Publications & Testimony

Edwin Meese III (pic­tured), who served as U.S. Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan, and Robert Morgenthau, the long-time dis­trict attor­ney of Manhattan who served as a U.S. attor­ney under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, believe that Alabama death row pris­on­er William Kuenzel is inno­cent and are urg­ing the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case. Meese and Morgenthau belong to dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal par­ties and take oppos­ing views on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, but both believe…

Saying the death penal­ty is ​“too fal­li­ble to endure,” the Lincoln Journal Star has called on Nebraska vot­ers to end cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the state. In two edi­to­ri­als pub­lished in con­nec­tion with the upcom­ing statewide death penal­ty bal­lot ref­er­en­dum on November 8, the paper urged Nebraskans to retain the leg­is­la­ture’s death penal­ty repeal bill. The pre­dom­i­nant­ly Republican leg­is­la­ture vot­ed to repeal the state’s death penal­ty in May 2015 and then, a few days later,…

After hav­ing ​“solicit­ed thor­ough­ly for ven­dors,” the Nevada Department of Corrections announced that no phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny has offered to sell the state drugs for use in exe­cu­tions. James Dzurenda, direc­tor of the Nevada Department of Corrections issued a state­ment on October 7 say­ing that the Department had sent 247 requests for pro­pos­als to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sup­pli­ers on September 2 and, in response, had received no bids to sup­ply the state with lethal injec­tion drugs. In…

The Florida Supreme Court has declared uncon­sti­tu­tion­al the state’s prac­tice of per­mit­ting judges to impose death sen­tences based upon a non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tion for death. In two rul­ings issued October 14 the court held that juries must unan­i­mous­ly find all facts nec­es­sary to impose a death sen­tence, includ­ing the exis­tence of any aggra­vat­ing fac­tor relied upon as a rea­son to impose the death penal­ty, whether the aggra­vat­ing fac­tors in and of themselves provide…

Texas is poised to have the fewest num­ber of exe­cu­tions in 20…

The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed a deci­sion of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals that affirmed the death sen­tence imposed on Shaun Michael Bosse. In a unan­i­mous per curi­am deci­sion issued October 11, the Court held that Oklahoma pros­e­cu­tors had improp­er­ly pre­sent­ed tes­ti­mo­ny from three mem­bers of the vic­tims’ fam­i­lies ask­ing the jury to sen­tence Bosse to death. The Court had ruled in 1987 in Booth v. Maryland that the use of victim-impact…

Kern County, California—one of five Southern California coun­ties that have been described as the ​“new Death Belt” — sent six peo­ple to death row between 2006 and 2015, more than 99.4% of U.S. coun­ties. Its death sen­tence-to-homi­cide rate dur­ing the 10-year-peri­od from 2006 to 2015 also was 2.3 times high­er than in the rest of the state. In this same time frame, Kern had the high­est rate of civil­ians killed by police of any coun­ty in the coun­try: between 2005…

In an October 10 state­ment com­mem­o­rat­ing World Day Against the Death Penalty, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon (pic­tured) urged the glob­al abo­li­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and called the death penal­ty inef­fec­tive and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive as an anti-ter­ror­ism tool. Saying that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment not only ​“has no place in the 21^st cen­tu­ry,” Secretary-General Ban also not­ed that exe­cu­tions of ter­ror sus­pects have been coun­ter­pro­duc­tive: ​“Experience has shown that putting terrorists to…

Lawyers for 30 Tennessee death row pris­on­ers argued before the state’s supreme court on October 6 that Tennessee’s lethal injec­tion pro­to­col vio­lates the Eighth Amendment pro­hi­bi­tion against cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. Tennessee, which has not car­ried out an exe­cu­tion since 2009, intends to use a one-drug pro­to­col of pen­to­bar­bi­tal that it says would be obtained from a com­pound­ing phar­ma­cy. The pris­on­ers argue that the Tennessee Department of Correction’s lethal-injection…

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argu­ment on October 5 in Buck v. Davis, a Texas case in which Duane Buck was sen­tenced to death after his own lawyer pre­sent­ed expert tes­ti­mo­ny from a psy­chol­o­gist who called Buck more like­ly to com­mit acts of vio­lence in the future because he is…