Publications & Testimony

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…

Public support for the death penalty fell by 7 percentage points in the last year, with fewer than half of Americans (49%) now saying they support the death penalty, according to a national Pew Research Center poll released on September 29. The poll marks the first time in 45 years that support for capital punishment polled below 50%, when a Gallup poll in released in November 1971 also reported that 49% of Americans supported the death penalty. Opposition to capital punishment reached a record…

The Orange County, California Crime Lab has been accused of doctoring its testimony about DNA evidence to favor the prosecution, after a senior forensic analyst offered conflicting conclusions that bolstered the prosecution in two separate murder cases. A motion filed on September 23 by the Orange County Public Defender’s office says prosecutor Kevin Haskins (now a judge) presented testimony from Senior Forensic Scientist Mary Hong in the 2008 capital murder prosecution of Lynn Dean Johnson…

Some proponents of the death penalty — including the late Justice Antonin Scalia and the 2016 Republican Party platform — have asserted that the Supreme Court cannot declare the death penalty unconstitutional because the Framers included reference to the punishment in the text of the Fifth Amendment. An article by Duke Law School Professor Joseph Blocher, published in the Northwestern University Law Review, critically analyzes that argument and concludes that the Fifth Amendment’s acknowledgment of…

A pharmacy that has received more than $125,000 in cash payments from Missouri for providing lethal injection drugs that the state has used in 16 executions has argued in a court filing that its identity should remain secret, claiming that selling execution drugs to the state’s Department of Corrections is political speech protected by the First Amendment. The supplier’s information was requested in a subpoena by Mississippi death row inmates who are challenging that state’s execution protocol…

As voters get set to cast ballots on death penalty questions in California, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, U.S. death row exonerees from across the country have been scouring those states in an effort to inform the public of the risks of wrongful executions. On September 19, 17 of the nation’s 156 death-row exonerees appeared at a California press conference advocating approval of Proposition 62, which would replace the death penalty with life without parole plus restitution, and defeat of Proposition…

The death-sentencing rate per homicide in Caddo Parish, Louisiana was nearly 8 times greater between 2006 and 2015 than the rest of the state, making a parish with only 5% of Louisiana’s population responsible for 38% of the death sentences imposed statewide. Caddo currently has more people on death row than any other parish in the state. Known as “Bloody Caddo,” the parish had the second highest number of lynchings of any county in the nation. The Confederate flag flew in front of the steps…