Publications & Testimony

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)…

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…