Publications & Testimony

In his new book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities, and in media inter­views accom­pa­ny­ing its release, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer dis­cuss­es the rela­tion­ship between American laws and those of oth­er coun­tries and his dis­sent in Glossip v. Gross, which ques­tioned the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the death penal­ty. In an inter­view with The National Law Journal, Breyer sum­ma­rized the core…

In a sweep­ing look at the cur­rent state of the U.S. death penal­ty, USA Today reporters Richard Wolf and Kevin Johnson high­light sev­er­al recent sto­ry lines that col­lec­tive­ly illus­trate a dra­mat­ic decline in the coun­try’s use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Their con­clu­sion: ​“The death penal­ty in America may be liv­ing on bor­rowed time.” Wolf and Johnson recount recent cas­es in which high-pro­file crimes result­ed in a life with­out parole sen­tence, in many instances because vic­tims’ families…

Montez Spradley, sen­tenced to death by an Alabama judge in 2008 over a jury’s 10 – 2 rec­om­men­da­tion for life with­out parole, was freed from prison on September 4. Spradley spent 9.5 years incar­cer­at­ed, includ­ing 3.5 years on death row. He was grant­ed a new tri­al in 2011 as a result of mul­ti­ple evi­den­tiary errors in his tri­al. The state’s key wit­ness against Spradley, his ex-girl­friend, Alisha Booker, lat­er tes­ti­fied that she had lied at tri­al because Spradley…

UPDATE: Former Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn (pic­tured), for­mer Oklahoma Sooners and Dallas Cowboys foot­ball coach Barry Switzer, and John W. Raley, Jr., the for­mer chief fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor for the Eastern District of Oklahoma, have joined with inno­cence advo­cates Barry Scheck, Co-Director of the Innocence Project, and Samuel Gross, edi­tor of the National Registry of Exonerations, in a letter…

Richard Glossip, who is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed in Oklahoma on September 16, is seek­ing a stay of exe­cu­tion to allow con­sid­er­a­tion of his claims of…

Riverside County, California is ​“the buck­le of a new Death Belt,” says Professor Robert J. Smith of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pro­duc­ing 7 death sen­tences in the first half of 2015. This, Smith says, is ​“more than California’s oth­er 57 coun­ties com­bined, more than any oth­er state, and more than the whole Deep South…

Robert Cindrich, a for­mer U.S. District Judge and U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, recent­ly wrote an op-ed for the Harrisburg Patriot-News call­ing Governor Tom Wolf’s mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions in Pennsylvania ​“appro­pri­ate” and ​“rea­son­able.” Expressing con­cerns about ​“mul­ti­ple, seri­ous prob­lems with the death penal­ty” in Pennsylvania, Judge Cindrich says Governor Wolf ​“was absolute­ly cor­rect” that no executions…

As nation­al exe­cu­tion num­bers drop to his­toric lows and a grow­ing num­ber of states halt exe­cu­tions or repeal the death penal­ty alto­geth­er, Missouri has recent­ly increased the num­ber of exe­cu­tions it is car­ry­ing out and over­tak­en Texas for the high­est per-capi­ta exe­cu­tion rate. Missouri and Texas have car­ried out all of the last 15 exe­cu­tions in the U.S. and 80% of exe­cu­tions through September 1 of this year. A report by The Marshall Project explores why Missouri is…

U.S. District Court Judge Gregory M. Sleet has crit­i­cized the lack of judi­cial review pro­vid­ed by the state and fed­er­al courts pri­or to Delaware​’s 2012 exe­cu­tion of Shannon Johnson, say­ing Johnson’s exe­cu­tion ​“high­lights pro­found fail­ings in our judi­cial process.” In an arti­cle in the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice mag­a­zine, Judge Sleet — who was Chief Judge at the time of the case — called “[t]he Johnson case, and its result,…

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize win­ning legal com­men­ta­tor Linda Greenhouse ana­lyzes the sig­nif­i­cance of and inter­play between the recent Connecticut Supreme Court deci­sion strik­ing down the state’s death penal­ty and Justice Stephen Breyer’s dis­sent in the U.S. Supreme Court case Glossip v. Gross. “[T]he Connecticut Supreme Court not only pro­duced an impor­tant deci­sion for its own juris­dic­tion; but it addressed the United…