Publications & Testimony

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…

Three death-row exonerees, including two who became symbols of the risks of wrongful capital convictions, died in 2015. David Keaton (pictured, far left), the first man exonerated from death row in the modern era of the death penalty, died on July 3 at the age of 63. A teenaged Keaton was sentenced to death in Florida in 1971 for the murder of an off-duty police officer. His conviction was based upon a coerced confession and erroneous eyewitness testimony. Keaton was exonerated in 1973 when new…

Velma Barfield in North Carolina on November 2, 1984 — She was in a relationship with Stuart Taylor who was a widower. She forged checks on Taylor’s account to pay for her addiction. Fearing that she had been found out, she mixed an arsenic based rat poison into his beer and tea. Taylor became very ill. As his condition worsened, she took him to the hospital where he died a few days later. There was an autopsy which found that the cause of Taylor’s death was arsenic poisoning and Velma was…

Donnis Musgrove Alabama: Conviction, 1988; Died on Death Row, 2015 David Rogers Alabama: Conviction, 1988; Died on Death Row, 2004 Donnis Musgrove (pictured) died of lung cancer on Alabama’s death row on November 25, while his case — which included a substantial claim of innocence — was pending before a federal judge. Musgrove’s attorneys had asked U.S. District Judge David Proctor to rule quickly because of Musgrove’s medical condition. Musgrove and his co-defendant, David Rogers, who previously…

In 1997, a St. Louis County, Missouri jury unanimously voted to sentence David Barnett to death. Eighteen years later, after learning horrific details of the physical and sexual abuse to which Barnett had been subjected as a small child, Andrew Dazey — the jury foreman in Barnett’s trial — says “[t]here’s no way” he would have voted for death. At trial, Barnett’s lawyer presented some evidence of his client’s abuse, mental illness, and suicide attempts. However, he failed to present at least 11…