Publications & Testimony

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…

“Americans’ support for the death penalty has dipped to a level not seen in 45 years,” according to the results of the 2017 Gallup poll released on October 26. Gallup reported that, in a nationwide survey of 1,028 adults polled October 5 – 11, 2017, 55% of Americans said they are “in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder,” down from a reported 60% in October 2016. The five percentage-point decline represented an 8% decrease in the level of support for the death penalty…

A federal judge has voided a contract that had provided Orlando-based attorney Patrick Megaro hundreds of thousands of dollars of compensation at the expense of Henry McCollum (pictured left, with his brother Leon Brown), an intellectually disabled former death-row prisoner who was exonerated in 2014 after DNA testing by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission showed that he had not committed the brutal rape and murder of a young girl for which he had been wrongly convicted and…

Two recent appellate decisions by the Texas courts have thrust into the national spotlight the continuing controversy over the use of false or flawed forensic testimony to secure convictions in death penalty cases. On October 18, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered a Travis County (Austin) trial court to conduct a hearing to consider evidence that the Austin police crime lab had botched its analysis of DNA evidence and presented scientifically false DNA testimony leading to the…

The long-term decline in executions in the United States will continue in 2017, according to an analysis of execution data by the Death Penalty Information Center. Although the number of executions in the United States in 2017 will surpass the 20 executions carried out last year — which had been a 25-year low — the data reflects that long-term, mid-term, and short-term execution trends in the United States will continue to decline. DPIC’s analysis shows that, even if all the executions currently…

Alabama executed Torrey McNabb (pictured) on October 19, amid questions of state interference in the judicial process, resulting in another apparent failure by the drug midazolam to render a prisoner insensate during an execution. Alabama prison officials defended the execution — which took 35 minutes — as conforming with state protocol, most of which has been withheld from the public. Montgomery Advertiser execution witness Brian Lyman reported that at 9:17 p.m., twenty minutes into the execution…

The United States Supreme Court has ordered the Florida Supreme Court to reconsider a decision that had denied a death-row prisoner’s claim that he was ineligible for the death penalty because he has Intellectual Disability. On October 16, the Court reversed and remanded the case of Tavares Wright (pictured, left), directing the Florida courts to reconsider his intellectual-disability claim in light of the constitutional standard the Court set forth in its March 2017 decision in Moore v. Texas.