Publications & Testimony

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…

Lawyers for 67-year-old Vernon Madison (pictured), a death-row prisoner whose diagnosis of “irreversible and progressive” vascular dementia has left him with no memory of the crime for which he was sentenced to death, have filed a motion to stay his January 25 execution in Alabama. In a petition for writ of certiorari and motion for stay of execution filed January 18 in the U.S. Supreme Court, Madison’s lawyers argue that the courts wrongly found Madison competent to be executed based upon the…

Kent Whitaker, who survived a shooting in which his wife, Tricia and younger son, Kevin were murdered, has asked the state of Texas to spare the life of his only remaining son, Thomas “Bart” Whitaker (pictured), who was convicted and sentenced to death for their murders. Kent Whitaker told the Austin American-Statesman, “I have seen too much killing already. I don’t want to see him executed right there in front of my eyes,” he said. The petition for clemency filed on January 10 by Bart…

A prosecutor’s duty, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in 1935, “is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” Yet prosecutors across the U.S. have refused to acknowledge the innocence of defendants who have been wrongfully convicted, obstructing release by retrying death-sentenced defendants despite exonerating evidence, or conditioning their release upon “Alford pleas,” which force defendants to choose between clearing their names or obtaining their freedom. In an article for…

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to be favoring arguments presented by Louisiana death-row prisoner Robert McCoy (pictured), who was convicted and sentenced to death after his lawyer, in the face of repeated instructions from his client to argue his innocence, instead told the jury that McCoy had killed three family members. McCoy’s trial lawyer, Larry English, said he ignored his client’s instructions and conceded guilt hoping jurors would then vote against the death penalty…

For the second time in four months, a Missouri judge has imposed a death sentence after a capital-sentencing jury did not reach a unanimous sentencing decision. Greene County Circuit Judge Thomas Mountjoy sentenced 49-year-old Craig Wood (pictured) to death on January 11 for the February 2014 killing of 10-year-old Hailey Owens. Wood was convicted of first-degree murder in November 2017, but the jury — empaneled from out-of-county jurors as a result of extensive pretrial publicity — could not reach…