Publications & Testimony

The Florida Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional the state’s practice of permitting judges to impose death sentences based upon a non-unanimous jury recommendation for death. In two rulings issued October 14 the court held that juries must unanimously find all facts necessary to impose a death sentence, including the existence of any aggravating factor relied upon as a reason to impose the death penalty, whether the aggravating factors in and of themselves provide sufficient grounds for…

Texas is poised to have the fewest number of executions in 20 years. As of October, the state has executed seven prisoners in 2016, with just one more execution scheduled this calendar year. The total would mark the fewest executions in the state in any year since 1996. In that year, three people were executed, as legal challenges to a new state law billed as speeding up appeals put most executions on hold. Fifteen execution dates for 11 people have been stayed or halted in Texas this year.

The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed a decision of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals that affirmed the death sentence imposed on Shaun Michael Bosse. In a unanimous per curiam decision issued October 11, the Court held that Oklahoma prosecutors had improperly presented testimony from three members of the victims’ families asking the jury to sentence Bosse to death. The Court had ruled in 1987 in Booth v. Maryland that the use of victim-impact testimony in determining whether a capital…

Kern County, California — one of five Southern California counties that have been described as the ​“new Death Belt“ — sent six people to death row between 2006 and 2015, more than 99.4% of U.S. counties. Its death sentence-to-homicide rate during the 10-year-period from 2006 to 2015 also was 2.3 times higher than in the rest of the state. In this same time frame, Kern had the highest rate of civilians killed by police of any county in the country: between 2005 and 2015, police killed 79 people in…

In an October 10 statement commemorating World Day Against the Death Penalty, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon (pictured) urged the global abolition of capital punishment and called the death penalty ineffective and counterproductive as an anti-terrorism tool. Saying that capital punishment not only ​“has no place in the 21^st century,” Secretary-General Ban also noted that executions of terror suspects have been counterproductive: ​“Experience has shown that putting terrorists to…

Lawyers for 30 Tennessee death row prisoners argued before the state’s supreme court on October 6 that Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Tennessee, which has not carried out an execution since 2009, intends to use a one-drug protocol of pentobarbital that it says would be obtained from a compounding pharmacy. The prisoners argue that the Tennessee Department of Correction’s lethal-injection protocol creates an…

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument on October 5 in Buck v. Davis, a Texas case in which Duane Buck was sentenced to death after his own lawyer presented expert testimony from a psychologist who called Buck more likely to commit acts of violence in the future because he is Black. While Cecilia Marshall, widow of Thurgood Marshall, and Buck’s stepsister, Phyllis Taylor — a survivor of the shooting — observed from the audience, Buck’s counsel told the Court that the jury had sentenced Buck to…

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund reports that America’s death rows have continued to decline in size, with 2,905 men and women on death row across the United States as of July 1, 2016. The new figures, reported in the organization’s Summer 2016 edition of its quarterly publication, Death Row USA, represent a 14% decline from the 3,366 prisoners who were on death row one decade earlier. The shrinking of death row populations across the country has exceeded the number of executions during that…

In a decision that could affect an estimated 25 Arizona death penalty cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied Arizona’s request to review a federal appeals court decision declaring unconstitutional an evidentiary rule that limited the types of mitigating evidence capital defendants could present in their cases. The ruling in Ryan v. McKinney let stand a 6 – 5 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in December 2015 that had reversed James McKinney’s 1993 death sentence…

Riverside County, California imposed more death sentences than any other county in the United States in 2015, accounting for more than half of the state’s new death sentences and 16% of new death sentences imposed nationwide. Among other states, only the 9 death sentences imposed in Florida outstripped Riverside’s total of 8. The 29 death sentences imposed in Riverside from 2010 – 2015 made it the nation’s second most prolific death-sentencing county during that period, behind only the country’s…