Publications & Testimony

Duval County, Florida prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for the 2013 murder of Shelby Farah (pictured), over the objections of Ms. Farah’s family. After unsuccessful attempts to persuade prosecutors to non-capitally resolve the case, Darlene Farah, Ms. Farah’s mother, publicly expressed her views in a recent column in TIME. Farah said, “I do not want my family to go through the years of trials and appeals that come with death-penalty cases.” Instead, she wants her family to be able to…

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (pictured), in remarks to a capital case seminar hosted by California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, criticized the death penalty as a “wasteful enterprise” and urged voters, legislators, and the courts to address the issue. Speaking by video, the former Justice said, “Few other civilized societies engage in such a wasteful use of resources with no demonstrated benefit to society. Taxpayers should terminate this waste as expeditiously as…

In an address at the Vatican on February 21, Pope Francis (pictured) broadened his call for a global end to capital punishment and urged Catholic leaders around the world to take action to halt all executions during the Church’s ongoing “Holy Year of Mercy.” The pontiff’s address was a prelude to a two-day international conference, “A World Without the Death Penalty,” hosted in Rome by the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic organization that opposes capital punishment. Francis said, “The…

“As Jews, as citizens of a nation dedicated to liberty and justice, we believe that governments must protect the dignity and rights of every human being. The use of the death penalty, in America, fails to live up to this basic requirement,” wrote Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz (pictured), founder and President of Uri L’Tzedek, the Orthodox Jewish social justice movement. In a column for Jewish Journal, Rabbi Yanklowitz outlines the reasons for Jewish opposition to the death penalty, focusing…

Saying that if one is looking to identify “failed government programs …, Florida’s death penalty certainly fills the bill,” Brian Empric (pictured), vice-chairman of the Florida Federation of Young Republicans, presents a conservative case against the death penalty. In a recent guest column for the Orlando Sentinel, Empric says that — as the Florida legislature weighs its response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hurst v. Florida — the state should halt all executions “[u]ntil the…

In a recent Washington Times op-ed, two former state supreme court chief justices argue that a state supreme court justice who, as district attorney, had authorized the capital prosecution of a defendant, should not have later participated as a judge in deciding an appeal in that case. Gerald Kogan (pictured, l.), former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, and Michael Wolff (pictured, r.), former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri, joined a number of other former judges who…

Naval veteran Travis Hittson (pictured), scheduled to be executed by Georgia on February 17, has filed an application for clemency with the State Board of Pardons and Paroles. Hittson assisted his superior officer, Edward Vollmer, to kill and dismember a fellow sailor, Conway Utterbeck in 1992. Despite evidence that Vollmer was the more culpable of the two, prosecutors permitted him to plead guilty and receive a life sentence from which he could be paroled, while Hittson was sentenced to death.

United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the Court’s most ardent defenders of the constitutionality of capital punishment, has died at age 79. Appointed to the Court in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan, Justice Scalia voted to uphold the application of the death penalty in a wide variety of circumstances. He was part of 5 – 4 conservative majorities in a number of significant death penalty cases, including the 1987 decisions in McCleskey v. Kemp severely limiting the…

U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford has ordered an evidentiary hearing on Donald Fell’s (pictured) challenge to the constitutionality of the federal death penalty. In court filings seeking to bar federal prosecutors from seeking death against him in a pending retrial, Fell has argued that the federal death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Fifth and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Among other grounds, he has asserted that the death penalty…

Duane Buck, who was sentenced to death after a defense expert witness testified that Buck could pose a future danger to society because he is black, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to grant him a new sentencing hearing because of his lawyer’s ineffectiveness. Buck is one of six defendants whose Texas capital trials were identified by a Texas Attorney General’s report as having been tainted by race-based testimony by psychologist, Dr. Walter Quijano. The other five were granted new sentencing…