped the death penalty after learning that state prison officials had withheld nearly 1,600 pages of prison records from a defendant facing capital charges in a prison killing. Despite a court order to produce all prison records, the department had failed to disclose medical and mental health records detailing psychiatric medication Steven Douglas…

A Utah judge has excoriated the Utah Department of Corrections for practices he called ​“sneaky” and ​“deceitful” and a state prosecutor has dropped the death penalty after learning that state prison officials had withheld nearly 1,600 pages of prison records from a defendant facing capital charges in a prison killing. Despite a court order to produce all prison records, the department had failed to disclose medical and mental health records detailing psychiatric medication Steven Douglas…

The University of Virginia School of Law has created a new interactive web resource (click on map) that allows researchers and the public to visually explore death-sentencing practices in the United States from 1991 through 2017. The interactive map provides county-level data on death sentences imposed across the United States, drawing from a new database created by University of Virginia Law Professor Brandon Garrett (pictured) for his recent book, End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death…

Multiple factors — from declining murder rates to the abandonment of capital punishment by many rural counties and substantially reduced usage in outlier counties that had aggressively imposed it in the past — have collectively led to an ​“astonishing plunge” in death sentences over the last twenty years, according to a new study, Lethal Rejection, published in the 2017/​2018 Albany Law Review. Using data on death-eligible cases from 1994, 2004, and 2014, Drake University law professor David McCord…

About half of all death penalty states include the murder of a child as an aggravating circumstance that can subject a defendant to the death penalty. As of January 2022, fourteen states authorized the death penalty for the murder of a child victim, and five states that later abolished the death penalty also had a child-victim aggravating circumstance. The most common of the age-of-victim requirements by far — used by nine current or former death penalty states — is that the victim must be under…

One month after Alabama called off its two-and-a-half hour attempted execution of Doyle Hamm, the state reached a confidential settlement agreement in which it agreed not to seek another execution date and Hamm’s attorney dismissed his client’s pending civil-rights lawsuit. In a March 27, 2018 press release, Columbia University law professor Bernard Harcourt, who has represented Hamm for 28 years, said the settlement was reached ​“after lengthy, fruitful discussions with the Alabama Attorney…

In his new book Surviving Execution: A Miscarriage of Justice and the Fight to End the Death Penalty, Sky News reporter Ian Woods tells the story of his relationship with condemned Oklahoma prisoner Richard Glossip, whose case gained prominence after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review his challenge to the state’s lethal-injection procedures. Although Glossip’s case is most frequently associated with the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Glossip v. Gross and Oklahoma’s dramatic, last-minute…