Publications & Testimony

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…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit says that “Adam Kelly Ward (pictured) has been afflicted with mental illness his entire life.” Yet Texas will execute him on March 22 unless the U.S. Supreme Court grants him a stay to review his case. Ward’s lawyers argue that the execution of a person who is severely mentally ill constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and that, for that reason, Ward should not be executed. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied review of that issue on March…

Baptist ethicist and theologian Dr. Roger E. Olson (pictured) recently issued a call “for Christian churches to publicly stand against the death penalty for Christian reasons.” A professor of Christian Theology and Ethics at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Dr. Olson writes in an essay for the theology website Patheos.com that “authentic Christians must oppose the death penalty.” He says that, while “[t]here are many secular reasons to abolish the death penalty,” there…

A new article by Cornell Law School Professor John Blume (pictured) and Lindsey Vann of Justice 360 analyzes South Carolina’s experience with the death penalty over the last 40 years and argues that capital punishment in the Palmetto State continues to exhibit the same arbitrary and discriminatory features that led the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the death penalty in 1972. Using Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in Glossip v. Gross as a guide, Blume and Vann point to unreliability…

In a divided 4 – 3 decision, the Ohio Supreme Court on March 16, 2016 authorized the state to try for a second time to execute death row inmate Romell Broom (pictured, after the state’s failed first attempt to execute him). The court majority held that a second execution attempt would not violate constitutional protections against twice placing a defendant in jeopardy of life, nor constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Ohio first tried to execute Broom on September 15, 2009, but the attempt…

United States District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis (pictured) ruled on March 15 that federal death row inmate Ronell Wilson is ineligible for the death penalty because he has intellectual disability. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Atkins v. Virginia that the death penalty constituted cruel and unusual punishment when applied to people diagnosed with intellectual disability, then known as mental retardation. Wilson was first sentenced to death in New York federal district court in…

In two separate op-eds, an Ohio Supreme Court Justice and a death row exoneree from Ohio expressed concerns about wrongful convictions that have led them to believe the death penalty should be abolished. In The Highland County Press, Justice Paul Pfeifer (pictured, r.) wrote about the “long and complex” case of Thomas Keenan, who was granted a new trial because prosecutors illegally withheld evidence. Pfeifer points to the misconduct in Keenan’s case as a reason why the death penalty should be…