Publications & Testimony

UPDATE: The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied Sallie’s request for clemency. PREVIOUSLY: Georgia plans to execute William Sallie (pictured) on December 6 in a case his attorneys argue is tainted by egregious juror misconduct that no court has considered because Sallie missed a filing deadline during a period in which he was unrepresented and Georgia provided him no right to a lawyer. It is a case that Andrew Cohen, a Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and long-time legal…

With 55 executions since the 1970s, Dallas County, Texas, ranks second among all U.S. counties — behind only Harris County (Houston), Texas — in the number of prisoners it has put to death. It is also among the 2% of counties that account for more than half of all prisoners on death row across the country, and produced seven new death sentences and one resentence between 2010 and 2015, more than 99.5% of all U.S. counties during that period. Dallas County has a long history of prosecutorial…

Federal capital defendants are disproportionately sentenced to death in Missouri compared to other states, with 14.5% of the 62 prisoners currently on federal death row having been prosecuted in Missouri’s federal district courts. By contrast, a DPIC analysis of FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics shows that Missouri accounted for only 2.26% of murders in the United States between 1988, when the current federal death penalty statute was adopted, and 2012. Not surprisingly, an article in The…

During argument November 29 in the case of Moore v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court expressed skepticism about Texas’ idiosyncratic method of deciding whether a capital defendant has Intellectual Disability and is therefore ineligible for the death penalty. A trial court, applying the criteria for Intellectual Disability established by the medical community, found that Bobby James Moore (pictured) was not subject to the death penalty. However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeal reversed that…

On November 23, the Florida Supreme Court overturned the death sentence imposed by a judge on Richard Franklin after his jury split 9 – 3 in recommending he receive the death penalty for a 2012 murder. “In light of the non-unanimous jury recommendation to impose a death sentence,” the court found that the death sentence violated Franklin’s right to have a unanimous jury determination of all facts necessary to impose a death penalty and that the violation could not be excused as harmless. The…

U.S. District Court Judge Richard M. Gergel granted a request on November 28 from Dylann Roof (pictured), the 22-year-old charged with the murders of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, to represent himself in his federal capital trial. Judge Gergel described Roof’s decision as “strategically unwise,” but said, “It is a decision you have the right to make.” A criminal defendant’s right to self-representation was established by the…

Timothy Shriver (pictured), the Chairman of the Special Olympics, has called on the U.S. Supreme Court to end Texas’ “use of stigmatizing stereotypes” in determining whether a defendant has Intellectual Disability and is therefore ineligible for execution. On November 29, the Court will hear argument in Moore v. Texas, a case challenging Texas’ use of the “Briseño factors” — a set of unscientific criteria based in part on the fictional character of Lennie Smalls from the novel “Of Mice and…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has upheld a federal district court’s decision ordering a new sentencing hearing for Johnny Bennett, a black man who was sentenced to death by an all-white South Carolina jury in a trial tainted by a prosecutor’s racially-inflammatory cross-examination and argument. Bennett was prosecuted by Donald Myers (pictured), known as “Death Penalty Donnie” for having sent 28 South Carolina defendants to death row. In response to defense argument at…

Los Angeles County, California is the home of the nation’s largest death row, one that statistics show continues to rapidly grow. In January 2013, Los Angeles was responsible for more death row prisoners than any other county in the United States, and it has ranked as one of the two most prolific counties in imposing new death sentences each year since. The 31 death sentences imposed in the county between 2010 and 2015 are more than any other U.S. county imposed during that period and the four…

In 1986, California voters removed Rose Bird, the state’s first female supreme court chief justice, from office after conservative groups spent more than $10 million in a recall effort that portrayed her as “soft on crime,” emphasizing her court opinions overturning death sentences that had been unconstitutionally imposed. Ten years later, Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Penny White lost a retention election after death penalty proponents and other conservative groups targeted her for voting…