Publications & Testimony

In a deci­sion that could affect an esti­mat­ed 25 Arizona death penal­ty cas­es, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied Arizona’s request to review a fed­er­al appeals court deci­sion declar­ing uncon­sti­tu­tion­al an evi­den­tiary rule that lim­it­ed the types of mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence cap­i­tal defen­dants could present in their cas­es. The rul­ing in Ryan v. McKinney let stand a 6 – 5 deci­sion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in December 2015 that had reversed James…

Riverside County, California imposed more death sen­tences than any oth­er coun­ty in the United States in 2015, account­ing for more than half of the state’s new death sen­tences and 16% of new death sen­tences imposed nation­wide. Among oth­er states, only the 9 death sen­tences imposed in Florida out­stripped Riverside’s total of…

Public sup­port for the death penal­ty fell by 7 per­cent­age points in the last year, with few­er than half of Americans (49%) now say­ing they sup­port the death penal­ty, accord­ing to a nation­al Pew Research Center poll released on September 29. The poll marks the first time in 45 years that sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment polled below 50%, when a Gallup poll in released in November 1971 also report­ed that 49% of Americans sup­port­ed the death penal­ty. Opposition to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment reached a…

The Orange County, California Crime Lab has been accused of doc­tor­ing its tes­ti­mo­ny about DNA evi­dence to favor the pros­e­cu­tion, after a senior foren­sic ana­lyst offered con­flict­ing con­clu­sions that bol­stered the pros­e­cu­tion in two separate murder…

Some pro­po­nents of the death penal­ty — includ­ing the late Justice Antonin Scalia and the 2016 Republican Party plat­form—have assert­ed that the Supreme Court can­not declare the death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because the Framers includ­ed ref­er­ence to the pun­ish­ment in the text of the Fifth Amendment. An arti­cle by Duke Law School Professor Joseph Blocher, pub­lished in the Northwestern University Law Review, crit­i­cal­ly ana­lyzes that argu­ment and con­cludes that the Fifth…

A phar­ma­cy that has received more than $125,000 in cash pay­ments from Missouri for pro­vid­ing lethal injec­tion drugs that the state has used in 16 exe­cu­tions has argued in a court fil­ing that its iden­ti­ty should remain secret, claim­ing that sell­ing exe­cu­tion drugs to the state’s Department of Corrections is polit­i­cal speech pro­tect­ed by the First Amendment. The sup­pli­er’s infor­ma­tion was request­ed in a sub­poe­na by Mississippi death row inmates who are chal­leng­ing that state’s…

As vot­ers get set to cast bal­lots on death penal­ty ques­tions in California, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, U.S. death row exonerees from across the coun­try have been scour­ing those states in an effort to inform the pub­lic of the risks of wrong­ful exe­cu­tions. On September 19, 17 of the nation’s 156 death-row exonerees appeared at a California press con­fer­ence advo­cat­ing approval of Proposition 62, which would replace the death…

The death-sen­tenc­ing rate per homi­cide in Caddo Parish, Louisiana was near­ly 8 times greater between 2006 and 2015 than the rest of the state, mak­ing a parish with only 5% of Louisiana’s pop­u­la­tion respon­si­ble for 38% of the death sen­tences imposed statewide. Caddo cur­rent­ly has more peo­ple on death row than any oth­er parish in the…

A poll of like­ly California vot­ers con­duct­ed joint­ly by The Field Poll and the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley has found con­tin­u­ing ero­sion of sup­port for the death penal­ty in the state and near-major­i­ty sup­port for Proposition 62, a bal­lot ques­tion to replace the state’s death penal­ty with a sys­tem of life impris­on­ment with­out parole, plus resti­tu­tion. The poll found sig­nif­i­cant vot­er con­fu­sion about a rival ballot measure,…

Semon Frank Thompson (pic­tured), a for­mer super­in­ten­dent at the Oregon State Penitentiary, over­saw both of the exe­cu­tions car­ried out under Oregon’s death penal­ty statute. He now believes that ​“cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is a failed…