Publications & Testimony

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…

A recent poll conducted by the University of South Carolina reveals deep racial divisions in the state over the death penalty and over the appropriateness of applying it in the case of Dylann Roof, the white defendant who faces state and federal capital charges in the race-based killings of nine black members of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. According to the poll, 64.9% of African Americans in South Carolina oppose the death penalty, while 69.4% of white South Carolinians say they support…

Saying that he has a permanent condition that makes him too mentally ill to execute, the office of California Attorney General Kamala Harris (pictured) recently asked the California Supreme Court to remove Ronnie McPeters from California’s death row and resentence him to life without parole. The action is rare because McPeters is not facing an imminent execution date, but Chief Deputy Attorney General Nathan Barankin said his office now considers some death row prisoners so “grievously…

A second Florida trial court has ruled that the state’s new death penalty statute is unconstitutional. On June 9, Hillsborough County Judge Samantha Ward barred prosecutors from seeking death against Michael Edward Keetley, saying that the state’s death penalty statute violated the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Judge Ward said that the Florida legislature’s changes to the sentencing law after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared the old statute unconstitutional in Hurst v. Florida…

On June 9, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Williams v. Pennsylvania that Terry Williams’ (pictured) due process rights were violated when Pennsylvania’s Chief Justice refused to recuse himself from the case. Ronald Castille served as Philadelphia District Attorney before being elected to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. As District Attorney, he personally approved the decision to pursue the death penalty against the 18-year-old Williams, and then, while running for state Supreme Court, touted his…

Pascal Calogero (pictured), former associate and chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, has called upon the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case of David Brown, a Louisiana death row prisoner who is challenging his sentence on the grounds that prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence. Brown says prosecutors violated the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brady v. Maryland, which requires disclosure of evidence that would be favorable to a defendant, whether relating to his guilt or in reaching…

A judge dismissed murder charges against former Texas death row prisoner Kerry Max Cook on June 6, after prosecutors conceded that his due process rights had been violated by the presentation of false testimony from an alternative suspect. The decision moves Cook one step closer to exoneration, nearly 40 years after he was originally convicted and sentenced to death for the 1977 murder of Linda Jo Edwards. Smith County prosecutors tried Cook three times, twice winning convictions and death…