Publications & Testimony

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has granted a stay of execution to Charles Flores (pictured) to permit him to litigate a claim that prosecutors unconstitutionally convicted and sentenced him to death by using unreliable hypnotically refreshed testimony. Texas had scheduled Flores’ execution for June 2. Flores, who is Latino, was convicted in 1999 of murdering a 64-year-old white woman in suburban Dallas, and was sentenced to death. Prosecutors presented no physical evidence linking Flores…

In a 5 – 2 decision issued May 26, the Connecticut Supreme Court reaffirmed its August 2015 decision in State v. Santiago that the death penalty violates Connecticut’s state constitution. Connecticut prospectively repealed the death penalty in 2012, leaving eleven men on death row. In Santiago, the court ruled that “capital punishment has become incompatible with contemporary standards of decency in Connecticut,” and replaced the eleven remaining death sentences with life without parole.

The Nebraska Supreme Court heard oral argument on May 25 in a challenge to the proposed November referendum that could reverse the state legislature’s 2015 repeal of the death penalty (vote results pictured left). Christy and Richard Hargesheimer, who oppose the death penalty, are challenging the documents submitted by Nebraskans for the Death Penalty, the organization supporting the referendum, on the grounds that the group violated state law when they failed to list Governor Pete Ricketts as…

As California prosecutors and law enforcement officials submitted signatures backing a ballot initiative intended to speed up the state’s dysfunctional death penalty appeals process, a coalition of innocence advocates and wrongfully convicted exonerees warned that the proposal will substantially increase the risk that California will execute an innocent person. The initiative, sponsored by district attorneys with major funding by the state’s prison guards’ union, would respond to appellate…

I. Beverly Lake, Jr. — a staunch supporter of North Carolina’s death penalty during his years as a State Senator and who, as a former Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, repeatedly voted to uphold death sentences — has changed his stance on capital punishment. In a recent piece for The Huffington Post, Lake said he not only supported capital punishment as a State Senator, he “vigorously advocated” for it and “cast my vote at appropriate times to uphold that harsh and most final…

Cert. granted May 26, 2015 as Foster v. Humphrey Argument: Nov. 2, 2015 Decided: May 23, 2016 In a 7 – 1 decision authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court granted a new trial to Timothy Foster, an African-American defendant who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury after Georgia prosecutors had struck every black prospective juror in his case. The Court held that prosecutors impermissibly struck two African-American jurors on the basis of race in violation of Batson v. Kentucky, which…

On May 23, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction and death sentence of Timothy Foster (pictured) because Georgia prosecutors improperly exercised their discretionary jury strikes on the basis of race to exclude African American jurors. The vote was 7 – 1, with Justice Thomas the lone dissenter. Foster is now entitled to a new trial. Foster, who is black, was sentenced to death by an all-white jury after prosecutors used their peremptory challenges to remove every black…

Following seven months of investigation into the causes of Oklahoma’s botched execution of Charles Warner using an unauthorized execution drug and its near-execution of Richard Glossip with the same wrong drug, an Oklahoma grand jury issued a report on May 19 identifying a wide range of what it characterized as “negligent,” “careless,” and in some instances “reckless” conduct by state officials that deviated from the state’s execution protocol. The state’s three-drug execution protocol called…

U.S. District Court Judge Neil Wake ruled on May 18 that a lethal injection challenge brought by Arizona death row prisoners may move forward, preventing Arizona from carrying out any executions before the reported expiration date of its supply of a key execution drug. Arizona has said that it is unable to replenish its supply of midazolam, an anti-anxiety medication that a number of states have used as a sedative in multi-drug lethal injection procedures. The death row prisoners are…

One year after the Nebraska legislature voted to repeal the death penalty and overrode a gubernatorial veto of that measure, actions in legislatures across the country suggest that the state’s efforts signalled a growing movement against the death penalty by conservative legislators and that support for the death penalty among Republican legislators is no longer a given. Reporting in The Washington Post, Amber Phillips writes that Republican legislators in ten states sponsored or co-sponsored…