Publications & Testimony

Prosecutors across the country are seeking the death penalty less frequently and in recent interviews two district attorneys, one from Texas and one from Pennsylvania, have given some of their reasons why. Randall County, Texas District Attorney James Farren (pictured) told KFDA-TV in Amarillo that his experience handling one particularly lengthy and costly capital case has changed how he will make decisions in future cases that are eligible for the death penalty. He said that his office has…

For the third time in two years, the Delaware Supreme Court has reversed the conviction of a death row inmate because his trial was tainted by prosecutorial misconduct. On December 14, the court ordered a retrial for Chauncey Starling, who was convicted in 2003 of killing two people in a Wilmington barber shop, in part because prosecutors had failed to disclose that they had dropped charges against a key witness for violating his parole. Instead, prosecutors informed defense counsel that those…

Although Georgia carried out 5 of the 28 executions in the U.S. in 2015, it imposed no new death sentences and a significantly changed legal landscape points to a “new Georgia” with the death penalty in decline. The Georgia legal publication, Daily Report, dubbed the decline in death sentences its “newsmaker of the year,” and explored the reasons for the change. Jerry Word, the division director of the Georgia Capital Defender, said that with the Defender’s early intervention initiative…

In a unanimous decision issued December 21, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld Gov. Tom Wolf’s (pictured) imposition of a moratorium on executions while he awaits the results of a legislative commission’s report on Pennsylvania’s death penalty. On February 13, 2015, Wolf issued a temporary reprieve to Terrance Williams and announced that he would put all executions on hold. At that time, he said that Pennsylvania’s “capital punishment system has significant and widely recognized defects” and…

The North Carolina Supreme Court has reversed the historic rulings of a Cumberland County, N.C. trial court that had overturned the death sentences of four North Carolina death-row prisoners under the state’s Racial Justice Act. Ruling entirely on procedural grounds, the state’s high court expressed no opinion on the lower court’s fact findings that North Carolina prosecutors had engaged in a decades-long practice of intentional race discrimination in jury selection in capital cases. In April…

Three quarters of American executions in 2015 involved cases of “crippling disabilities and uncertain guilt,” according to a report by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard University. Saying that the 2015 executions revealed “a broken capital punishment system,” the report found that, “[o]f the 28 people executed [in 2015], 75% were mentally impaired or disabled, experienced extreme childhood trauma or abuse, or were of questionable guilt.” It said seven people…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit has ruled in favor of Kevan Brumfield, upholding the decision of a Louisiana federal district court that he is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution. Louisiana’s state courts had initially denied Brumfield resources to investigate evidence of his intellectual disability and then dismissed his case without an evidentiary hearing, finding that he had not presented sufficient evidence to justify further review of the issue. A…

On December 16, DPIC released its annual report on the latest developments in capital punishment, “The Death Penalty in 2015: Year End Report.” The death penalty declined by virtually every measure in 2015. 28 people were executed, the fewest since 1991. Death sentences dropped 33% from last year’s historic low, with 49 people being sentenced to death this year. There have now been fewer death sentences imposed in the last decade than in the decade before the U.S. Supreme Court declared…

Arizona officials have agreed not to schedule any executions until a federal court challenge to the state’s lethal injection protocol and secrecy policy is resolved. U.S. District Court Judge Neil V. Wake had previously put the lawsuit on hold while Arizona rewrote its execution protocol. He said the execution hold was necessary to prevent what he called “crisis litigation” — artificially forcing the court to decide issues in the 60 days before an execution was scheduled to occur. Such…