Publications & Testimony

Just 27% of Houston-area res­i­dents pre­fer the death penal­ty over life sen­tences for those con­vict­ed of first-degree mur­der, accord­ing to a new report by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. Harris County, the largest coun­ty in the Houston met­ro­pol­i­tan area, ​“earned its rep­u­ta­tion as the ​‘death penal­ty cap­i­tal of America,’” the report says, ​“hav­ing exe­cut­ed more peo­ple since 1976 … than any oth­er coun­ty in the nation.” At its peak, Harris County…

Thirty years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 deci­sion in Batson v. Kentucky pro­hib­it­ed the inten­tion­al exclu­sion of prospec­tive jurors on the basis of race, dis­crim­i­na­tion in cap­i­tal jury selec­tion con­tin­ues to plague the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty across the…

On May 5, the Florida Supreme Court will hear oral argu­ment in the case of Timothy Hurst, whose death sen­tence was over­turned in the U.S. Supreme Court’s deci­sion Hurst v. Florida. The state court must deter­mine whether the high court’s rul­ing, which struck down Florida’s sen­tenc­ing scheme, enti­tles Hurst to a new sen­tenc­ing hear­ing, reduces his sen­tence to life with­out parole, or requires some oth­er out­come. The case may also decide…

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…