Publications & Testimony

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…

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…

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…

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-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…

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…

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…

A September 20 report by the Texas Defender Service says that Texas​“has failed to ensure effec­tive coun­sel” for appel­lants in cap­i­tal cas­es and that the state’s sys­tem of review­ing death penal­ty cas­es on direct appeal is​“in dire need of reform.” The report, titled Lethally Deficient, reviewed all 84 cap­i­tal direct appeals decid­ed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) from 2009 to 2015 and identified…

Newspaper edi­to­r­i­al boards in California are over­whelm­ing­ly sup­port­ing a November bal­lot ini­tia­tive to abol­ish the state’s death penal­ty and replace it with life with­out parole plus resti­tu­tion, and are uni­form­ly reject­ing an oppos­ing ini­tia­tive that pur­ports to speed up the appeals process. At least eight California news­pa­pers have pub­lished edi­to­ri­als sup­port­ing Proposition 62 and oppos­ing Proposition 66, and Ballotpedia reports that it is…

Judicial over­ride of jury rec­om­men­da­tions of life, the impo­si­tion of death sen­tences after non-unan­i­­mous jury sen­tenc­ing rec­om­men­da­tions, and pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct, race bias, and inef­fec­tive defense coun­sel have made Mobile County, Alabama one of the most pro­lif­ic death sen­tenc­ing coun­ties in the…