Publications & Testimony

Florida Governor Rick Scott issued a series of executive orders on April 3 removing locally elected 9^th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Aramis Ayala (pictured) from 21 first-degree murder cases and replacing her with 5^th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Brad King. The removal comes two weeks after Ayala announced a policy that her office would not pursue the death penalty in murder prosecutions. The cases include a number of potential capital resentencings resulting from the Florida Supreme…

A new study of the case records of the men and women executed in the United States between 2000 and 2015 has found that 21^st-century executions disproportionately involve prisoners diagnosed with mental illness and who have experienced traumatic child abuse. In The Washington Post’s data feature, Monkey Cage, Professor Frank Baumgartner and Betsy Neill of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill write that “[m]ost Americans oppose the death penalty for the mentally ill. But our research…

As Arkansas moves toward attempting to conduct an unprecedented eight executions in eleven days, former corrections officials from across the country are warning Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson of the psychological toll the compressed execution schedule could take on prison personnel. Dr. Allen Ault (pictured), former warden and corrections commissioner in Georgia who oversaw five executions in that state, said “[t]he rapid schedule will put an extraordinary burden on the men and women…

In a joint op-ed for The Washington Post, former governors Bob Taft (pictured, l.) and Joseph E. Kernan (pictured, r.) have expressed bipartisan support for proposed legislation that would prohibit the use of the death penalty against people who have severe mental illness. Taft, a former Republican governor of Ohio, and Kernan, a former Democratic governor of Indiana, call the execution of mentally ill defendants ​“an inhumane practice that fails to respect common standards of decency and…

Maricopa County, Arizona County Attorney Bill Montgomery has sought the death penalty so frequently that the county has run up millions of dollars in defense costs and run out of defense lawyers qualified to handle new capitally-charged cases. The Arizona Republic reports that, with 65 active death-penalty cases and more new capital cases charged than the 35 that have been resolved since July 1, 2014, the county ran out of the specialized lawyers needed to defend the cases in January of this…

The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously struck down Texas’ standard for evaluating intellectual disability in death penalty cases, calling the state’s approach an ​“outlier” that, “[b]y design and in operation, … create[s] an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed.” In Moore v. Texas, the Court on March 28 vacated the judgment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), which had applied an unscientific set of lay stereotypes known as the ​“Briseño factors”…

“We live in a gendered society,” says Dr. Mary Atwell (pictured), one of the nation’s foremost experts on women and capital punishment, and the men and women who go to death row are different. In the latest podcast episode of ​“Discussions with DPIC,” commemorating Women’s History Month, Dr. Atwell says why that is so. Dr. Atwell chose to write about women on death row because she ​“wanted to do something about capital punishment that was not just numbers, that was a human take on capital…

Judy and Glenn Cherry (pictured), the parents of Jonas Cherry, have asked Texas state and local officials not to execute Paul Storey, the man convicted of killing their son. The state has scheduled Storey’s execution for April 12. In a letter to Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson, Gov. Greg Abbott, state District Judge Robb Catalano, and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, the Cherrys ask state officials to commute Storey’s sentence to life without parole. They write, ​“Paul…

The Florida Legislative Black Caucus has joined more than 100 lawyers and legal experts and the parents of murder victim Sade Dixon in urging Governor Rick Scott to rescind his order removing Orange-Osceola County State Attorney Aramis Ayala (pictured) from a high-profile double murder case in which she decided to not seek the death penalty. The other victim in the case, Lt. Debra Clayton, was an Orlando police officer. Governor Scott did not speak with Dixon’s family before issuing an order…

Lawyers for Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, the man accused of plotting the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, are seeking U.S. Supreme Court intervention to prevent his trial before a military tribunal in which Nashiri faces the death penalty if convicted. The petition for a writ of certiorari asks the Court to allow Nashiri’s lawyers to challenge his military detention — and efforts to try him in a military tribunal rather than a civilian court — because the CIA admittedly subjected him to 14 years of…