Publications & Testimony

Family members of murder victims share no single, uniform response to the death penalty, but two recent publications illustrate that a growing number of these families are now advocating against capital punishment. In From Death Into Life, a feature article in the January 8, 2018 print edition of the Jesuit magazine America, Lisa Murtha profiles the stories of how several prominent victim-advocates against the death penalty came to hold those views. And in a recently released compilation of…

The U.S. Supreme Court has directed a federal appeals court to reconsider whether Georgia death-row prisoner Keith Tharpe (pictured) is entitled to federal court review of his claim that he was unconstitutionally sentenced to death because he is black. On January 8, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6 – 3 opinion sending Tharpe’s case — in which a racist juror used an offensive slur to describe the defendant and doubted whether African Americans have souls — back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the…

From October 2016 to October 2017, support for capital punishment among those identifying themselves as Republicans fell by ten percetage points. Two op-eds published towards the end of the year illustrate the growing conservative opposition to the death penalty. Writing in The Seattle Times on December 27, Republican State Senator Mark Miloscia (pictured, l.) called for bipartisan efforts to repeal Washington’s death-penalty statute. In a December 13 commentary in the Washington Times…

Saying that the death penalty should ​“be reserved for the ​‘worst of the worst in our society,’” retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General John Castellaw (pictured) has urged the Tennessee state legislature to adopt pending legislation that would bar the death penalty for people with severe mental illnesses. In an op-ed in the Memphis newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, General Castellaw writes that the death penalty ​“should not be prescribed for those with severe mental illnesses, including those…

Saying “[a] movement was sworn in today,” long-time civil-rights lawyer Larry Krasner (pictured) — who pledged to end Philadelphia’s use of the death penalty — took the oath of office on January 2 as district attorney in a county that only five years ago had the third largest death row of any county in the country. Krasner’s inaugural address put a face on the “[t]ransformational change in criminal justice” he had called for during the election, saying it was time to begin ​“trading jails — and death…

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe commuted the sentence of mentally incompetent death-row prisoner William Joseph Burns (pictured) on December 29, 2017, after multiple mental-health experts said Burns was unlikely to regain sufficient competency for his death sentence to ever be carried out. Burns, whose sentence was converted to life in prison without the possibility of parole, became the fifth death-row prisoner to have been granted clemency in the United States in 2017. Burns was convicted…

Former Illinois death-row prisoner Gabriel Solache (pictured), a Mexican national whose death sentence was one of 157 commuted by Governor George Ryan in January 2003, was exonerated on December 21, 2017 after twenty years of wrongful imprisonment, but immediately seized by agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. Cook County prosecutors dropped charges against Solache and his co-defendant Arturo DeLeon-Reyes after Circuit Court Judge James Obbish overturned their…

A New Jersey U.S. district court judge has barred federal prosecutors from seeking the death penalty against Farad Roland, finding that Roland is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for capital punishment. After an eighteen-day evidentiary hearing featuring sixteen witnesses, Judge Esther Salas ruled on December 18 that Roland — accused of five killings in connection with a drug-trafficking gang — had ​“abundantly satisfied his burden of proving his intellectual disability by a…

When Anthony Graves (pictured) was exonerated from death row in Texas in 2010, he decided that he would use his personal experience as a catalyst for redressing the ​“injustice of the justice system.” After receiving $1.45 million as compensation for the 18 years he was wrongly incarcerated, including twelve years on death row, the nation’s 138^th death-row exoneree created the Anthony Graves Foundation. Over the past two years, Graves has personally contributed more than $150,000 of his…