Publications & Testimony

In a racially charged case raising questions of prosecutorial overcharging, inadequate representation, and questionable jury practices, Kharon Davis (pictured), an African-American man charged with capital murder in Dothan, Alabama, has been imprisoned for 10 years without trial. Davis — who has consistently maintained his innocence and whose prior offense was driving without a license — was 22 years old when he and two others were arrested for the shooting death of a man from whom they were…

The failed capital prosecution of Scott Dekraai for the worst mass murder in Orange County, California history has cost taxpayers more than $2.5 million — more than double the average cost of a California death-penalty case — and the pricetag for continuing investigations into official misconduct by the county district attorney’s and sheriff’s offices continues to rise. Unlike most capital cases, the costs were not primarily for the trial itself, but the product of a multi-year investigation and…

Two professors of sociology and criminology who reviewed more than 1500 cases in which convicted prisoners were later exonerated have found a direct relationship between the seriousness of the crime and miscarriages of justice: “the ‘worst of the worst crimes,’” they say, “produce the ‘worst of the worst evidence.’” In their research — reported in the law review article, The Worst of the Worst: Heinous Crimes and Erroneous Evidence — University of Denver professors Scott Phillips (pictured) and…

Texas prosecutors have dropped their pursuit of the death penalty against a severely mentally ill capital defendant charged with what they characterized as the “ambush murder” of a Harris County sheriff’s deputy. Special prosecutor Brett Ligon (pictured, left) — the Montgomery County District Attorney who was handling the prosecution because Houston prosecutors had a conflict that prevented them from participating in the case — announced on September 13 that he had agreed to a plea deal in which…

A coalition of 23 human rights groups, including Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, and Reprieve, has urged the United States government to issue sanctions against foreign government officials who they say have used the death penalty to repress political dissent by torturing peaceful protesters into confessing to capital offenses they did not commit. In a September 12, 2017 letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the non-governmental organizations…

Ohio executed Gary Otte on September 13 after both the United States Supreme Court and the Ohio Supreme Court declined to review his challenge to the constitutionality of applying the death penalty against people who were younger than age 21 at the time of the offense. Otte’s lawyer, supervisory assistant federal public defender Carol Wright, said Otte exhibited “abnormal” chest and stomach movements when he was injected with the execution drug, midazolam, showing signs of struggling for air…

A Death Penalty Information Center analysis of U.S. murder data from 1987 through 2015 has found no evidence that the death penalty deters murder or protects police. Instead, the evidence shows that murder rates, including murders of police officers, are consistently higher in death-penalty states than in states that have abolished the death penalty. And far from experiencing increases in murder rates or open season on law enforcement, the data show that states that have abolished the death…

Sixteen years later, the alleged perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 hijackings and attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and the downing of Flight 93, have yet to be tried, and issues relating to the use of evidence obtained by torture, the appropriateness and legality of trials by military commission, and where and how they should be tried raise questions as to whether and when a trial may take place. The five men charged in the attack — alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed…

Death rows are shrinking nationwide, and the experience in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania helps explain why. Virginia’s death row has fallen from a reported high of 58 in 1995 to four in September 2017, the lowest it has been since 1979. Pennsylvania’s death row of 160 prisoners is its smallest in nearly 25 years — down from 175 last December and from a reported 247 in April 2002. These declines mirror the national trends, as the number of prisoners removed from death row continues to…

For the second time in as many years, Georgia is preparing to execute an intellectually disabled African-American man, despite evidence that the death verdict in his case may have been tainted by a white juror’s profound racial bias. Lawyers for Keith Leroy Tharpe (pictured), whose IQ has been measured in the 60s and whom Georgia has scheduled to be executed on September 26, say the courts should reconsider his case in light of the racial slurs a white juror made about him. They say new U.S.