Publications & Testimony

This week, two decades-old cas­es involv­ing men with inno­cence claims reached final res­o­lu­tion: Louisiana inmate Gary Tyler (pic­tured) was released after 42 years in prison and Paul Gatling was exon­er­at­ed in New York more than 50 years after his wrong­ful con­vic­tion. Both men had once faced the death penal­ty. Tyler was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death for the fatal shoot­ing of a 13-year-old white boy in 1974 dur­ing a riot over…

The U.S. Supreme Court has vacat­ed a deci­sion of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals uphold­ing a death sen­tence imposed on Alabama death row pris­on­er Bart Johnson, and has direct­ed the state court to recon­sid­er the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of Alabama’s death-sen­tenc­ing pro­ce­dures. Johnson, rep­re­sent­ed by lawyers from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), had chal­lenged the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of his death sen­tence, which was imposed by a tri­al judge after a…

A Florida tri­al judge in St. Lucie County sen­tenced Eriese Tisdale to death on April 29 for the killing of a sher­if­f’s sergeant, rely­ing on sen­tenc­ing pro­ce­dures from the ver­sion of Florida’s death penal­ty law that the U.S. Supreme Court declared uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in Hurst v. Florida. The jury in Tisdale’s case con­sid­ered the evi­dence in the penal­ty phase of Tisdale’s tri­al under the old Florida law, vot­ing 9 – 3 to rec­om­mend a death sen­tence without…

On April 24, just days before a Texas fed­er­al appeals courts was to hear his case, Max Soffar — who spent 35 years on death row con­stant­ly main­tain­ing his inno­cence — died of liv­er can­cer at the age of 60. No phys­i­cal evi­dence linked Soffar to the crime for which he was sen­tenced to death, and Soffar — a sev­enth-grade drop-out with brain dam­age from fetal alco­hol syn­drome — said that he con­fessed to police only after hours of coercive…

More than 80% of the 241 death sen­tences imposed in Louisiana since 1976 have been reversed on appeal, and one death row pris­on­er has been exon­er­at­ed for every three exe­cu­tions in the state, accord­ing to a new study by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Professor Frank Baumgartner and sta­tis­ti­cian Tim Lyman. The study, to be pub­lished in the Southern University Law Center’s Journal of Race, Gender and Poverty, also reveals dra­mat­ic racial dis­par­i­ties in both the trial…

Arizona’s last exe­cu­tion, the botched lethal injec­tion of Joseph Wood in July 2014, sparked con­tro­ver­sy and legal chal­lenges to the state’s lethal injec­tion pro­ce­dure, and came at a time when Arizona was strug­gling not only with the logis­tics of car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions, but also broad­er issues of fair­ness and costs. In a sweep­ing piece for The Arizona Republic, Michael Kiefer, who wit­nessed Wood’s exe­cu­tion, describes the his­tor­i­cal and legal…

A law review arti­cle by Brooks Emanuel (pic­tured), a Law Fellow at the Equal Justice Initiative, argues that North Carolina’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment statute vio­lates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution because it lacks a mean­ing­ful appel­late mech­a­nism to pre­vent the arbi­trary and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty. Citing exten­sive his­tor­i­cal evi­dence, Emanuel argues that ​“racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in North Carolina death sen­tences was…

The assets of The Apothecary Shoppe, a Tulsa, Oklahoma com­pound­ing phar­ma­cy that pro­vid­ed lethal injec­tion drugs to Missouri, have been auc­tioned off after the com­pa­ny default­ed on its loans, and is being sold after admit­ting to near­ly two thou­sand vio­la­tions of phar­ma­cy reg­u­la­tions, accord­ing to a report by BuzzFeed News. Inspectors from the fed­er­al Food and Drug Administration and the Oklahoma Board of Pharmacy found that the drug com­pounder had…

Bobby James Moore (pic­tured) faces exe­cu­tion in Texas after the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals reject­ed his claim of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty in September 2015, say­ing he failed to meet Texas’ ​“Briseño fac­tors” (named after the Texas court deci­sion that announced them), an unsci­en­tif­ic sev­en-pronged test which a judge based on the char­ac­ter Lennie Smalls from John Steinbeck’s ​“Of Mice and Men.” In doing so, the appeals court reversed a…

The high cost of cap­i­tal tri­als has put the death penal­ty under scruti­ny in Arizona and Colorado. In Mohave County, Arizona, where two cap­i­tal cas­es have already cost about $239,000 this fis­cal year, County Supervisors have been told that the defense costs for try­ing these two cas­es and pur­su­ing three oth­er cap­i­tal cas­es that are cur­rent­ly on appeal will be $380,000 this fis­cal year, with com­pa­ra­ble costs expect­ed for next fis­cal year. County…