Publications & Testimony

In a court fil­ing in the fed­er­al law­suit chal­leng­ing its exe­cu­tion pro­ce­dures, Arizona offi­cials have declared that the state does not have the drugs nec­es­sary to car­ry out an exe­cu­tion, and is cur­rent­ly unable to obtain them. The fil­ing states, ​“the Department’s lack of the drugs and its cur­rent inabil­i­ty to obtain these drugs means that the Department is present­ly inca­pable of car­ry­ing out an…

A divid­ed Arkansas Supreme Court vot­ed 4 – 3 on June 23 to uphold the state’s lethal injec­tion pro­to­col and secre­cy pol­i­cy. The deci­sion poten­tial­ly opens the path for the state to move for­ward with eight exe­cu­tions that had been stayed pend­ing the out­come of this lit­i­ga­tion. However, it is unclear whether exe­cu­tions will resume because Arkansas’ sup­ply of lethal injec­tion drugs expires on June 30, and the sup­pli­er from which it obtained those drugs has indi­cat­ed that it will…

The pace of exe­cu­tions in Georgia is out­strip­ping the pace of death sen­tences. While the num­ber of exe­cu­tions this year (5) is equal to the sin­gle-year record set in 1987 and 2015, no one has been sen­tenced to death in more than two years, and pros­e­cu­tors are rarely seek­ing death sen­tences. The last death sen­tence in Georgia came down in March 2014. The num­ber of notices of intent to seek the death penal­ty has fall­en by more than 60% in the last decade, from 34 in 2006 to 13…

Pennsylvania’s tax­pay­ers have paid an esti­mat­ed $272 mil­lion per exe­cu­tion since the Commonwealth rein­stat­ed its death penal­ty in 1978, accord­ing to an inves­ti­ga­tion by The Reading Eagle. Using data from a 2008 study by the Urban Institute, the Eagle cal­cu­lat­ed that cost of sen­tenc­ing 408 peo­ple to death was an esti­mat­ed $816 mil­lion high­er than the cost of life with­out parole. The esti­mate is con­ser­v­a­tive, the paper says, because it assumes only one cap­i­tal tri­al for each…

The U.S. Supreme Court grant­ed writs of cer­tio­rari in three jury dis­crim­i­na­tion cas­es on June 20, vacat­ing each of them and direct­ing state courts in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana to recon­sid­er the issue in light of the Court’s recent deci­sion in Foster v. Chatman. Two of the peti­tion­ers, Curtis Flowers of Mississippi and Christopher Floyd of Alabama, are cur­rent­ly on death row. The third, Jabari Williams, was con­vict­ed in Louisiana of sec­ond-degree murder.

Sharon Risher, whose moth­er, Ethel Lance (pic­tured), and cousins, Susie Jackson and Tywanza Sanders, were killed in the racial­ly-moti­vat­ed shoot­ing at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church one year ago, says she has not for­giv­en Dylann Roof, the accused per­pe­tra­tor, but does not think he should be sen­tenced to death. In an arti­cle for Vox, Risher shared her expe­ri­ences since the shoot­ing, dis­cussing her emo­tion­al reac­tions to her moth­er’s death and her views on gun con­trol, the removal of…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has grant­ed a stay of exe­cu­tion to Robert Roberson (pic­tured), who had been sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on June 21 for the 2003 death of his two-and-a-half-year-old daugh­ter, Nikki Curtis. The court’s June 16 stay order halts Roberson’s exe­cu­tion under a recent Texas law per­mit­ting court chal­lenges based on new sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence of inno­cence. Prosecution experts had tes­ti­fied at Roberson’s tri­al that his daugh­ter died of…

The Delaware Supreme Court heard oral argu­ment on June 15 in Rauf v. State, a case chal­leng­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the state’s death sen­tenc­ing statute on the grounds that it vio­lates the Sixth Amendment right to tri­al by jury. The chal­lenge arose in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court deci­sion in January 2016 in Hurst v. Florida, which struck down Florida’s sen­tenc­ing scheme, say­ing that “[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a…