Publications & Testimony

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — the nation’s third largest death-penalty county — has elected as its new district attorney a candidate who ran on a platform of ending mass incarceration and eschewing use of the death penalty. Democrat Lawrence Krasner (pictured), a longtime civil rights lawyer and opponent of the death penalty, who once joked that he’d ​“spent a career becoming completely unelectable,” received 75% of the vote in easily defeating his Republican opponent Beth Grossman. As a civil rights…

Two recent high court rulings have raised questions of whether death-row prisoners are sufficiently mentally impaired to be deemed incompetent to be executed and who gets to make that determination. On November 7, the Arkansas Supreme Court issued an order staying the execution of death-row prisoner Jack Greene (pictured, left) to resolve whether that state’s mechanism to determine competency — giving the director of the Arkansas Department of Correction (“ADC”) sole discretion to make the…

Former high-ranking law enforcement officials from Arizona and Kansas have called on their states to end the death penalty. In separate op-ed stories one week apart, former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard (pictured, left) and former Kansas Secretary of Corrections Roger Werholtz (pictured, right) conclude that the capital punishment schemes in their states have failed and should be abandoned. In a November 5 op-ed in the Arizona Daily Star headlined Arizona’s 40-year experiment with the…

Texas plans to execute a Mexican national on November 8, despite claims that he is innocent and that Texas violated U.S. international treaty obligations by denying him access to legal assistance from his government. Senior Mexican diplomats called the death sentence imposed on Ruben Ramírez Cárdenas (pictured) ​“illegal” and a violation of due process. In a news conference in Mexico City on November 6, Carlos Sada, Mexico’s deputy foreign minister for North America, said ​“From the start, there…

The Arkansas Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s Freedom of Information Act requires the Arkansas Department of Correction (ADC) to release copies of the pharmaceutical drug and packaging labels for the supply of the drug midazolam that it intends to use in upcoming executions, but that the secrecy provisions of the state’s Methods of Execution Act permit the department to redact the batch and lot numbers that appear on the labels. The high court’s November 2 decision reverses part of an…

In a Houston death-penalty case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in a decision overturning the Texas courts’ standard for determining Intellectual Disability in capital cases, prosecutors have conceded that Bobby James Moore (pictured) is himself intellectually disabled and ineligible for the death penalty. In a brief filed November 1 in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Harris County prosecutors agreed with Moore’s lawyers and mental health advocacy organizations that Moore…

Finding that an Alabama prosecutor with a history of misconduct had ​“intentionally” made improper comments in the capital trial of Artez Hammonds (pictured) ​“in flagrant violation” of a pre-trial order warning him not to do so, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit nevertheless denied Hammonds’s appeal and permitted his conviction and death sentence to stand. While the court noted that the prosecutor, District Attorney Douglas Valeska ​“had been reprimanded in prior cases for…

Appeals courts in Mississippi and Pennsylvania have granted new trials to two men who have long asserted their innocence of charges that had sent them to their states’ death rows. On October 26, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a new trial for Sherwood Brown (pictured, left), after reviewing exculpatory results of DNA testing and evidence that Brown’s triple-murder conviction and death sentence had been obtained as a result of misleading forensic testimony. On October 31, the Pennsylvania…

A new study of more than two decades of murders in Oklahoma has found that defendants charged with killing a white woman have odds of being sentenced to death in the Sooner State that are nearly ten times greater than if they had been charged with killing a man who is a racial minority. The study, published in the Fall 2017 issue of the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, examined more than 4,600 Oklahoma homicide cases over a 23-year…

“The death penalty is dying in the United States, and Republicans are contributing to its demise,” concludes a new report, The Right Way, released on October 25 by the advocacy group Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. The report traces ​“the dramatic rise in Republican sponsorship of bills to end the death penalty” and the trends that it says helped contribute to this rise. Based on this data, the report says “[m]ore Republican lawmakers are recognizing that the death penalty is a…