Publications & Testimony

I Am Troy Davis is a recent book by Jen Marlowe and Troy Davis’ sis­ter, Martina Davis-Correia, that tells the sto­ry of a pos­si­bly inno­cent man who was exe­cut­ed in Georgia in 2011. Troy Davis was sen­tenced to death for the mur­der of a police offi­cer in Savannah. Years lat­er evi­dence cast­ing doubts about his guilt emerged, includ­ing recan­ta­tions from sev­er­al of the wit­ness­es who had tes­ti­fied against him. Pope Benedict XVI, President…

On May 27, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Hall v. Florida that Florida’s strict IQ cut­off for deter­min­ing intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty in cap­i­tal cas­es is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. The Court con­clud­ed, ​“Florida’s law con­tra­venes our Nation’s com­mit­ment to dig­ni­ty and its duty to teach human decen­cy as the mark of a civilized…

On May 22, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed into law a bill that will allow the state to use the elec­tric chair in exe­cu­tions if lethal injec­tion drugs are not avail­able. While sev­en states, includ­ing Tennessee, allow inmates to choose the elec­tric chair as their method of exe­cu­tion, no oth­er state forces inmates to be exe­cut­ed by that method. Defense attor­ney David Raybin, who helped draft Tennessee’s death penal­ty law in the 1970s, said that chang­ing the…

The Bureau of Justice Statistics recent­ly issued a new report, ​“Capital Punishment, 2012,” ana­lyz­ing the use of the death penal­ty in that year and reveal­ing over­all trends since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed. The report not­ed that 2012 was ​“the twelfth con­sec­u­tive year in which the num­ber of inmates under sen­tence of death decreased.” Among the sta­tis­tics not report­ed else­where, BJS not­ed that the time between sen­tenc­ing and exe­cu­tion in 2012 was 15.8 years. The average…

UPDATE: The U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay of exe­cu­tion, pend­ing the out­come of a review by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8^th Circuit. The Court fur­ther not­ed: ​“We leave for fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion in the low­er courts whether an evi­den­tiary hear­ing is…

A recent poll by Quinnipiac University found that Ohioans sup­port life sen­tences over the death penal­ty for peo­ple con­vict­ed of mur­der. A total of 49% of respon­dents chose sen­tences of life with­out parole (40%) or life with parole (9%), com­pared to just 43% who chose the death penal­ty. The sur­vey also showed a 4‑point drop in death penal­ty sup­port in just the last three months. In February, 47% of respon­dents said they pre­ferred the death penal­ty. Death penal­ty sup­port was…

On May 15, the Associated Press and four oth­er media orga­ni­za­tions filed suit against the state of Missouri, ask­ing a state court to order the Department of Corrections (DOC) to release infor­ma­tion about the source of its lethal injec­tion drugs. Under Missouri law, the iden­ti­ty of the ​“exe­cu­tion team” is secret, and the DOC has inter­pret­ed the drug sup­pli­er to be a part of that team. The oth­er four news orga­ni­za­tions are the Guardian‑U.S., the…

Oliver North, a for­mer Marine and not­ed con­ser­v­a­tive leader, has opposed the death penal­ty for many years. In a recent inter­view, he said, ​“I’m a ​‘law and order’ guy. Don’t get me wrong. Individuals need to be held accountable…but I have always felt… and always said that there are very seri­ous ques­tions about the jus­tice of the death penal­ty. Just a few months ago, a man (Glenn Ford) who was on death row for thir­ty years was found to be inno­cent.” When…

A new book, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty, describes the his­to­ry of flawed exe­cu­tions in the U.S. from 1890 to 2010. During that peri­od, 8,776 peo­ple were exe­cut­ed and 276 of those exe­cu­tions went wrong in some way. Of all the meth­ods used, lethal injec­tion had the high­est rate of botched exe­cu­tions – about 7%. Austin Sarat, the author of the book and a pro­fes­sor of jurispru­dence and polit­i­cal sci­ence at Amherst…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stayed the exe­cu­tion of Robert Campbell just hours before he was sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed in Texas on May 13, grant­i­ng him per­mis­sion to file a new peti­tion on his claim of men­tal retar­da­tion. If Campbell is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled, he is barred from exe­cu­tion by the Supreme Court’s 2002 rul­ing in Atkins v. Virginia. The unan­i­mous three-judge pan­el not­ed that Texas author­i­ties had…