Publications & Testimony

Facing court challenges for underfunding the state’s public defender system and pressure from prosecutors angered by the zealous capital representation provided in the state by non-profit capital defense organizations, the Louisiana legislature enacted a law last year redirecting $3 million to local public defenders that had previously been allocated to fund capital defenders. As it has nearly every winter, however, the Louisiana public defender system has run out of money, and the underfunded…

From 1846 to 1870, more than 100 men and women were hanged on the branches of the notorious “Hanging Tree” in Goliad, Texas. Many were Mexicans or Mexican Americans and many were killed by lynching. In a November 25 op-ed in the San Antonio Express-News, historian Alfredo Torres, Jr. writes that these public killings are a reminder that “the noose, [which] has been identified as emblematic of violence and oppression toward African-Americans, [is] often overlooked as a symbol of terror for…

Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Scott Crichton (pictured) will not participate in deciding the appeal of a prisoner sentenced to death in a controversial, high-profile prison killing, after Crichton publicly commented on the case during an appearance on a local radio program. On November 21, Crichton recused himself from the pending appeal of death-row prisoner David Brown, one day after Brown’s lawyers sought his removal from the case because of Crichton’s on-air comments about the “Angola 5”…

A senior United Nations human rights official has criticized the secrecy with which countries carry out the death penalty and called for greater transparency by countries that still employ capital punishment. “There is far too much secrecy,” United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour (pictured) said in an interview released November 21 by the U.N. News Centre, “and it’s quite indicative the fact that although many countries are giving up the practice, those that…

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…