Publications & Testimony

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…

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…