Publications & Testimony

Recently released poll results from two Florida counties that have heavily used the death penalty suggest that voters actually prefer life-sentencing options instead. Polls conducted by North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling on January 22 – 23, 2018, indicate that three-quarters of Miami-Dade County respondents preferred some form of life imprisonment rather than the death penalty as the punishment for people convicted of murder, and two-thirds of Pinellas County respondents preferred one of…

In what lawyers for Virginia death-row prisoners have called ​“a landmark ruling,” a federal judge has issued an injunction barring the Commonwealth from subjecting prisoners who have been sentenced to death to automatic solitary confinement, physical isolation from visitors and other prisoners, and other harsh conditions. In a decision issued on February 21, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema wrote that the conditions to which Virginia subjected death-row prisoners before instituting reforms in 2015…

With 24 prisoners currently condemned to die, Hamilton County — home to Cincinnati — has the largest death row of any county in Ohio, despite a smaller population and a lower murder rate than other parts of the state. Ten of the 55 prisoners executed in the state since the 1970s were sentenced to death in Hamilton County, again more than any other Ohio county. In a recent pair of articles in The Cincinnati Enquirer, reporter Dan Horn describes the county’s long history with the death penalty and…

On January 12, 2016, in an 8 – 1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion in Hurst v. Florida, in which the Court struck down as unconstitutional Florida’s capital sentencing statute. At the time of the opinion, Florida death-penalty law required a jury to make a sentencing recommendation – on which only a bare majority of jurors had to agree – to the judge, who would then later ​“hold a separate hearing and determine whether sufficient aggravating circumstances existed to justify…

Prosecutors in Mohave County, Arizona announced in February that they will drop the pursuit of the death penalty in two murder cases in the county. Justin Rector and Darrell Ketchner were separately charged with first-degree murder, and officials said their defense teams had already spent over $2.2 million preparing for trials that are still far from taking place. Mohave County Attorney Matt Smith said, ​“Everybody’s looking to save money and these death penalty cases are extremely expensive.”

Less than a week after Alabama halted the failed execution of a terminally ill prisoner whose veins were not suitable for intraveneous injection, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to hear the case of another Alabama prisoner whose medical condition, his lawyers say, make him constitutionally unfit for execution. Strokes have slurred Vernon Madison’s speech and left him legally blind, incontinent, unable to walk independently, and with no memory of the offense for which he was sentenced to…

Three states — Alabama, Florida, and Texas — prepared to carry out controversial executions on Thursday, February 22, all scheduled for 7 PM Eastern time, but by the end of the night, two had been halted. Less than an hour before his scheduled execution, and after having said a final good-bye to his anguished father, Texas death-row prisoner Thomas ​“Bart” Whitaker (pictured, left) learned that Governor Greg Abbott had commuted his death sentence to life in prison. Minutes later, Florida executed…

Thirty-three Tennessee death-row prisoners have filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality and legality of the state’s new execution protocol, after Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery (pictured) asked the state supreme court to expedite executions before one of the state’s execution drugs expires. On February 14, Slatery asked the court to schedule eight execution to be carried out before June 1. Attorneys for the death-row prisoners, who were in the process of finalizing their…

BuzzFeed News investigation has disclosed that Missouri carried out seventeen executions between 2014 and 2017 using supplies of the drug pentobarbital it secretly obtained from a pharmacy the Food and Drug Administration had classified as ​“high risk” because of repeated serious health violations. The February 20 exposé describes a complex system of clandestine meetings, code names, and undocumented cash payments that Missouri employed to conceal the identity of Foundation Care, a suburban St.

A Guantánamo military commission judge has indefinitely suspended proceedings in the death-penalty trial of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, accused of planning al-Qaida’s alleged 2000 bombing of the Navy warship USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. Expressing exasperation over his continuing inability to compel civilian death-penalty lawyers to return to the case, Air Force Colonel Vance Spath (pictured) halted the proceedings on February 16. ​“I am abating these proceedings indefinitely,” Spath said.