Publications & Testimony

Arizona death-row prisoner Barry Jones (pictured) has said for the twenty-three years he has been on death row that he never raped or murdered his girlfriend’s 4‑year-old daughter, Rachel Gray. In a pair of recent articles for The Intercept, reporter Liliana Segura describes the inconsistent medical testimony, police ​“tunnel vision,” inept defense lawyering, and other ​“hallmarks of wrongful convictions” that led to a federal court evidentiary hearing last Fall that could overturn Jones’s 1995…

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia categorically bars states from executing any person who has Intellectual Disability. (Daryl Atkins is pictured.) However, as reported in recent stories in Pacific Standard Magazine and the newspaper, The Atlanta Black Star, some states have attempted to circumvent the Atkins ruling by using social stereotypes and race as grounds to argue that defendants of color are not intellectually disabled. Prosecutors in at least eight states…

A bipartisan bill to abolish the death penalty in Washington passed the state Senate on February 14 on a 26 – 22 vote. SB 6052 now moves to the House of Representatives, where the chairwoman of the House Judiciary Committee has said it will be given a hearing. ​“Today, the Washington State Senate took an historic, bipartisan vote, passing Attorney General-requested legislation to eliminate the death penalty and replace it with life in prison without possibility of parole,” said incumbent…

The sudden firing by U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis (left) of the Pentagon official who oversaw military commission trials at Guantánamo Bay has raised concerns of political interference in the already tumultuous legal proceedings in the death-penalty trials of the five men charged with plotting the 9/​11 attacks on the United States. The New York Times reports that Mattis fired Harvey Rishikof (right), who served as the Convening Authority of the Guantánamo tribunals, as Rishikof was…

An analysis by the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice of the cost of capital punishment has found that cases in which prosecutors seek the death penalty are more costly than cases in which life without parole was the maximum sentence. The Commission’s Death Penalty Working Group reviewed recent studies of death-penalty costs in Utah and across the country and found that, while there was disagreement about the magnitude of the cost difference, there was consensus that the death…

Five prisoners on death row in Pennsylvania have filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the Commonwealth’s policy mandating solitary confinement for all condemned prisoners. The five named plaintiffs have been held in solitary confinement between 16 and 27 years each, kept in cells the size of a parking space, allowed out for a maximum of two hours per day for exercise, and denied human contact with family members during prison visits. The prisoners, represented by the American Civil…

Ohio Governor John Kasich (pictured, left) has granted a reprieve to Raymond Tibbetts (pictured, right), temporarily halting his execution to permit the Ohio Parole Board to consider a juror’s plea for mercy in the case. In a February 8 letter to parole board Chairman Andre Imbrogno, the Governor requested that the Board convene a hearing to consider concerns about the case raised by Ross Geiger, one of the Tibbetts jurors. To facilitate that review, Kasich issued a temporary reprieve of…

On February 5, the American Bar Association (ABA) House of Delegates voted overwhelmingly to adopt a resolution calling for an end to the death penalty for offenders who were 21 or younger at the time of the crime. According to a report accompanying the resolution, ​“there is a growing medical consensus that key areas of the brain relevant to decision-making and judgment continue to develop into the early twenties.” The ABA first opposed applying the death penalty against defendants younger than…

Raymond Wallace Shuman (pictured), whose case led to a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming the unconstitutionality of mandatory death sentences, has died in a Nevada prison at age 83. Shuman, one of the longest-incarcerated prisoners in Nevada history, was serving a life sentence for a 1958 murder when he was convicted of killing a fellow prisoner in 1973. At that time, Nevada law mandated the death penalty for life-sentenced prisoners convicted of another first-degree murder. Then, in…

The latest effort by death-penalty proponents to reinstate the death penalty in New Mexico has died in a House committee. House Bill 155, which would have brought back the death penalty for murders of children, police officers, and corrections employees, was tabled by the House Consumer and Public Affairs Committee by a 3 – 2 vote following a Saturday hearing on the bill on February 3, 2018. The bill, introduced by Albuquerque Rep. Monica C. Youngblood, was the fifth and, according to news…