Publications & Testimony

Voters in three states approved pro-death penalty ballot questions Tuesday, while in a fourth, voters turned back an effort to oust four Justices who had been criticized for granting defendants relief in capital cases. Amid widespread agreement that California’s death penalty system is broken, the state’s voters rejected Proposition 62, which would have abolished the state’s death penalty and replaced it with life without possibility of parole plus restitution, and narrowly approved a competing…

Two recent studies examining the effects of Batson v. Kentucky found that, despite the Supreme Court’s ban on racial discrimination in jury selection, Black jurors continue to be disproportionately removed from jury pools in North and South Carolina. Batson, the case that banned the practice of striking jurors on the basis of race, has garnered recent attention because of a recent Supreme Court case, Foster v. Chatman. In Foster, the trial court denied a Black defendant’s challenges to the…

Pinellas County, Florida ranks among the 2% of counties responsible for more than half of all prisoners on death rows across the United States and among the 2% of counties responsible for more than half of all executions conducted in this country since 1977. The five death sentences imposed in Pinellas between 2010 and 2015 also place it, along with three other Florida counties, among the 16 U.S. counties with the highest number of new death sentences in the country. One major reason for…

The U.S. Supreme Court has stayed the execution of Tommy Arthur, who was scheduled to be executed in Alabama at 6:00 p.m. Central Time on November 3. Around 10:30 p.m. Eastern, the Court first issued a temporary stay of execution through Circuit Justice Clarence Thomas “pending further order” of the Court. Anticipating a second ruling by the Court, Alabama continued preparations for the execution. Then, just before midnight in Washington, the Court issued a full stay to permit it to consider a…

The editorial boards of Oklahoma’s two major newspapers and the leadership of the Oklahoma Conference of Churches are all urging voters to vote no on State Question 776, which would enshrine the death penalty in the Oklahoma constitution and remove from state courts the power to declare the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment. The Oklahoman called SQ 776 “unnecesary,” saying it, “should be rejected by Oklahoma voters on Nov. 8.” The Tulsa World also encouraged a no vote on 776, saying…

Former Ohio death row prisoner Kevin Keith (pictured) has filed a motion seeking a new trial to clear his name after evidence has emerged of systemic bias and erratic behavior by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) scientist whose testimony helped put him on death row. Keith and James Parsons, who also was convicted of murder and was sentenced to a term of 15 years to life in prison, have challenged the work of BCI analyst G. Michele Yezzo, who testified at dozens of trials over her…

Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment by Harvard Law Professor Carol S. Steiker and University of Texas Law Professor Jordan M. Steiker examines the U.S. Supreme Court’s “extensive — and ultimately failed — effort to reform and rationalize the practice of capital punishment in the United States through top-down, constitutional regulation.” The authors argue that significant constitutional flaws persist in the death penalty system despite the Court’s attempts to regulate it, and…

San Bernardino County, California is one of five Southern California counties that have produced more death sentences since 2010 than 99.5% of all U.S. counties. Along with its neighbors, Kern County, Riverside County, Orange County, and Los Angeles County, San Bernardino forms a “new Death Belt,” a region with high numbers of death sentences marked by overzealous prosecutors and poor representation for defendants facing a death sentence. In January 2013, San Bernardino had 37 prisoners on…

With newly discovered confessions and DNA evidence pointing to the prosecution’s chief witness as the actual killer, the Florida Supreme Court, on October 27, vacated the capital conviction of death-row prisoner Clemente Aguirre. Aguirre was convicted of killing his two neighbors — an elderly woman and her adult daughter — but he has always maintained his innocence and claimed that he discovered the women after they were deceased. After he was convicted, Aguirre’s post-conviction attorneys…

Kenya has commuted the death sentences of all 2,747 prisoners on the nation’s death row. On October 24, President Uhuru Kenyatta signed orders sparing the lives of 2,655 men and 92 women who had been sentenced to death, commuting their sentences to terms of life in prison. While Kenya still authorizes the death penalty, it has not carried out an execution in nearly 30 years. In August 2009, former President Mwai Kibaki commuted the death sentences of the more than 4,000 prisoners who were then…