Publications & Testimony

A Texas court has found that a severe­ly men­tal­ly ill death-row inmate, Marcus Druery (pic­tured), is incom­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed. Druery’s attor­neys pre­sent­ed more than 150 pages of reports from men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als argu­ing that, as a result of major men­tal ill­ness, Druery does not under­stand why he is being pun­ished, mak­ing it uncon­sti­tu­tion­al to exe­cute him. His ​“para­noid and grandiose delusions…deprive him of a rational…

Amnesty International report­ed that world­wide exe­cu­tions spiked by 54% to at least 1,634 — a 25-year high — in 2015, even as the num­ber of coun­tries abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty reached record…

After Debbie Carter was raped and mur­dered in Ada, Oklahoma in 1982, police and pros­e­cu­tors told her cousin, Christy Sheppard (pic­tured) that Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz were guilty of the crime. In 1988, Williamson was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death; Fritz received a life sen­tence. Eleven years lat­er, the pair were exon­er­at­ed when DNA test­ing exclud­ed them as per­pe­tra­tors and point­ed to anoth­er man who had once been a sus­pect. Sheppard, now a criminal…

Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld new­ly enact­ed death penal­ty statutes in Gregg v. Georgia and two oth­er cas­es, Professor Evan J. Mandery of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice says arbi­trari­ness con­tin­ues to plague the admin­is­tra­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment across the United States. In a piece for The Marshall Project, Professor Mandery revis­its the death penal­ty in light of the con­sti­tu­tion­al defects that led the Supreme Court to over­turn existing capital…

According to a report by Raw Story, two recent exe­cu­tions may have irrepara­bly impaired efforts by sev­er­al pris­on­ers to prove their inno­cence, pre­vent­ing them from pre­sent­ing tes­ti­mo­ny from poten­tial alter­nate sus­pects. Rodney Lincoln was con­vict­ed of the 1982 mur­der of JoAnn Tate and assault­ing her two young daugh­ters and was sen­tenced to two life terms. The pri­ma­ry evi­dence against him was the tes­ti­mo­ny of Melissa Davis, Tate’s eight-year-old daugh­ter who sur­vived the attack. Years…

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles announced on March 31 that it had denied clemen­cy to Joshua Bishop. Bishop had asked that his death sen­tence be reduced to life with­out parole because his co-defen­dant, who was near­ly twice Bishop’s age at the time of the crime, and had a his­to­ry of vio­lent crime while Bishop did not, was giv­en a plea deal result­ing in a life sen­tence. Bishop is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed in Georgia on March 31. Seven of the twelve…

A group of promi­nent Oklahomans have announced the cre­ation of a 12-mem­ber Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission to con­duct a com­pre­hen­sive review of the state’s death penal­ty. The all-vol­un­teer com­mis­sion will be led by three co-chairs, for­mer Governor Brad Henry (pic­tured), retired Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Reta Strubhar, and for­mer U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy…

In one week, courts in unre­lat­ed cas­es have grant­ed relief to two Alabama death row inmates because of prosecutorial…

In an inter­view with The Marshall Project, Texas death penal­ty juror Sven Berger says he would not have vot­ed to sen­tence cap­i­tal defen­dant Paul Storey to death in 2008 had he known about Storey’s ​“bor­der­line intel­lec­tu­al func­tion­ing,” his­to­ry of depres­sion, and oth­er evi­dence that Storey’s lawyer failed to present at tri­al. Berger and 11 oth­er Texas jurors unan­i­mous­ly vot­ed to sen­tence Storey to death, but Berger says that at the…

A South Carolina fed­er­al dis­trict court has vacat­ed the death sen­tence imposed on Johnny Bennett, an African-American defen­dant con­demned by an all-white jury after pros­e­cu­tor Donald Myers (pic­tured) had ​“made mul­ti­ple state­ments clear­ly cal­cu­lat­ed to excite the jury with racial imagery and…