Publications & Testimony

Deterrence is one of the most com­mon­ly expressed rea­sons for use of the death penal­ty, both as a con­sti­tu­tion­al jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and as a pub­lic pol­i­cy ratio­nale. Elected offi­cials have recent­ly called the death penal­ty an​“essen­tial” deter­rent to crime. The argu­ment goes that if some­one knows they could face the death penal­ty, they will not com­mit the crime. Following that rea­son­ing would sug­gest that states with the death penal­ty are safer than states without…

On June 26, 2025, more than 200 Californians and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of civ­il rights orga­ni­za­tions gath­ered at the state Capitol to urge California Governor Gavin Newsom to com­mute all death sen­tences. Speakers at the gath­er­ing called California’s death penal­ty statute uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and not­ed per­sis­tent evi­dence of racial bias, his­toric ties to lynch­ing, inef­fec­tive pro­tec­tion of inno­cent lives, and high costs. California, home to the nation’s largest death row, is…

The Arizona leg­is­la­ture is con­sid­er­ing new leg­is­la­tion that will com­pen­sate exon­er­at­ed indi­vid­u­als. HB 2813 was intro­duced in February by Republican Representative Khyl Powell and eas­i­ly passed in the Arizona House of Representatives in a 59 – 1 vote two weeks lat­er. The bill is now await­ing con­sid­er­a­tion by the Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee, and accord­ing to report­ing by the Daily Independent it is being​“con­sid­ered for inclu­sion as part of a final…

The death penal­ty in the Unites States is expe­ri­enc­ing what schol­ars call a​“slow death.” In their forth­com­ing book,​“The Slow Death of the Death Penalty: Toward a Postmortem,” edi­tors Todd C. Peppers, Jamie Almallen, and Mary Welek Atwell bring togeth­er death penal­ty experts to exam­ine this shift in the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. New death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions still occur in a lim­it­ed num­ber of states; but Peppers et al reflect on the broad­er trends away from use…

On June 16, 2025, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a motion in the Anderson County District Court request­ing a new exe­cu­tion date for Robert Roberson, despite the fact that a motion from defense coun­sel with new evi­dence in sup­port of Mr. Roberson’s actu­al inno­cence remains pend­ing. As the Dallas Morning Editorial Board notes, it is​“unusu­al” that “[AG] Paxton’s office is involved” in request­ing the exe­cu­tion date. AG Paxton has active­ly sought Mr. Roberson’s…

Nearly half of all known exe­cu­tions to date in 2025 in Iran (244) and Saudi Arabia (50) have been for drug-relat­ed crimes, track­ing close­ly pat­terns doc­u­ment­ed by Harm Reduction International (HRI) for 2024. According to HRI’s new report, The Death Penalty for Drug Offenses: Global Overview 2024, the use of the death penal­ty for drug-relat­ed crimes reached​“cri­sis lev­els” in 2024. At least 615 peo­ple were known to be exe­cut­ed on drug-relat­ed charges world­wide, 607 of…

A joint inves­ti­ga­tion by ProPublica and ABC15 Arizona reviewed more than 300 cas­es over the past two decades where Maricopa County pros­e­cu­tors sought the death penal­ty and found that only 13% result­ed in death sen­tences. In most cas­es a jury nev­er got close to con­sid­er­ing whether to sen­tence some­one to death: in more than three-quar­ters of cas­es, defen­dants pled guilty in exchange for less­er pun­ish­ment, or pros­e­cu­tors reversed course before tri­al. In only 41 of…