Publications & Testimony

A divided Arkansas Supreme Court voted 4 – 3 on June 23 to uphold the state’s lethal injection protocol and secrecy policy. The decision potentially opens the path for the state to move forward with eight executions that had been stayed pending the outcome of this litigation. However, it is unclear whether executions will resume because Arkansas’ supply of lethal injection drugs expires on June 30, and the supplier from which it obtained those drugs has indicated that it will no longer sell…

The pace of executions in Georgia is outstripping the pace of death sentences. While the number of executions this year (5) is equal to the single-year record set in 1987 and 2015, no one has been sentenced to death in more than two years, and prosecutors are rarely seeking death sentences. The last death sentence in Georgia came down in March 2014. The number of notices of intent to seek the death penalty has fallen by more than 60% in the last decade, from 34 in 2006 to 13 in 2015. This year…

Pennsylvania’s taxpayers have paid an estimated $272 million per execution since the Commonwealth reinstated its death penalty in 1978, according to an investigation by The Reading Eagle. Using data from a 2008 study by the Urban Institute, the Eagle calculated that cost of sentencing 408 people to death was an estimated $816 million higher than the cost of life without parole. The estimate is conservative, the paper says, because it assumes only one capital trial for each defendant and it does…

The U.S. Supreme Court granted writs of certiorari in three jury discrimination cases on June 20, vacating each of them and directing state courts in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana to reconsider the issue in light of the Court’s recent decision in Foster v. Chatman. Two of the petitioners, Curtis Flowers of Mississippi and Christopher Floyd of Alabama, are currently on death row. The third, Jabari Williams, was convicted in Louisiana of second-degree murder. Earlier this year, the Supreme…

Sharon Risher, whose mother, Ethel Lance (pictured), and cousins, Susie Jackson and Tywanza Sanders, were killed in the racially-motivated shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church one year ago, says she has not forgiven Dylann Roof, the accused perpetrator, but does not think he should be sentenced to death. In an article for Vox, Risher shared her experiences since the shooting, discussing her emotional reactions to her mother’s death and her views on gun control, the removal of the…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has granted a stay of execution to Robert Roberson (pictured), who had been scheduled to be executed on June 21 for the 2003 death of his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis. The court’s June 16 stay order halts Roberson’s execution under a recent Texas law permitting court challenges based on new scientific evidence of innocence. Prosecution experts had testified at Roberson’s trial that his daughter died of Shaken Baby Syndrome, asserting that…

The Delaware Supreme Court heard oral argument on June 15 in Rauf v. State, a case challenging the constitutionality of the state’s death sentencing statute on the grounds that it violates the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury. The challenge arose in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in January 2016 in Hurst v. Florida, which struck down Florida’s sentencing scheme, saying that “[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence…

On June 13, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Miranda v. Arizona, granting suspects critical constitutional protections designed to combat abusive police interrogation practices. In commentary for The Marshall Project, Samuel Gross (pictured) and Maurice Possley of the National Registry of Exonerations discuss the interplay between false confessions, the death penalty, and wrongful convictions and describe how Miranda’s famous rights to remain silent and to be represented by a lawyer during…