Publications & Testimony

Orange County, California Sheriff Sandra Hutchens appeared before Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals (pictured) on July 5 to explain her department’s 4 – 1/​2‑year failure to comply with court orders directing the department to produce documents related to a multi-decade practice in the county of misusing prison informants to illegally obtain incriminating statements from accused defendants. In May 2015, Judge Goethals barred the entire Orange County District Attorney’s office from…

Three thousand vials of the anesthetic sodium thiopental that three states attempted to illegally import into the United States for use in executions have now expired, according to an investigative report by BuzzFeed News. Arizona, Nebraska, and Texas each purchased 1000 vials of the drug in 2015 from a questionable supplier in India called Harris Pharma, despite warnings from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that importation of the drug would violate federal law. Citing documents…

Lynching has long been regarded as a regional phenomenon, but in an updated edition of its landmark 2015 report ​“Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has now documented more than 300 lynchings of African Americans in states outside the Deep South. ​“Racial terror lynching was a national problem,” said EJI Director Bryan Stevenson (pictured). More than six million African American migrants fled ​“as refugees and exiles from terror in the…

As we reach the mid-point of the year, executions and new death sentences are on pace to remain near historic lows in 2017, continuing the long-term historic decline in capital punishment across the United States. As of June 30, six states have carried out 13 executions, with 30 other executions that had been scheduled for that period halted by judicial stays or injunctions, gubernatorial reprieves or commutation, or rescheduled. By contrast, at the midpoint of 2016, five states had carried out…

A divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on June 28 reversed the decision of a federal district court that had stayed executions in Ohio. In an 8 – 6 en banc decision, the court voted to allow Ohio to proceed with executions using a proposed combination of the controversial sedative midazolam, the paralytic drug pancuronium bromide, and the heart-stopping drug potassium chloride. Midazolam has been implicated in botched executions in Alabama, Arizona, Ohio, and Oklahoma and flawed…

In DPIC’s latest podcast, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Litigation Director Christina Swarns (pictured, center, outside the U.S. Supreme Court following the argument in Buck v. Davis) discusses the issues of race, future dangerousness, and ineffective representation presented in the landmark case. She calls the case — in which a Texas trial lawyer who represented 21 clients sent to death row presented an expert witness who testified that his own client was more likely to commit future…

At an international death penalty conference in Washington, DC, hosted by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, the European Union strongly renewed its call for a global end to the use of capital punishment. In his opening remarks for the conference, David O’Sullivan, the European Union’s Ambassador to the United States, expressed optimism about recent declines in the use of the death penalty in the United States and said ​“the abolition of capital punishment … would put the U.S. on the…

In a 5 – 4 decision released June 26, the United States Supreme Court upheld the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, denying review of Texas death-row prisoner Erick Daniel Davila’s claim that he had been provided ineffective representation by his state appeal lawyer. The case, Davila v. Davis, raised the question of whether two earlier Supreme Court decisions (Martinez v. Ryan and Trevino v. Thaler) permitted a federal court to review a prisoner’s claim that his direct…

Lawyers for William Morva (pictured), a seriously mentally ill death-row prisoner suffering from a delusional disorder that leaves him unable to distinguish his delusions from reality, has petitioned Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe seeking clemency from his scheduled July 6, 2017 execution. Morva’s lawyers say that he has suffered for years from ​“a serious psychotic disorder” that includes beliefs that ​“local law enforcement and the Administration of former President George W. Bush conspired…

The New Orleans District Attorney’s office has decided not to pursue the death penalty in two high-profile murder cases, highlighting a trend in Louisiana away from the use of capital punishment. In a one-week period, Leon Cannizzaro (pictured), the District Attorney for Orleans Parish, announced that his office would not seek the death penalty against Travis Boys, charged with fatally shooting a New Orleans police officer, and Chelsea Thornton, charged with killing her 3‑year-old son and…