Publications & Testimony

A major­i­ty of Americans pre­fer life with­out parole to the death penal­ty, accord­ing to the 2015 American Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. The poll of 2,695 Americans found that 52% pre­ferred life with­out parole, while 47% pre­ferred the death penal­ty. The poll found that respon­dents’ views on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment tracked their views about racial jus­tice and dif­fered great­ly by race. 53% of all Americans agreed with the state­ment, ​“A black per­son is more like­ly than a white…

Caddo Parish, Louisiana, known nation­al­ly for its aggres­sive pur­suit of the death penal­ty, has elect­ed its first black District Attorney. In a November 21 runoff elec­tion con­duct­ed against the back­drop of con­tro­ver­sial remarks about the death penal­ty by the cur­rent DA and a threat­ened civ­il rights law­suit over sys­temic racial dis­crim­i­na­tion by Caddo Parish pros­e­cu­tors in jury selec­tion, for­mer judge James E.

A major­i­ty of Oklahoma vot­ers favor abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty if it is replaced with a sen­tence of life with­out parole plus resti­tu­tion, accord­ing to a new poll com­mis­sioned by News 9/​News on 6. The sur­vey by the non-par­ti­san SoonerPoll​.com found that 52.4% of Oklahomans would sup­port abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty if the state replaced its sys­tem of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment with the alter­na­tive sanc­tion of life with­out parole, plus a require­ment that the…

Georgia is sched­uled to exe­cute Marcus Johnson (pic­tured) on November 19 despite ongo­ing con­cerns about his inno­cence. The exe­cu­tion would be Georgia’s fifth since December 2014 — each rais­ing seri­ous ques­tions about sys­temic prob­lems in Georgia’s appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty. In a com­men­tary for The Marshall Project, Sara Totonchi, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Southern Center for Human Rights, says these cas­es ​“are emblem­at­ic” of death sentences…

Raphael Holiday (pic­tured) is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed in Texas on November 18 after appeals lawyers who were appoint­ed to his case uni­lat­er­al­ly decid­ed not to seek clemen­cy or pur­sue addi­tion­al appeals and then opposed Holiday’s efforts to replace them with lawyers who would. James ​“Wes” Volberding and Seth Kretzer say that they were unable to find new evi­dence on which to base any appeal and that seek­ing clemen­cy from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would give…

In light of the FBI’s acknowl­edge­ment in April that flawed foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny by its expert hair-com­par­i­son ana­lysts had taint­ed at least 268 cas­es, includ­ing 32 death penal­ty cas­es, foren­sic sci­ence is com­ing under increased scruti­ny. A com­men­tary in the Boston Review argues that ​“mount­ing hor­ror sto­ries,” includ­ing instances of crime-lab ​“cor­rup­tion and dys­func­tion, have cre­at­ed a moment of cri­sis in foren­sic sci­ence.” Referencing ​“scores of…

Both exe­cu­tions and new death sen­tences in the United States are on pace for sig­nif­i­cant declines to their low­est lev­els in a gen­er­a­tion, Reuters reports. With 25 exe­cu­tions con­duct­ed so far this year, and only two more sched­uled, the United States could have its low­est num­ber of exe­cu­tions since 1991, sig­nif­i­cant­ly below the peak of 98 exe­cu­tions in 1999. Only 8 states have car­ried out exe­cu­tions in the last two years, down from a high of 20, also in 1999. New death sen­tences, which peaked…

A three-judge pan­el of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit has over­turned a California fed­er­al dis­trict court deci­sion that had declared California’s death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, say­ing that the issue pre­sent­ed ​“a nov­el con­sti­tu­tion­al rule” that was beyond the pow­er of the fed­er­al courts to address in a habeas cor­pus pro­ceed­ing. The appeals court did not address the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of California’s death penal­ty, say­ing that because of tech­ni­cal pro­ce­dur­al rules…

Robert Patton (pic­tured), the direc­tor of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections who over­saw the botched exe­cu­tion of Clayton Lockett, the use of the wrong third drug in the exe­cu­tion of Charles Warner, and the failed exe­cu­tion of Richard Glossip, was also involved in a num­ber of Arizona exe­cu­tions that vio­lat­ed that state’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col, a BuzzFeed investigation…

In an op-ed for USA Today, three retired gen­er­als call for sys­temic review of the sta­tus of vet­er­ans on death row nation­wide and urge deci­sion-mak­ers in cap­i­tal cas­es to seri­ous­ly con­sid­er the men­tal health effects of ser­vice-relat­ed PTSD in deter­min­ing whether to pur­sue or to impose the death penal­ty against mil­i­tary vet­er­ans. Calling DPIC’s new report, ​“Battle Scars: Military Veterans and the Death Penalty,” ​“a wake-up call for an issue that few have focused on,”…