Publications & Testimony

Death row in Texas has shrunk from 460 men and women at its peak in 1999 to 260 today. The main rea­son for that drop, accord­ing to an arti­cle in The Texas Tribune, is the dra­mat­ic decline in death sen­tences imposed in the state. In 1999 alone, Texas sen­tenced 48 peo­ple to death. But in the first 6 months of 2015, no death sen­tences have been imposed in Texas. This devel­op­ment is unprece­dent­ed, accord­ing to the Texas Defender Service (TDS). ​“This is…

Michelle Byrom (pic­tured, seat­ed) was released from prison in Mississippi on June 26 after spend­ing 16 years behind bars, 14 of them on death row, for the mur­der of her hus­band. Byrom main­tains her inno­cence for the crime, but agreed to an Alford plea — which means that she plead­ed no con­test to the charges against her — in exchange for her release. In 2014, the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed Byrom’s con­vic­tion and death sen­tence and ordered a new tri­al, cit­ing numerous…

Glenn Ford, who was exon­er­at­ed last year after spend­ing almost 30 years on Louisiana’s death row, died of lung can­cer on June 29 at the age of 65. At the time of his release, Ford was the nation’s longest-serv­ing death row exoneree. Just hours after his death, Ford’s case was cit­ed in the dis­sent­ing opin­ion of Justice Breyer in Glossip v. Gross, as pro­vid­ing ​“strik­ing” evi­dence ​“that the death penal­ty has been…

On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court held (5 – 4) in Glossip v. Gross that Oklahoma inmates ​“failed to estab­lish a like­li­hood of suc­cess on the mer­its of their claim that the use of mida­zo­lam vio­lates the Eighth Amendment.” Three inmates on Oklahoma’s death row had chal­lenged the state’s use of mida­zo­lam as the first drug in a three-drug pro­to­col, say­ing that it ​“fails to ren­der a per­son insen­sate to…

Lester Bower was exe­cut­ed in Texas on June 3 despite main­tain­ing his inno­cence through­out the 30 years he spent on death row. The evi­dence of Bower’s inno­cence includ­ed tes­ti­mo­ny from a woman who said that her boyfriend and three of his friends — not Bower — had com­mit­ted the mur­ders for which Bower was exe­cut­ed. The wit­ness came for­ward in 1989, after read­ing that Bower had been sen­tenced to death for the crime her boyfriend had con­fessed to com­mit­ting six…

In an inter­view with The Marshall Project, Bryan Stevenson (pic­tured), direc­tor of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy, dis­cussed the role the his­to­ry of slav­ery, lynch­ings, and racial ter­ror­ism in the South played in the racial­ly-moti­vat­ed killings of nine black peo­ple in an his­toric black church in Charleston, South…

This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a Georgia case, Foster v. Humphrey, in which an all-white jury sen­tenced a black man to death after pros­e­cu­tors struck every black prospec­tive juror in the case. The Court will deter­mine whether pros­e­cu­tors vio­lat­ed the Court’s 1986 deci­sion in Batson v. Kentucky, which banned the prac­tice of dis­miss­ing poten­tial jurors on the basis of race. In antic­i­pa­tion of the case, The New Yorker pub­lished an analysis…

Recent edi­to­ri­als from lead­ing news­pa­pers in three of the largest death row states cri­tique flaws in the death penal­ty and call for its abo­li­tion. The Sacramento Bee quot­ed fed­er­al dis­trict court judge Cormac Carney’s recent rul­ing find­ing California’s death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because exe­cu­tions are so rare that they ​“serve no ret­ribu­tive or deter­rent pur­pose.” The Bee called the state’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem ​“an abject failure”…

A new study by North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation exam­ines the finan­cial and human costs of cas­es in which, ​“pros­e­cu­tors sought the death penal­ty despite a clear lack of evi­dence, result­ing in acquit­tal or dis­missal of…