Publications & Testimony

After Debbie Carter was raped and murdered in Ada, Oklahoma in 1982, police and prosecutors told her cousin, Christy Sheppard (pictured) that Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz were guilty of the crime. In 1988, Williamson was convicted and sentenced to death; Fritz received a life sentence. Eleven years later, the pair were exonerated when DNA testing excluded them as perpetrators and pointed to another man who had once been a suspect. Sheppard, now a criminal justice counselor and victim…

Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld newly enacted death penalty statutes in Gregg v. Georgia and two other cases, Professor Evan J. Mandery of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice says arbitrariness continues to plague the administration of capital punishment across the United States. In a piece for The Marshall Project, Professor Mandery revisits the death penalty in light of the constitutional defects that led the Supreme Court to overturn existing capital punishment statutes…

According to a report by Raw Story, two recent executions may have irreparably impaired efforts by several prisoners to prove their innocence, preventing them from presenting testimony from potential alternate suspects. Rodney Lincoln was convicted of the 1982 murder of JoAnn Tate and assaulting her two young daughters and was sentenced to two life terms. The primary evidence against him was the testimony of Melissa Davis, Tate’s eight-year-old daughter who survived the attack. Years later…

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles announced on March 31 that it had denied clemency to Joshua Bishop. Bishop had asked that his death sentence be reduced to life without parole because his co-defendant, who was nearly twice Bishop’s age at the time of the crime, and had a history of violent crime while Bishop did not, was given a plea deal resulting in a life sentence. Bishop is scheduled to be executed in Georgia on March 31. Seven of the twelve jurors who voted to sentence Bishop to…

A group of prominent Oklahomans have announced the creation of a 12-member Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission to conduct a comprehensive review of the state’s death penalty. The all-volunteer commission will be led by three co-chairs, former Governor Brad Henry (pictured), retired Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Reta Strubhar, and former U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Lester. The commission intends “to conduct extensive research on [Oklahoma’s] entire death penalty process, beginning with an…

In one week, courts in unrelated cases have granted relief to two Alabama death row inmates because of prosecutorial misconduct. On March 11, Alabama Circuit Judge Robert Smith dismissed capital charges against ex-state trooper George Martin and barred his retrial because of the prosecution’s “willful misconduct.” Martin had been convicted for allegedly murdering his wife in a car fire. In 2000, jurors recommended that Martin be sentenced to life, but the trial judge overrode their…

In an interview with The Marshall Project, Texas death penalty juror Sven Berger says he would not have voted to sentence capital defendant Paul Storey to death in 2008 had he known about Storey’s “borderline intellectual functioning,” history of depression, and other evidence that Storey’s lawyer failed to present at trial. Berger and 11 other Texas jurors unanimously voted to sentence Storey to death, but Berger says that at the time of jury deliberations he did not believe Storey would pose…

A South Carolina federal district court has vacated the death sentence imposed on Johnny Bennett, an African-American defendant condemned by an all-white jury after prosecutor Donald Myers (pictured) had “made multiple statements clearly calculated to excite the jury with racial imagery and stereotypes.” Myers’ misconduct included eliciting irrelevant evidence that Bennett had an interracial sexual relationship with a white woman and that a white witness whom Bennett had assaulted when he was…

Cole County, Missouri Circuit Judge Jon Beetem ruled on March 21 that Missouri must release the names of pharmacies that have provided lethal injection drugs for executions. Judge Beetem ruled in favor of the ACLU of Missouri and several media organizations that had filed three separate suits against the state. The media plaintiffs included the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Kansas City Star, the Springfield News-Leader, Associated Press, The…

American Bar Association President Paulette Brown has sent a letter to California Govenor Jerry Brown urging him to grant a reprieve to death row inmate Kevin Cooper to permit a full investigation of Cooper’s possible innocence. The ABA President wrote: “Mr. Cooper’s arrest, prosecution, and conviction are marred by evidence of racial bias, police misconduct, evidence tampering, suppression of exculpatory information, lack of quality defense counsel, and a hamstrung court system. We therefore…