Publications & Testimony

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The assets of The Apothecary Shoppe, a Tulsa, Oklahoma com­pound­ing phar­ma­cy that pro­vid­ed lethal injec­tion drugs to Missouri, have been auc­tioned off after the com­pa­ny default­ed on its loans, and is being sold after admit­ting to near­ly two thou­sand vio­la­tions of phar­ma­cy reg­u­la­tions, accord­ing to a report by BuzzFeed News. Inspectors from the fed­er­al Food and Drug Administration and the Oklahoma Board of Pharmacy found that…

Bobby James Moore (pic­tured) faces exe­cu­tion in Texas after the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals reject­ed his claim of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty in September 2015, say­ing he failed to meet Texas’​“Briseño fac­tors” (named after the Texas court deci­sion that announced them), an unsci­en­tif­ic sev­en-pronged test which a judge based on the char­ac­ter Lennie Smalls from John Steinbeck’s​“Of Mice and Men.” In doing so, the appeals…

The high cost of cap­i­tal tri­als has put the death penal­ty under scruti­ny in Arizona and Colorado. In Mohave County, Arizona, where two cap­i­tal cas­es have already cost about $239,000 this fis­cal year, County Supervisors have been told that the defense costs for try­ing these two cas­es and pur­su­ing three oth­er cap­i­tal cas­es that are cur­rent­ly on appeal will be $380,000 this fis­cal year, with com­pa­ra­ble costs expected for…

Leonard Edloe (pic­tured), President of the American Pharmacists Association Foundation has urged Virginia law­mak­ers to reject Governor Terry McAuliffe’s pro­pos­al to con­ceal the iden­ti­ty of the state’s exe­cu­tion drug sup­pli­ers, say­ing that the plan​“under­mines every­thing our pro­fes­sion stands for, and is actu­al­ly against the law.” In an op-ed in The Virginian-Pilot on the eve of a veto ses­sion in which the…

On April 13, the Tennessee House of Representatives joined the Tennessee Senate in unan­i­mous­ly approv­ing a bill that would man­date the preser­va­tion of bio­log­i­cal evi­dence in cas­es involv­ing a death sen­tence. The House vot­ed 94 – 0 in favor of the bill after the Senate had passed the bill on April 4 by a 31 – 0 vote. If the gov­er­nor signs the bill, such evi­dence must be held until the defen­dant is exe­cut­ed, dies, or is released from…