Publications & Testimony

Two Philadelphia, Pennsylvania capital cases involving men who have long asserted their innocence reached major milestones on August 23, with one winning an appeal granting him a new trial and a jury acquitting a second in his retrial. Both cases involved allegations of serious police and prosecutorial misconduct. James Dennis (pictured), who has been on the Commonwealth’s death row for nearly 25 years, was granted a new trial by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit after prosecutors…

As states and counties across the United States are using the death penalty with decreasing frequency, a new report issued by the Fair Punishment Project on August 23 explores the outlier practices of 16 U.S. counties that are bucking the national trend and disproportionally pursuing capital punishment. These jurisdictions, representing one-half of one percent of all U.S. counties or county equivalents, are the only locales in the United States to have imposed five or more death sentences since…

A recent poll by researcher Craig Haney, a Professor of Psychology at the University of California — Santa Cruz, has found that a “strong majority” of Florida respondents prefer life without parole to the death penalty for people convicted of murder, even as many harbor continuing misconceptions about capital punishment that would predispose them to support the death penalty. In Haney’s survey of more than 500 jury-eligible respondents who were asked to choose between Florida’s statutorily…

As his August 24 execution date approaches, Jeffrey Wood’s case has garnered mounting attention from groups and individuals calling on the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Greg Abbott to commute Wood’s sentence. These diverse voices include a conservative Texas state representative, a group of evangelical leaders, and the editorial boards of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and several Texas newspapers, among others. Wood (pictured) was convicted under Texas’ “law of…

Harris County, Texas has sent more people to death row than any other county in the United States and Jerry Guerinot (pictured) was defense counsel for twenty-one of them. His death-sentenced clients included two who were juveniles at the time of the crime and another who was later freed after prosecutors dropped charges against him. Labeled by some as “the worst lawyer in the United States,” in forty years of practice, none of Guerinot’s capital murder clients was acquitted. Now, after decades…

The Equal Justice Initiative has announced plans to construct a Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama to commemorate the victims of terror lynchings in the American South. In a New Yorker profile of EJI executive director Bryan Stevenson, Jeffrey Toobin describes EJI’s criminal defense work and the genesis of the lynching memorial. “There’s no question that we have a long history of seeing people through [a] lens of racial difference. It’s a direct line from slavery to the…

Delaware Attorney General Matt Denn (pictured) announced on August 15 that his office will not appeal the Delaware Supreme Court’s August 2 decision in Benjamin Rauf v. State of Delaware, which struck down the state’s death penalty statute. In Rauf, the court found that Delaware’s capital sentencing scheme violated the Sixth Amendment, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hurst v. Florida, by granting judges, rather than juries, the ultimate power to decide whether the prosecution had…

A new study of Nebraska’s death penalty found that the state spends $14.6 million per year to maintain its capital punishment system. The study, The Economic Impact of the Death Penalty on the State of Nebraska: A Taxpayer Burden?, also estimates that each death penalty prosecution cost Nebraska’s taxpayers about $1.5 million more than a life without parole prosecution. At a press conference announcing the study, principal investigator Dr. Ernest Goss — an economics professor at Creighton…

On August 2, 2016, the Delaware Supreme Court, by a vote of 4 – 1, declared the state’s capital sentencing procedures unconstitutional. The decision, in the case of Benjamin Rauf v. State of Delaware, left Delaware without a valid death penalty statute. Four members of the Delaware high court ruled that the state’s capital sentencing statute unconstitutionally empowers judges, rather than jurors, to decide whether the prosecution has proven the existence of all aggravating circumstances that are…

Louisiana death row exoneree John Thompson (pictured, center), who was wrongly convicted of two different New Orleans murders as a result of prosecutorial misconduct, has filed a petition with the United States Department of Justice seeking an investigation of more than 100 cases prosecuted by former Orleans Parish assistant district attorney James Williams. Thompson filed his petition on August 2 under provisions of the Law Enforcement Misconduct Statute, which makes it a violation of federal…