Publications & Testimony

A juror who served on the capital murder trial of Raymond Tibbetts (pictured) and voted to sentence Tibbetts to death has written to Ohio Governor John Kasich asking Kasich to halt Tibbetts’s scheduled February 13 execution and commute his sentence to life without parole. In a January 30 letter to Governor Kasich, juror Ross Geiger — who, at the time of trial, described himself as a conservative Republican — said after learning the ​“truly terrible conditions” in which Tibbetts was brought up and…

Anthony Ray Hinton spent thirty years confined on Alabama’s death row for murders he did not commit. Three years after his exoneration and release, he has published a memoir of his life, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, that recounts stories from his childhood, the circumstances of his arrest, the travesty of his trial, how he survived and grew on death row, and how he won his freedom. The book, co-authored with Lara Love Hardin, has earned praise from Kirkus…

Severely restricting the use of capital punishment or abolishing the death penalty altogether would help rectify some of the persistent racial disparities found in the United States’ criminal justice system, according to Cassia Spohn (pictured), the Foundation Professor of Criminology and Director of the School of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. In a chapter on Race and Sentencing Disparity in the recently released Academy for Justice four-volume study, Reforming…

Alabama prosecutors have agreed that Renard Marcel Daniel (pictured) should be resentenced to life without parole, after the state’s mental health expert administered psychological tests to Daniel that showed the intellectually disabled man had an IQ of 48. Earlier in January, Daniel’s lawyers — with the consent of the Alabama Attorney General’s office — filed a motion in federal district court jointly asking the court to vacate Daniel’s death sentence and return his case to state court for him to…

The Colorado Supreme Court has upheld a trial court ruling overturning the first-degree murder conviction of David Bueno (pictured) after Arapahoe County prosecutors who sought the death penalty against him in a prison killing hid evidence that pointed to another suspect. The January 22 ruling comes in the wake of a trial court ruling that prosecutors in the state’s 18^th Judicial District, which includes Arapahoe County, also suppressed more than twenty pieces of evidence that should have been…

The United States Supreme Court has stayed the execution of Vernon Madison to consider for a second time questions related to his competency to be executed. In a 6 – 3 vote, with Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissenting, the Court halted Alabama’s scheduled January 25 execution of Madison ​“pending the disposition of the petition for a writ of certiorari” he had filed seeking review of his competency to be executed. That petition was based upon new evidence of his deteriorating mental…

A Wake County, North Carolina jury has rejected the death penalty for 24-year-old Donovan Jevonte Richardson (pictured) and sentenced him to two life sentences, marking the ninth consecutive Wake County capital trial to result in a life verdict. No jury has imposed the death penalty in the county since 2007. ​“The reality,” said Gretchen Engel, Executive Director of the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation, is that ​“it just doesn’t make sense to pursue the death penalty in Wake…

A Wake County, North Carolina jury has rejected the death penalty for 24-year-old Donovan Jevonte Richardson (pictured) and sentenced him to two life sentences, marking the ninth consecutive Wake County capital trial to result in a life verdict. No jury has imposed the death penalty in the county since 2007. ​“The reality,” said Gretchen Engel, Executive Director of the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation, is that ​“it just doesn’t make sense to pursue the death penalty in Wake…

In three days of bulk decision-making, the Florida Supreme Court has denied new sentencing hearings to more than thirty death-row prisoners, declining to enforce its bar against non-unanimous death sentences to cases that became final on appeal before June 2002. At least 24 of the prisoners who were denied relief had been unconstitutionally sentenced to death after non-unanimous jury sentencing recommendations, including three prisoners — Etheria Verdell Jackson, Ernest D. Suggs, and Harry…