Publications & Testimony

When University of Colorado Boulder sociology professor Michael Radelet began doing research on the death penalty in the 1970s, the noted death-penalty scholar tells Colorado Public Radio, he didn’t have an opinion about capital punishment and ​“didn’t know anything about it.” After researching issues of race, innocence, and the death penalty, he came to have grave reservations. ​“I believe the death penalty is about making god-like decisions without god-like accuracy,” he told Colorado Matters…

Ha’im Al Matin Sharif (pictured), formerly known as Charles Robins, has been released from Nevada’s death row, nearly 30 years after he was convicted of killing his girlfriend’s 11-month-old daughter, after medical evidence revealed that the baby died from infantile scurvy, rather than from physical abuse. Prosecutors agreed to amend the charges against Sharif and release him on time served after a prosecution doctor confirmed that Brittany Smith actually died of Barlow’s disease, a form of…

In a 5 – 4 decision released June 19, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama had unconstitutionally denied death-row prisoner James McWilliams (pictured) the assistance of an independent mental health expert. The Court wrote that its 1985 ruling in Ake v. Oklahoma, which entitles indigent defendants to the assistance of a mental health expert, encompassed a clearly established right to an expert who is ​“independent from the prosecution.” In his opinion for the Court, Justice Breyer…

In a Washington Post op-ed, former New Mexico Governor and United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson (pictured) — who in 2009 signed a bill to abolish his state’s death penalty — urged that capital punishment be abolished in the United States, saying “[t]he practice is wrong and I hope it isn’t long for this world.” Richardson said he supported the death penalty for decades before ​“empirical evidence and common sense” convinced him that the practice should end. That evidence, he writes, included…

In a recent commentary article in Medium, psychologist Dr. Frederick J. Frese, III (pictured) — a Marine Corps veteran who has himself been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia — argues that Congress and state legislatures should pass laws exempting people with severe mental illness from the death penalty. ​“Supporters and opponents of the death penalty agree that it should only be reserved for the most culpable and deliberate of criminals who commit heinous crimes,” Frese writes. He says that…

, an intellectually disabled prisoner whose conviction and death sentence was overturned in 1980, was freed from prison in Texas on June 12, 2017, having spent 35 years in jail without a valid conviction and without being retried. Hartfield, whose IQ is in the 50s or 60s, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1977 on charges that he had murdered a bus station worker. Hartfield confessed to the crime, but has long asserted his innocence and that his confession was coerced. In 1980, he was…

Death-row prisoners and the state of Arizona have reached a tentative settlement to address the state’s lethal-injection protocol. Under the settlement, which could have an impact on lethal-injection litigation across the country, Arizona has dropped a three-drug formula from its protocol in favor of using a high dose of single barbiturate, and will honor a prior commitment not to use the sedative midazolam. The state also agreed not to use any paralytic drug in the execution process — which…

Defense attorneys for Travis Bredhold, a Kentucky defendant facing the death penalty for a murder committed when he was 18 years old, are asking a judge to extend the death-penalty exemption for juvenile offenders to those younger than age 21. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court (pictured) ruled in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment when applied to offenders who were under age 18 at the time of the crime. The Court held at that time that a…

Thirty years ago, filmmaker Errol Morris, who directed the documentary ​“The Thin Blue Line,” helped to exonerate Texas death-row prisoner Dale Adams, falsely accused of murdering a police officer. During the course of making the film, Morris met the notorious Texas prosecution psychiatrist, Dr. James Grigson, who routinely testified that capital defendants — including the innocent Mr. Adams — posed a risk of future dangerousness. Morris recently interviewed Christina Swarns (pictured, center)…