Publications & Testimony

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 The unpublished April 7 order sends Storey’s case back to the trial court to consider whether the prosecution knowingly presented false evidence about the victim’s family’s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…

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…