Publications & Testimony

South Carolina prosecutors announced on July 25 that they would not appeal a trial court ruling, granting a new, non-capital trial to former death-row prisoner Kenneth Simmons (pictured). Finding that prosecutors had presented false DNA testimony that ​“severely deprived” Simmons of his due process rights, a Dorchester County Circuit Judge overturned Simmons’s conviction. Simmons had been sentenced to death for the 1996 sexual assault and murder of an elderly woman based on false and misleading…

The American Bar Association has released a new publication, The State of Criminal Justice 2017, an annual report examining major issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. In a chapter devoted to capital punishment, Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, describes significant death penalty cases and developments over the past year. Tabak reports on historic declines in new death…

Cert. granted: January 13, 2017 Argument: April 24, 2017 (Read the Transcript) Decided: June 26, 2017 (Opinion) On June 26, 2017, the Supreme Court (5 – 4) denied relief to Texas death-row prisoner, Erick Daniel Davila, declining to extend the equitable rule announced in Martinez v. Ryan (2011) to claims of ineffective assistance of appellate counsel. The question presented, as stated in the merits brief filed by Petitioner is as follows: Whether the rule established in Martinez v. Ryan and…

A Nebraska trial judge has permitted Patrick Schroeder (pictured) — whose lawyers from the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy had challenged the constitutionality of the state’s death penalty — to fire his lawyers, withdraw the challenge, and plead guilty to first-degree murder. The court deferred until August 22 whether to also permit Schroeder to waive his right to have a jury decide whether aggravating circumstance exist that could make him eligible for the death penalty. The court…

A Jackson County, Mississippi judge has sentenced Scotty Lakeith Street (pictured), a capital defendant suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia, to life without possibility of parole after his capital sentencing jury did not reach a unanimous sentencing verdict. The sentence is another in a series of notable cases in which jurors presented with evidence of mental illness have spared severely mentally ill defendants the death penalty. Street was convicted murdering a retired special…

Newly available evidence shows that Oklahoma’s death penalty unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of race, according to petitions filed by lawyers seeking to overturn the death sentences imposed on two African-American defendants, Julius Darius Jones (pictured) and Tremane Wood. Jones — a high school athlete and honor student who did not fit the description of the shooter and who has continuously maintained his innocence — and Wood were convicted and sentenced to death for killing white…

After a hiatus of 3½ years, Ohio resumed executions on July 26, putting Ronald Phillips (pictured) to death with a three-drug combination of the sedative midazolam, the paralytic drug rocuronium bromide, and the heart-stopping drug potassium chloride. Phillips was pronounced dead at 10:43 a.m. It was the state’s first execution since the botched execution of Dennis McGuire on January 16, 2014, and the 15^th in the U.S. in 2017. Phillips’ execution is the first of four executions that Ohio has…

Arizona will soon end its policy of automatically and indefinitely incarcerating death-row prisoners in solitary confinement, joining a growing number of states to ease draconian conditions on their state death rows. Arizona’s action is part of a settlement of a federal lawsuit filed against the Department of Corrections (DOC) by death-row prisoner Scott Nordstrom (pictured), which argued that the state’s death-row conditions were unconstitutionally harsh. Nordstrom’s attorney, Sam Kooistra…

Bucks County, Pennsylvania prosecutors have agreed not to seek the death penalty for defendant Cosmo DiNardo (pictured), in exchange for his confession to a quadruple murder, information implicating an accomplice, and information permitting authorities to recover the body of one of the victims. The deal was made quickly — just one week after the beginning of the investigation into the disappearance of the four young men and the discovery of three of the bodies — to end the uncertainty faced by the…

Lawyers for Texas death-row prisoner TaiChin Preyor (pictured), whose prior federal habeas lawyer relied on research from Wikipedia and the guidance of a disbarred lawyer, have filed motions in state and federal courts seeking to stay his scheduled July 27 execution. His pleadings allege that he was represented by a succession of inept counsel, including a penalty-phase lawyer who failed to interview key witness or seek critical mental health testing; a post-conviction lawyer who met him for…