Publications & Testimony

A Reuters analy­sis of more than 2,000 state Supreme Court rul­ings in cap­i­tal cas­es has found that elect­ed judges are much less like­ly to over­turn death sen­tences than judges who are appoint­ed. In the 15 states in which the state Supreme Court is direct­ly elect­ed, jus­tices over­turned death sen­tences only 11% of the time as com­pared to a 26% rever­sal rate in the 7 states in which jus­tices are appoint­ed. 15 states have a hybrid sys­tem, where jus­tices are initially…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will hear argu­ments on September 23 regard­ing Scott Panetti​’s com­pe­ten­cy to be exe­cut­ed. Panetti is a severe­ly men­tal­ly ill man who rep­re­sent­ed him­self at his tri­al wear­ing a cow­boy cos­tume, and attempt­ed to sub­poe­na the Pope, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. As the court pre­pares to hear Panetti’s case, opin­ion pieces in two Texas news­pa­pers used it to illus­trate larger problems…

A ship­ment of sodi­um thiopen­tal, an anes­thet­ic once wide­ly used in exe­cu­tions, was recent­ly stopped in India before it could reach Nebraska. The Indian dis­trib­u­tor sold more than $50,000 worth of sodi­um thiopen­tal to the state in May, but the ship­ment was stopped before leav­ing the coun­try because of​“improp­er or miss­ing paper­work.” FedEx said it halt­ed the ship­ment because it did not have Food And Drug Administration clear­ance:​“As with any…

So far in 2015, no one has been sen­tenced to death in Texas. The death row pop­u­la­tion has dropped to 257, down from 460 at its peak in 1999. In that year, Texas sen­tenced 48 peo­ple to death, the most in any year since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed. Among the rea­sons for the decline in death sen­tences has been the adop­tion of the alter­na­tive sen­tence of life with­out parole (adopt­ed in 2005), and a change in the polit­i­cal cli­mate that had led politicians…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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

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…