Publications & Testimony

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on May 12 granted a stay of Tilon Carter’s May 16 execution to consider his claim that he was convicted based on ​“false or misleading testimony by the State Medical Examiner” concerning the cause of the victim’s death. Carter (pictured) was convicted and sentenced to death based upon testimony by a local medical examiner that the 89-year-old victim, James Tomlin, had died of suffocation. His lawyers say that new scientific evidence that was unavailable at the…

The Florida Supreme Court has directed that Ralph Daniel Wright, Jr. (pictured) be acquitted of the murder charges for which he was sentenced to death in 2014, making him the 159^th person exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973. On May 11, 2017, the court unanimously vacated Wright’s convictions for the murders of his ex-girlfriend and their son, ruling that the ​“purely circumstantial” evidence against him was insufficient to convict. A majority of the court joined a…

Newly unsealed psychiatric evaluations and court transcripts in the case of Dylann Roof (pictured) — sentenced to death for the racially motivated killing of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina — raise additional questions as to whether Roof was competent to waive representation in his death penalty proceedings and to forego presenting mental health evidence in his defense. The documents confirm that Roof represented himself in jury selection and in the penalty stage of his…

The nation’s death rows are shrinking more rapidly than new defendants are being sentenced to death, according to a new Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) statistical brief, ​“Capital Punishment, 2014 – 2015.” The statistical brief, which analyzes information on those under sentence of death in the United States as of December 31, 2014 and December 31, 2015, documents a continuing decline in executions, new death sentences, and death row populations across the U.S. 2015 marked the fifteenth…

The Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct has issued a formal reprimand to a sitting Burnet County judge who posted on Facebook a photo of a black murder suspect accused of killing a police officer with the comment, ​“Time for a tree and a rope.” Judge James Oakley (pictured), who is white, denied that the comment about Otis Tyrone McKane was a race-based reference to lynching. ​“My comment was intended to reflect my personal feelings that this senseless murder of a police officer should…

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia has overturned the death sentence imposed on Lawrence Jefferson, saying that his trial counsel had been ineffective for failing to investigate and present available mitigating evidence in his case, including evidence related to ​“a head injury he sustained as a child when an automobile rolled over his head.” The court also found that the state courts had denied Jefferson a ​“full and fair” hearing on the issue, in violation of due…

Soon after passing legislation to make death penalty trials fairer by preventing judges from overriding jury recommendations of life sentences, the Alabama legislature is taking steps to enact a bill that critics say would make capital appeals far less fair. The bill, denominated the ​“Fair Justice Act,” would constrict the amount of time death-row prisoners have to file appeals, impose deadlines for judges to rule on appeals, and require prisoners to pursue their direct appeal and…

The U.S. Supreme Court has vacated the Alabama state courts’ rejection of a prisoner’s claim that he is ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability, and directed the state to reconsider his claim in light of the Court’s recent decision in Moore v. Texas requiring states to employ scientifically accepted standards in determining whether a death-row prisoner is intellectually disabled. On May 1, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case of Taurus Carroll, and…

John Jackson, the former Navarro County, Texas prosecutor and judge, is on trial for ethics violations in the 1992 capital trial of Cameron Todd Willingham (pictured), which many believe led to the execution of an innocent man. Willingham was convicted of arson and murder and sentenced to death in connection with the house fire that killed his three young daughters. Texas executed him in 2004. Willingham’s conviction and execution rested on two key pieces of testimony: arson testimony — since…

An independent study of the costs of seeking and imposing the death penalty in Oklahoma, prepared for the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, has concluded that seeking the death penalty in Oklahoma ​“incurs significantly more time, effort, and costs on average, as compared to when the death penalty is not sought in first degree murder cases.” The report — prepared by Seattle University criminal justice professors Peter A. Collins and Matthew J. Hickman and law professor Robert C.