Publications & Testimony

In a recent com­men­tary in the Columbus Dispatch, for­mer Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro (pic­tured) crit­i­cized the state’s death penal­ty as ​“a bro­ken sys­tem that cur­rent­ly serves only the inter­est of Ohio pros­e­cu­tors” and said that keep­ing ​“the death penal­ty is just not worth it any more.” As a state leg­is­la­tor, Petro helped write Ohio’s cur­rent death-penal­ty law and he over­saw eigh­teen exe­cu­tions as Attorney General from 2003 – 2007. He says, at the time “[w]e…

New data sug­gests that states that cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing statutes that per­mit judges to impose death sen­tences by over­rid­ing jury rec­om­men­da­tions for life or after juries have returned non-unan­i­mous rec­om­men­da­tions for death may increase the risk of wrongful…

The geo­graph­ic arbi­trari­ness, high rates of offi­cial mis­con­duct, racial dis­crim­i­na­tion, and poor defense rep­re­sen­ta­tion char­ac­ter­is­tic of out­lier juris­dic­tions that dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly seek and impose the death penal­ty in the United States are all present in Clark County, Nevada​’s admin­is­tra­tion of the death…

Calling racial bias in the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty ​“an undis­put­ed fact,” the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators (NHCSL), a group of 320 Hispanic leg­is­la­tors, has passed a res­o­lu­tion urg­ing leg­isla­tive action in all state and fed­er­al juris­dic­tions to repeal the death penal­ty across the United States. The leg­is­la­tors note that the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem sub­jects ​“Black, Latino, Native Americans, and all peo­ple of col­or” to more punitive treatment,…

Attorneys for Mississippi death row pris­on­er Eddie Lee Howard (pic­tured) are seek­ing to prove his inno­cence and chal­leng­ing the ques­tion­able expert bite mark tes­ti­mo­ny that per­suad­ed jurors to con­vict him and sen­tence him to death in 1992. As part of the attack on that evi­dence, Howard’s lawyers recent­ly deposed Michael West, the dis­cred­it­ed foren­sic odon­tol­o­gist who tes­ti­fied against Howard and many oth­er defen­dants in the 1990s, pri­mar­i­ly in Mississippi and…

Maricopa County, Arizona imposed 28 death sen­tences between 2010 and 2015 and, as described in a BuzzFeed news analy­sis of a new report on out­lier death penal­ty prac­tices, ​“stands out for its stark exam­ples of the prob­lems found across the coun­ties that most often sen­tence people to…

In a new book, Against the Death Penalty, Professor John Bessler of the University of Baltimore School of Law presents Justice Stephen Breyer’s his­toric dis­sent in Glossip v. Gross, which ques­tioned the con­tin­u­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States, in a new for­mat intend­ed to make the opin­ion more acces­si­ble to a broad audi­ence. ​“I tried to con­tex­tu­al­ize the opin­ion by doing a longer intro­duc­tion which makes the…

In a pri­ma­ry elec­tion described as reshap­ing the polit­i­cal land­scape of Northeast Florida, the region vot­ed in a land­slide Tuesday to oust State Attorney Angela Corey (pic­tured) and Public Defender Matt Shirk. The pair’s con­tro­ver­sial poli­cies had made Duval County one of the most pro­lif­ic death sen­tenc­ing coun­ties in the coun­try and had led to nation­al deri­sion of its criminal justice…

FBI records show that state claims that exe­cu­tion drug sup­pli­ers have been the sub­ject of threats by anti-death penal­ty activists are large­ly unsub­stan­ti­at­ed and exag­ger­at­ed, accord­ing to an inves­ti­ga­tion by BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed found that ​“few con­crete exam­ples” of the alleged harass­ment, intim­i­da­tion, and phys­i­cal threats states claim have been made against drug sup­pli­ers, and that ​“the states’ mar­quee exam­ple — in which the FBI alleged­ly inves­ti­gat­ed a serious bomb…

In a 5 – 2 order, with two judges dis­sent­ing and two oth­ers not par­tic­i­pat­ing, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the sched­uled August 31 exe­cu­tion of Rolando Ruiz (pic­tured). The order did not spec­i­fy the rea­son why the court issued the stay, say­ing only that after review­ing a new chal­lenge to Ruiz’s death sen­tence that his lawyers had filed, ​“we have deter­mined that his exe­cu­tion should be stayed pend­ing fur­ther order by this Court.” Although Texas…