Publications & Testimony

In legal challenges filed separately by Arkansas death-row prisoners and a company involved in the distribution of pharmaceuticals, the Arkansas state and federal courts issued preliminary injunctions putting on hold the state’s plan to carry out an unprecedented eight executions in the span of eleven days. After a four-day evidentiary hearing that ended late in the evening on Thursday, April 13, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas issued a preliminary…

Amid mounting concerns that Virginia may execute an innocent man on April 25, a diverse group of religious, political, and business leaders are calling on Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe to grant clemency to Ivan Teleguz (pictured). Their pleas for clemency stress that Teleguz was convicted based upon highly unreliable testimony and sentenced to death based upon false testimony that he had been involved in a fabricated Pennsylvania murder that had, in fact, never occurred. Teleguz was…

In 1986, James McWilliams (pictured), an indigent defendant, was sentenced to death by a judge in Alabama after being denied access to an independent expert who could have helped the defense understand and present his mental health issues. On April 24, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court will hold oral argument in McWilliams v. Dunn. The question before the Court is whether, when the Supreme Court held in Ake v. Oklahoma (1985) that an indigent defendant is entitled to meaningful expert assistance for…

A new poll of voters in Orange and Osceola counties in Florida — taken in the wake of Governor Rick Scott’s removal of their locally elected State Attorney Aramis Ayala (pictured) from 22 homicide cases after she announced that her office would not pursue the death penalty — shows that the counties’ voters overwhelmingly prefer the use of life imprisonment over the death penalty as punishment for murder. The poll by Public Policy Polling, released on April 10, found that 62% of Orange and Osceola…

Three Louisiana legislators, all of them former law enforcement officials, have proposed legislation to abolish the state’s death penalty. Sen. Dan Claitor (R‑Baton Rouge, pictured), a former New Orleans prosecutor who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, is the primary author of Senate Bill 142, which would eliminate the death penalty for offenses committed on or after August 1, 2017. The bill’s counterpart in the House of Representatives, House Bill 101, is sponsored by Rep. Terry Landry…

Executions worldwide fell by 37% in 2016, according to the annual Amnesty International Global Report on Death Sentences and Executions, released on April 11, 2017. With 20 executions in 2016, the United States ranked seventh in the world among confirmed executions, the lowest it has ranked since at least 2005. For the 8^th consecutive year, the U.S. was the only country in the Americas to conduct any executions, and the only Western democracy in the world to do so. Amnesty International…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has issued an order staying the scheduled April 12 execution of Paul Storey. The unpublished April 7 order sends Storey’s case back to the trial court to consider whether the prosecution knowingly presented false evidence about the victim’s family’s views on the death penalty. Storey had been scheduled to be executed on April 12. His lawyers argued that ​“the State denied him his right to due process because it argued ​“evidence it knew to be false” when…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has upheld a lower federal court ruling blocking the state of Ohio from proceeding with plans to carry out executions with its new three-drug execution protocol. The decision affirmed a district court preliminary injunction that barred the state from using the drug midazolam as part of a three-drug execution process, and barred the state from using ​“any lethal injection method which employs either a paralytic agent…or potassium chloride.” Judge…

The Arkansas Parole Board voted 6 – 1 on April 5 to recommend clemency for Jason McGehee, one of the eight death-row prisoners scheduled to be executed in an unprecedented eleven-day period later this month. McGehee’s clemency petition drew support from both the former Director of the Arkansas Department of Correction, Ray Hobbs, and the trial judge who presided in his case, Robert McCorkindale. Speaking on McGehee’s behalf, Hobbs told the Board, ​“He has learned his lesson, and he still has value…

The Alabama legislature has approved and sent to the Governor a bill that would bring to an end the practice of permitting trial judges to impose death sentences over a capital sentencing jury’s recommendation that the defendant be sentenced to life. Alabama is the only state in the U.S. that currently permits judicial override. The legislature acted in response to mounting court challenges to Alabama’s death penalty statute. On April 4, the state House of Representatives voted 78 – 19 to pass a…