Publications & Testimony

County Commissioners in Pennington County, South Dakota have approved budget increases of a half-million dollars each for the county’s courts and its public defender office for 2018, largely as a result of two high-profile death-penalty prosecutions. Taxpayers will shoulder most of the financial burden resulting from the capital prosecutions of Rapid City defendants Jonathon Klinetobe and Richard Hirth, charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy in the disappearance and death of…

Signaling a strengthening of the Catholic Church’s official opposition to capital punishment, Pope Francis (pictured) marked the 25^th anniversary of the Catholic Church’s promulgation of amendments to its Catechism by declaring the death penalty “contrary to the Gospel” and “an inhumane measure that, regardless of how it is carried out, abases human dignity.” During Vatican ceremonies on October 11 commemorating the 1992 amendments, Pope Francis said that the death penalty is “inadmissible”…

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied review of a petition filed by lawyers on behalf of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri — accused of orchestrating al-Qaida’s October 12, 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole warship off the coast of Yemen — challenging the legality of his death penalty trial before a Guantánamo Bay military commission. But in what has been described as “a stunning setback” to what would have been the first death-penalty trial held before the special military tribunals established in the wake…

An Arkansas trial judge has dismissed all charges against former death-row prisoner, Rickey Dale Newman (pictured), setting him free on October 11 after having spent nearly 17 years in custody following the February 2001 murder of a transient woman in a “hobo park” on the outskirts of Van Buren, Arkansas. Newman became the 160^th person since 1973 to be exonerated after having having been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. Newman, a former Marine with major depression, chronic…

A St. Charles County trial judge has sentenced a Missouri man to death two months after 11 of the 12 jurors in his case had voted to spare his life. On October 6, 2017, Judge Kelly Wayne Parker disregarded the near-unanimous vote of the jury on August 13 and imposed the death penalty upon former Dent County deputy sheriff and state correctional officer Marvin Rice (pictured) for murdering his ex-girlfriend, Annette Durham, during a custody dispute over their son. The judge also sentenced Rice…

In separate statements issued in connection with the 15^th World and European Day against the Death Penalty on October 10, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and European Union U.S. Ambassador David O’Sullivan have called upon all nations to halt scheduled executions and abolish the death penalty. In his first ever statement on capital punishment since becoming Secretary-General on January 1, 2017, Guterres described capital punishment as a “barbaric practice” that, he said, “has…

Though no physical evidence links him to the crime, Texas is set to execute Robert Pruett (pictured) on October 12 for the 1999 stabbing death of a state correctional officer who was at the center of a prison corruption investigation. Results of a DNA test of the murder weapon in 2015 found DNA that matched neither Pruett nor the victim, Officer Daniel Nagle. According to Pruett’s pending clemency petition, Officer Nagle was working to identify corrupt correctional officers who had been…

Two cases in which prosecutors have elected to pursue the death penalty against aging or infirm defendants who will almost certainly never be executed have raised questions about the costs and benefits of capital charges and the arbitrary exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Federal prosecutors in Missouri are seeking the death penalty against 61-year-old Ulysses Jones Jr., a man with terminal renal disease, for the 2006 killing of another prisoner at a federal prison hospital. At the same…

The United States has voted against an historic resolution passed by the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning the criminalization of and use of the death penalty for apostasy, blasphemy, adultery, and consensual same-sex relations and calling on nations in which the death penalty is legal to ensure that it is not imposed “arbitrarily or in a discriminatory manner.” The resolution also called for an end to the discriminatory use of the death penalty “against persons belonging to racial…

Death-row exoneree John Thompson (pictured), described by Innocence Project New Orleans director Emily Maw, as “an amazing force in the world” and a “national legend,” died October 3 at a New Orleans-area hospital after suffering a heart attack. Exonerated in 2003, Thompson had survived a corrupt Orleans Parish prosecution, seven death warrants, and an imminent execution by the state of Louisiana for a murder he did not commit. Following his release, he became a national advocate for criminal…