Publications & Testimony

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe rejected a bill that would have employed the electric chair as the state’s method of execution if lethal injection drugs are unavailable. Instead, he offered amendments that would permit the Commonwealth’s Department of Corrections to enter into confidential contracts to obtain execution drugs from compounding pharmacies, whose identities would be concealed from the public. His proposal is similar to legislation he backed last year that failed because of…

Kenneth Clair (pictured), whose California death sentence was overturned last year, says he is innocent and that the Orange County District Attorney’s office is withholding DNA evidence that would prove it. His prosecutors have declared that they will not seek the death penalty against Clair in a new sentencing hearing, and in so doing may avoid pretrial discovery proceedings in which they could have been required to turn over the potentially exclupatory DNA evidence to the defense. Clair was…

A Texas court has found that a severely mentally ill death-row inmate, Marcus Druery (pictured), is incompetent to be executed. Druery’s attorneys presented more than 150 pages of reports from mental health professionals arguing that, as a result of major mental illness, Druery does not understand why he is being punished, making it unconstitutional to execute him. His “paranoid and grandiose delusions…deprive him of a rational understanding of the connection between his crime and punishment,”…

Amnesty International reported that worldwide executions spiked by 54% to at least 1,634 — a 25-year high — in 2015, even as the number of countries abolishing the death penalty reached record levels. In its annual report on global developments in capital punishment, released on April 6, Amnesty said that the bulk of recorded executions were concentrated in just three outlier countries — Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. These countries accounted for 89% of all recorded executions. Amnesty did not…

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…