Publications & Testimony

On July 19, the new­ly con­sti­tut­ed Pennsylvania Supreme Court unan­i­mous­ly vot­ed to uphold a tri­al court’s order grant­i­ng a new tri­al to Philadelphia death row pris­on­er, Christopher…

Doyle Lee Hamm (pic­tured), an Alabama death row pris­on­er, has asked the United States Supreme Court to con­sid­er his case after Alabama’s state and fed­er­al appel­late courts upheld an order in which the tri­al court reject­ed his appeal by adopt­ing word-for-word an 89-page order writ­ten by the state attor­ney gen­er­al’s office. In a process The Marshall Project’s Andrew Cohen described as ​“a sham,” the court dis­missed Hamm’s appeal one busi­ness day after receiv­ing the…

As sup­port for the death penal­ty has waxed and waned over the years, the views of the major U.S. polit­i­cal par­ties, as reflect­ed in their nation­al con­ven­tion plat­forms, has changed. To track those changes, DPIC has cre­at­ed a new resource pre­sent­ing the Democratic and Republican par­ty plat­form posi­tions on crime and the death penal­ty from 1960 to 2016. With the most recent views of both the Republican and Democratic par­ties expressed in their 2016 plat­forms, the new page now…

On July 21, a divid­ed Arkansas Supreme Court vot­ed 4 – 3 to deny a request by state death row pris­on­ers to recon­sid­er its recent deci­sion uphold­ing Arkansas’ lethal injec­tion pro­to­col and secre­cy law, but in anoth­er 4 – 3 vote, the court issued an order stay­ing the man­date, delay­ing the deci­sion from tak­ing effect until the U.S. Supreme Court has an oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­sid­er an appeal. The stay order pre­vents the state from set­ting new exe­cu­tion dates before the…

Weighing in on California’s com­pet­ing death penal­ty bal­lot ini­tia­tives, the San Jose Mercury News edi­to­r­i­al board urged vot­ers to sup­port repeal of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and reject a pro­pos­al to speed up exe­cu­tions. The edi­to­r­i­al called California’s death penal­ty sys­tem, ​“a fail­ure on every lev­el,” not­ing that the state has spent $4 bil­lion to car­ry out just 13 exe­cu­tions and the $150 mil­lion annu­al sav­ings the inde­pen­dent Legislative Analysts Office says death penalty…

A recent arti­cle in The Economist exam­ines the state of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Louisiana and the state’s strik­ing decline in the use of the death penal­ty. In 1987, its peak year for exe­cu­tions, Louisiana exe­cut­ed eight pris­on­ers. Since 2002, the state has had just one exe­cu­tion. This decline ​“is far more pre­cip­i­tous than in neigh­bor­ing states like Mississippi and Alabama,” which the arti­cle says have each exe­cut­ed more than 10 peo­ple since…

James Willie ​“Bo” Cochran, who spent 19 years on Alabama​’s death row for a killing he did not com­mit, has died at age 73. His lawyer, Richard Jaffe, said that Mr. Cochran and his case ​“are rea­sons why the death penal­ty does not work. He did not kill any­one, was wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and found inno­cent because he had lawyers that took up his cause.” Mr. Cochran, who is black, was found guilty and sen­tenced to death for the mur­der of a white gro­cery store clerk.

The exe­cu­tion of John Conner on July 15 end­ed a two-month peri­od with­out exe­cu­tions in the United States, the longest such peri­od in the coun­try since 2007 – 2008. A range of state-spe­cif­ic issues have con­tributed to this stop­page, includ­ing ques­tions about the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of state death penal­ty prac­tices, prob­lems relat­ing to lethal injec­tion drugs and state exe­cu­tion pro­to­cols, and the fall­out from botched…

A court hear­ing is under way in the cap­i­tal tri­al of Donald Fell in a Vermont fed­er­al dis­trict court chal­leng­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the fed­er­al death penal­ty. This week, death penal­ty experts tes­ti­fied for the defense about sys­temic prob­lems Fell’s lawyers say may ren­der the fed­er­al death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Fell was sen­tenced to death in 2006, but was grant­ed a new tri­al because of juror mis­con­duct. The hear­ing began on July 11 and is scheduled…

Georgia is con­tin­u­ing with prepa­ra­tions to exe­cute John Conner (pic­tured) on July 14 after the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles denied his clemen­cy peti­tion and the Georgia Supreme Court denied him a stay of…