Publications & Testimony

Alabama has set an execution date for Doyle Lee Hamm (pictured), a 60-year-old man with terminal cranial and lymphatic cancer that his lawyer says has rendered his veins unusable for lethal injection. Hamm has received radiation and chemotherapy, and was scheduled for surgery to remove a cancerous lesion on December 13, but Alabama prison officials cancelled the surgery and instead informed Hamm that a death warrant had been issued scheduling his execution for February 22, 2018. In September…

The racially discriminatory jury selection practices of the Clark County, Nevada, District Attorney’s office are now causing it to lose convictions in capital cases. In a December 18 article, the prosecutorial watchdog, The Open File, details repeated violations by Clark County death-penalty prosecutors of the constitutional proscription against striking prospective jurors from service on the basis of race. Four times in the past four years, the Nevada Supreme Court has ordered new trials in…

Several months after Arizona settled a lawsuit over the conditions of confinement on the state’s death row, the state has ended the practice of automatically housing condemned prisoners in solitary confinement, and prisoners and prison officials alike are praising the changes. Carson McWilliams (pictured), Division Director for Offender Operations in the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC), told the Arizona Republic that the new incarceration conditions provide an ​“atmosphere where…

For the third time since 2012, no one in North Carolina was sentenced to death in 2017. All four trials in 2017 in which prosecutors sought a death sentence ended with a jury either acquitting the defendant of capital murder or returning a lesser sentence. Despite the historical decline in death sentencing in North Carolina, two state legislative leaders, in a letter derided by editorial boards as political posturing, used the recent killing of three prison guards to demand that Governor Roy…

The Supreme Court of Kenya has declared the nation’s mandatory death sentencing procedures unconstitutional. In a December 14, 2017 ruling that could affect 7,000 death-row prisoners, the high court overturned Section 204 of Kenya’s Penal Code, which required that judges impose death sentences upon conviction of murder or armed robbery. The decision resolves conflicting rulings by the country’s lower courts of appeal, and grants new sentencing hearings to those currently sentenced to death.

On December 17, 2007, New Jersey abolished the death penalty. On the tenth anniversary of abolition, the editorial board of the New Jersey Law Journal writes, ​“On the Death Penalty, New Jersey Got it Right.” The editorial board wrote, ​“Abolition has proven its worth, in that there has been no surge of murders, a significant decline of prosecution and appeal expenses, and the elimination of unremediable judicial mistakes. [Abolition] was and remains both the right thing and the sensible thing to…

Nearly one-third (31%) of the 39 new death sentences imposed in the United States in 2017 came from just three counties, Riverside, California; Clark, Nevada; and Maricopa, Arizona, according to statistics compiled for DPIC’s annual year end report. In a press release accompanying the annual report, DPIC said that the year’s sentences reflect ​“the increasing geographic isolation and arbitrary nature of the death penalty.” Riverside imposed five death sentences in 2017, Clark four, and Maricopa…

Executions and new death sentences remained near historic lows in 2017, and public support for the death penalty polled at its lowest level in 45 years, according to DPIC’s annual report, ​“The Death Penalty in 2017: Year End Report,” released December 14. Both the 23 executions and the 39 projected new death sentences in 2017 were the second lowest totals in more than a quarter-century. Four more people were exonerated from death row in 2017, bringing the total to 160 death-row exonerations…

As U.S. pharmaceutical companies have strengthened distribution controls on their medicines to prevent their use in executions, states have been changing their execution protocols in search of new or more readily available drugs. That search has led Nebraska and Nevada to build their execution protocols around fentanyl — the drug known for its role in the current opioid crisis in America — and the paralytic cisatracurium, which have never been used in executions before. According to a report in…

The certainty of apprehension, not the severity of punishment, is more effective as a deterrent. So argues Daniel S. Nagin (pictured), one of the nation’s foremost scholars on deterrence and criminal justice policy, in his chapter on Deterrence in the recently released Academy for Justice four-volume study, Reforming Criminal Justice. Reviewing deterrence scholarship since the 1960s and five leading studies from the past two decades, Dr. Nagin concludes that evidence supporting a deterrent…