Publications & Testimony

As Texas readies itself to execute Richard Masterson (pictured), his lawyers have filed new pleadings questioning whether any murder occurred at all and are seeking a stay of execution based on what they say is “evidence of State fraud, misconduct, and his actual innocence.” Masterson’s filings challenge the forensic testimony presented by the prosecution in the case, the accuracy of instructions given to jurors, and the constitutionality of Texas’ lethal injection secrecy law. Masterson is…

Florida executions are plagued by stark racial, gender, and geographic disparities, according to a new University of North Carolina study, with executions 6.5 times more likely for murders of white female victims than for murders of black males. (See graph, left. Click to enlarge.). UNC Chapel Hill Professor Frank Baumgartner examined data from the 89 executions conducted in Florida between 1976 — when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Florida’s use of the death penalty — and 2014. Baumgartner…

On Sunday, January 10, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Anthony Ray Hinton, who was exonerated on April 3, 2015 after spending nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row. In the interview, Hinton described how issues of race permeated his case. Hinton told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley about a conversation he had with a police lieutenant after having been arrested: “I said, ‘You got the wrong guy.’ And he said, ‘I don’t care whether you did it or don’t.’ He said, ‘But you gonna be…

In an 8 – 1 decision in Hurst v. Florida released on January 12, the U.S. Supreme Court found Florida’s capital sentencing scheme in violation of the 6^th Amendment, which guarantees the right to trial by jury. “The Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the opinion of the Court. The jury and judge in Hurst’s case followed Florida’s statutory sentencing procedure, which requires only an “advisory…

On January 7, the Connecticut Supreme Court heard arguments in State of Connecticut v. Russell Peeler, in which state prosecutors are seeking to overturn the court’s 4 – 3 decision last summer declaring Connecticut’s death penalty unconstitutional. The court ruled in August in State v. Santiago that Connecticut’s prospective legislative repeal of the death penalty, in combination with “the state’s near total moratorium on carrying out executions over the past fifty-five years,” established that…

In a recent article in Slate, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree, the executive director of the university’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says “the death penalty is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption and cruelty.” He emphasizes the increasing isolation of capital punishment to a few outlier jurisdictions, particularly highlighting Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Caddo Parish received national attention when, shortly after the exoneration of Glenn…

The New York Times reports that the number of countries using capital punishment continued to shrink and its use became more isolated from 2013 to 2014, even as the number of death sentences worldwide rose. 105 countries have abolished the death penalty, most recently Suriname and Mongolia, and the United Nations lists 60 additional countries as “de facto abolitionist” because they have not had any executions in at least 10 years. That leaves just 28 countries that still practice capital…

A new report by a special committee created by Orange County, California District Attorney Tony Rackauckas (pictured) cites a “failure of leadership” as the root cause of a multi-decade history of prosecutorial misconduct involving jailhouse informants. Documents obtained by defense lawyers and The Orange County Register had revealed what the paper called “a secret and well-organized network of snitches” that had been hidden from defense counsel and the courts. In May 2015, California Superior…

Natrona County, Wyoming District Attorney Mike Blonigen (pictured) recently called for a reconsideration of the state’s death penalty after a federal judge overturned the death sentence of Dale Wayne Eaton, a decade after Blonigen obtained it in 2004. At the time U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson reversed Eaton’s sentence in 2014, Eaton was the only person on Wyoming’s death row. Judge Johnson ruled that Eaton had received ineffective representation, in part because of inadequate funding of…

Several newspapers across the country featured themes from DPIC’s 2015 Year End Report in editorials and opinion pieces at the end of December: “Once broadly accepted, capital punishment is increasingly a fringe practice. A handful of states conduct nearly all executions. Four — Texas, Missouri, Georgia and Florida — carried out 93 percent of them in 2015. Sixty-three percent of new death sentences came from a mere 2 percent of U.S. counties, a group with a history of disproportionately using…