Publications & Testimony

In an 8 – 1 deci­sion in Hurst v. Florida released on January 12, the U.S. Supreme Court found Florida’s cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing scheme in vio­la­tion of the 6^th Amendment, which guar­an­tees the right to tri­al by jury.​“The Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact nec­es­sary to impose a sen­tence of death,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the opin­ion of the Court. The jury and judge in Hurst’s case fol­lowed Florida’s statutory…

On January 7, the Connecticut Supreme Court heard argu­ments in State of Connecticut v. Russell Peeler, in which state pros­e­cu­tors are seek­ing to over­turn the court’s 4 – 3 deci­sion last sum­mer declar­ing Connecticut’s death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. The court ruled in August in State v. Santiago that Connecticut’s prospec­tive leg­isla­tive repeal of the death penal­ty, in com­bi­na­tion with​“the state’s near total moratorium on…

In a recent arti­cle in Slate, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the uni­ver­si­ty’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says​“the death penal­ty is col­laps­ing under the weight of its own cor­rup­tion and cru­el­ty.” He empha­sizes the increas­ing iso­la­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment to a few out­lier juris­dic­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly high­light­ing Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Caddo Parish received national attention…

The New York Times reports that the num­ber of coun­tries using cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment con­tin­ued to shrink and its use became more iso­lat­ed from 2013 to 2014, even as the num­ber of death sen­tences world­wide rose. 105 coun­tries have abol­ished the death penal­ty, most recent­ly Suriname and Mongolia, and the United Nations lists 60 addi­tion­al coun­tries as​“de fac­to abo­li­tion­ist” because they have not had any exe­cu­tions in at least 10 years. That leaves just 28…

A new report by a spe­cial com­mit­tee cre­at­ed by Orange County, California District Attorney Tony Rackauckas (pic­tured) cites a​“fail­ure of lead­er­ship” as the root cause of a mul­ti-decade his­to­ry of pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct involv­ing jail­house infor­mants. Documents obtained by defense lawyers and The Orange County Register had revealed what the paper called​“a secret and well-orga­nized net­work of snitch­es” that had been hid­den from defense…

Natrona County, Wyoming District Attorney Mike Blonigen (pic­tured) recent­ly called for a recon­sid­er­a­tion of the state’s death penal­ty after a fed­er­al judge over­turned the death sen­tence of Dale Wayne Eaton, a decade after Blonigen obtained it in 2004. At the time U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson reversed Eaton’s sen­tence in 2014, Eaton was the only per­son on Wyoming’s…

Several news­pa­pers across the coun­try fea­tured themes from DPIC’s 2015 Year End Report in edi­to­ri­als and opin­ion pieces at the…

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Velma Barfield in North Carolina on November 2, 1984 — She was in a rela­tion­ship with Stuart Taylor who was a wid­ow­er. She forged checks on Taylor’s account to pay for her addic­tion. Fearing that she had been found out, she mixed an arsenic based rat poi­son into his beer and tea. Taylor became very ill. As his con­di­tion wors­ened, she took him to the hos­pi­tal where he died a few days lat­er. There was an autop­sy which found that the cause of Taylor’s death was…

(source: M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smylka,​“Executions in the U.S. 1608 – 1987: The Espy File.” (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1994) with recent…