Publications & Testimony

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.

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…