Publications & Testimony

In their new book, Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty, a team of researchers led by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill political science professor Frank Baumgartner uses forty years of empirical data to assess whether the modern death penalty avoids the defects that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare in Furman v. Georigia (1972) that the nation’s application of capital punishment was unconstitutionally arbitrary and capricious. Their conclusion: ​“A reasoned…

Claiming that a lack of lethal-injection drugs was preventing the state from executing Bobby Wayne Stone (pictured, right) on December 1, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster (pictured, left) urged state legislators to act quickly to enact an execution-drug secrecy law. But as McMaster and Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling held a press conference outside barbed-wire fences at the Broad River Capital Punishment Facility in Columbia, South Carolina on November 20, they knew…

Joseph M. Giarratano (pictured), a former Virginia death-row prisoner who came within two days of execution, has been been granted parole after 38 years in jail for a rape and double murder that lawyers and supporters have long said he did not commit. On November 20, twenty-six years after Governor L. Douglas Wilder commuted Giarratano’s death sentence to life, the Virginia State Parole Board voted to grant him parole. Giarratano was convicted and sentenced to death in Norfolk, Virginia in…

The life of Terry Ball (pictured) ​“is worth remembering,” says his appeal lawyer, Elizabeth Hambourger. She says Ball’s life, which ended October 18 when he died of natural causes on North Carolina’s death row, ​“hold[s] keys to understanding the origins of crime and our shared humanity with people labeled the worst of the worst.” His ​“story of childhood trauma and brain damage” is characteristic of the backgrounds of many on death row, Hambourger says, but ​“was barely told at trial.” Ball was…

Nevada has pardoned Fred Steese (pictured), who spent 21 years in prison after Las Vegas prosecutors wrongly sought the death penalty against him while witholding evidence that he was not even in the state at the time the murder occurred. In what news reports described as ​“a clear rebuke to the Las Vegas prosecutors,” the Nevada Board of Pardons Commissioners voted 8 – 1 on November 8 to grant Steese a full pardon. ​“I’m a new man now,” Steese said. ​“It’s lifted a black cloud over me.” The seven…

Having failed to find a suitable vein in which to set an intravenous execution line, Ohio called off the scheduled November 15 execution of gravely ill and physically debilitated death-row prisoner, Alva Campbell (pictured). After execution personnel failed in four attempts to find a vein for the IV line, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Director Gary Mohr stopped the execution and Governor John Kasich granted Campbell a temporary reprieve. Kasich rescheduled Campbell’s…

A Utah county has fired an appeals lawyer who had publicly criticized the county’s underfunding of death-penalty cases. Attorney Samuel Newton (pictured) — hired by Weber County to handle the appeals of condemned prisoners Douglas Lovell and Floyd Maestas, as well as other indigent criminal defendants in the county — had his contract terminated by County Commissioner James Harvey, who said Newton’s comments to the media about underfunding were ​“harmful to the county’s reputation.” Harvey also…

Ohio death-row prisoner Alva Campbell (pictured) is 69, suffers from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, is unable to walk without a walker, relies on a colostomy bag that hangs outside his body, requires four breathing treatments each day, may have lung cancer, and is reportedly allergic to midazolam, the controversial first drug in the state’s lethal-injection process. Prison personnel have been unable to find veins suitable for inserting an intravenous line into either of…

A former Florida death-row doctor says the experience of U.S. military veterans who have been sentenced to death provides a lens through which the public can better understand some of the failures of the state’s death penalty and identify opportunities for meaningful reform of the criminal justice system. In a Veterans Day guest column in Florida Politics, psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Thornton (pictured) writes that ​“18-percent of Florida’s death row is made up of veterans of our military…

As Nebraska announced its intention to use a never-before-tried four-drug execution combination featuring the opiod pain medication fentanyl and the paralytic drug cisatracurium, a Nevada judge issued a stay of execution that put off the nation’s first attempted execution using those drugs. On November 9, the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services provided notice to death-row prisoner Jose Sandoval that it intends to execute him using a combination of the drugs diazepam (Valium)…