Publications & Testimony

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…

A poll of likely California voters conducted jointly by The Field Poll and the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley has found continuing erosion of support for the death penalty in the state and near-majority support for Proposition 62, a ballot question to replace the state’s death penalty with a system of life imprisonment without parole, plus restitution. The poll found significant voter confusion about a rival ballot measure, Proposition 66, that…

Semon Frank Thompson (pictured), a former superintendent at the Oregon State Penitentiary, oversaw both of the executions carried out under Oregon’s death penalty statute. He now believes that “capital punishment is a failed policy.” In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Thompson — who used to support the death penalty — explains how conducting executions changed his mind. Prior to serving as prison superintendent, Thompson had felt that “justice had been served” when a defendant who had…

A September 20 report by the Texas Defender Service says that Texas “has failed to ensure effective counsel” for appellants in capital cases and that the state’s system of reviewing death penalty cases on direct appeal is “in dire need of reform.” The report, titled Lethally Deficient, reviewed all 84 capital direct appeals decided by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) from 2009 to 2015 and identified numerous “persistent deficits in the provision of counsel on direct appeal in death…

Newspaper editorial boards in California are overwhelmingly supporting a November ballot initiative to abolish the state’s death penalty and replace it with life without parole plus restitution, and are uniformly rejecting an opposing initiative that purports to speed up the appeals process. At least eight California newspapers have published editorials supporting Proposition 62 and opposing Proposition 66, and Ballotpedia reports that it is aware of no editorial boards that have supported…

Judicial override of jury recommendations of life, the imposition of death sentences after non-unanimous jury sentencing recommendations, and prosecutorial misconduct, race bias, and ineffective defense counsel have made Mobile County, Alabama one of the most prolific death sentencing counties in the United States. Mobile judges imposed 8 death sentences between 2010 and 2015, 88% in cases with white victims. A recent report by Harvard University’s Fair Punishment Project attributes this high…

For the first time in two decades, Oklahoma will go at least two years without an execution. As part of an agreement in a federal lawsuit brought by the state’s death row prisoners, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (pictured) has said the state will not request execution dates for at least five months after the state adopts a new execution protocol. Because of this, when the Oklahoma Board of Corrections met on September 13, 2016, the state already could not have sought to conduct any…