Publications & Testimony

With the backing of the state’s governor and attorney general, Democratic and Republican sponsors of a bill to repeal Washington’s capital-punishment statute have expressed optimism that the state may abolish the death penalty in 2018. In 2017, Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, was joined by former Attorney General Rob McKenna, a Republican, in calling on the legislature to end the state’s death penalty. Ferguson, who has said “[t]here is no role for capital punishment in a fair…

States that have recently abolished the death penalty have not experienced the “parade of horribles” — including increased murder rates — predicted by death-penalty proponents, according to death-penalty experts who participated in a panel discussion at the 2017 American Bar Association national meeting in New York City. Instead, the panelists said, abolition appears to have created opportunities to move forward with other broader criminal justice reforms. The transcript of that panel…

To deter future use of the death penalty in their county, the Blaine County, Idaho County Commissioners on January 2 voted to consider withdrawing from the state’s Capital Crimes Defense Fund as a way to choke off state funding in capital prosecutions. “This is a way for our county to say we don’t support the death penalty, and that we don’t want the prosecutor seeking it in Blaine County,” said Commissioner Larry Schoen (pictured), who proposed the withdrawal. Two days later, however, the…

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…