Publications & Testimony

The death penal­ty in the Unites States is expe­ri­enc­ing what schol­ars call a​“slow death.” In their forth­com­ing book,​“The Slow Death of the Death Penalty: Toward a Postmortem,” edi­tors Todd C. Peppers, Jamie Almallen, and Mary Welek Atwell bring togeth­er death penal­ty experts to exam­ine this shift in the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. New death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions still occur in a lim­it­ed num­ber of states; but Peppers et al reflect on the broad­er trends away from use…

On June 16, 2025, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a motion in the Anderson County District Court request­ing a new exe­cu­tion date for Robert Roberson, despite the fact that a motion from defense coun­sel with new evi­dence in sup­port of Mr. Roberson’s actu­al inno­cence remains pend­ing. As the Dallas Morning Editorial Board notes, it is​“unusu­al” that “[AG] Paxton’s office is involved” in request­ing the exe­cu­tion date. AG Paxton has active­ly sought Mr. Roberson’s…

Nearly half of all known exe­cu­tions to date in 2025 in Iran (244) and Saudi Arabia (50) have been for drug-relat­ed crimes, track­ing close­ly pat­terns doc­u­ment­ed by Harm Reduction International (HRI) for 2024. According to HRI’s new report, The Death Penalty for Drug Offenses: Global Overview 2024, the use of the death penal­ty for drug-relat­ed crimes reached​“cri­sis lev­els” in 2024. At least 615 peo­ple were known to be exe­cut­ed on drug-relat­ed charges world­wide, 607 of…

A joint inves­ti­ga­tion by ProPublica and ABC15 Arizona reviewed more than 300 cas­es over the past two decades where Maricopa County pros­e­cu­tors sought the death penal­ty and found that only 13% result­ed in death sen­tences. In most cas­es a jury nev­er got close to con­sid­er­ing whether to sen­tence some­one to death: in more than three-quar­ters of cas­es, defen­dants pled guilty in exchange for less­er pun­ish­ment, or pros­e­cu­tors reversed course before tri­al. In only 41 of…

When a lawyer makes a mis­take, who suf­fers the con­se­quences? The​“agency prin­ci­ple” says the client does, under the ratio­nale that clients choose their lawyers and autho­rize their actions. But courts uni­ver­sal­ly apply this prin­ci­ple to all attor­ney-client rela­tion­ships, includ­ing when indi­gent, iso­lat­ed death-sen­­tenced pris­on­ers are appoint­ed attor­neys by the state, with lit­tle or no means of con­trol­ling their lawyers’ actions. Many com­men­ta­tors have noted the…

On May 29, 2025, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Shukura Ingram ruled that Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr must abide by a 2021 agree­ment reached with attor­neys for nine indi­vid­u­als cur­rent­ly on Georgia’s death row that bars their exe­cu­tions until COVID-19 vac­cines are avail­able to every­one. In 2021, the state agreed to halt exe­cu­tions until vac­cines were avail­able to all mem­bers of the pub­lic. In her rul­ing, Judge Ingram not­ed that the vac­cine is not approved for…