Publications & Testimony

UPDATE: Terrell was denied clemen­cy on Dec. 7 and exe­cut­ed just before 1:00 a.m. on December 9. The Atlanta Journal Constitution report­ed that it took a nurse an hour to find a vein for the lethal injec­tion IV and that, as the exe­cu­tion drug was being admin­is­tered, Terrell mouthed the words: ​“Didn’t do it.” EARLIER: After three tri­als, Georgia is set to exe­cute Brian Keith Terrell (pic­tured) on December 8, unless the Georgia Board of…

The coun­ties in the United States that have the high­est per capi­ta rate of killings by police offi­cers also rank among the high­est in the coun­try in the num­ber of peo­ple sen­tenced to death. In his crim­i­nal jus­tice blog, ​“The Watch,” for the Washington Post, Radley Balko details the ​“remark­able cor­re­la­tion” between killings by police and death sentences…

Terry Williams was bare­ly 18 when he killed Amos Norwood, a man who had been sex­u­al­ly abus­ing him since Williams was…

Donnis Musgrove (pic­tured), an Alabama death row pris­on­er with a sub­stan­tial claim of inno­cence, died of lung can­cer on Alabama’s death row on November 25, while his case was pend­ing before a fed­er­al judge. Musgrove’s attor­neys had asked U.S. District Judge David Proctor to rule quick­ly because of Musgrove’s med­ical con­di­tion. Musgrove and his co-defen­dant, David Rogers, who pre­vi­ous­ly died on Alabama’s death row, were sen­tenced to death in 1988. Rogers’ lawyer, Tommy Nail -…

Capital mur­der indict­ments have plum­met­ed and life sen­tences risen sharply in Ohio over the past five years, accord­ing to a report by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The news­pa­per’s exam­i­na­tion of Ohio prison and oth­er pub­lic records revealed that cap­i­tal indict­ments in the state have dropped by 77% since 2010, mir­ror­ing nation­al trends. Prosecutors are far more like­ly to seek a sen­tence of life with­out parole in cas­es in which they once would have pur­sued the death penal­ty. The paper…

Lawyers for cap­i­tal defen­dants and death row inmates across the coun­try have begun to respond to what lawyers in one fed­er­al case described as the ​“clar­i­on call for recon­sid­er­a­tion of the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the death penal­ty” issued by Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in their dis­sent­ing opin­ion in June in Glossip v.

Lawyers for Texas death row pris­on­er Robert L. Roberson III have filed a peti­tion ask­ing the United States Supreme Court to review whether Seth Kretzer and James W. Volberding — the same appoint­ed lawyers who were accused of aban­don­ing Raphael Holiday, whom Texas exe­cut­ed in November — had a con­flict of inter­est that inter­fered with Mr. Roberson’s right to an inde­pen­dent legal advo­cate in his fed­er­al habeas cor­pus pro­ceed­ings chal­leng­ing his…

On Sunday, November 29, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a seg­ment on Arizona​’s 2‑hour botched exe­cu­tion of Joseph Wood (pic­tured). As described by 60 Minutes, Wood’s ​“exe­cu­tion with a new cock­tail of drugs was sup­posed to take 10 min­utes. It took almost two hours, the longest exe­cu­tion in U.S. his­to­ry.” On July 23, 2014, Arizona gave Wood 15 con­sec­u­tive dos­es of mida­zo­lam and hydro­mor­phone, the same drug com­bi­na­tion that had been…

Death row exoneree Anthony Graves (pic­tured, right, with Sen. Richard Durbin after tes­ti­fy­ing before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights in 2012) has expe­ri­enced what he calls the ​“injus­tice of the jus­tice sys­tem” and is work­ing to make the sys­tem bet­ter. Graves was exon­er­at­ed from death row in Texas in 2010, 16 years after being wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed in a mul­ti­ple mur­der case. Using some of the $1.5…