Publications & Testimony

A majority of Americans prefer life without parole to the death penalty, according to the 2015 American Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. The poll of 2,695 Americans found that 52% preferred life without parole, while 47% preferred the death penalty. The poll found that respondents’ views on capital punishment tracked their views about racial justice and differed greatly by race. 53% of all Americans agreed with the statement, “A black person is more likely than a white…

Caddo Parish, Louisiana, known nationally for its aggressive pursuit of the death penalty, has elected its first black District Attorney. In a November 21 runoff election conducted against the backdrop of controversial remarks about the death penalty by the current DA and a threatened civil rights lawsuit over systemic racial discrimination by Caddo Parish prosecutors in jury selection, former judge James E. Stewart, Sr. defeated current Caddo Parish prosecutor Dhu Thompson, 55% to 45%. Ten…

A majority of Oklahoma voters favor abolition of the death penalty if it is replaced with a sentence of life without parole plus restitution, according to a new poll commissioned by News 9/News on 6. The survey by the non-partisan SoonerPoll.com found that 52.4% of Oklahomans would support abolition of the death penalty if the state replaced its system of capital punishment with the alternative sanction of life without parole, plus a requirement that the inmates pay restitution to victims’…

Georgia is scheduled to execute Marcus Johnson (pictured) on November 19 despite ongoing concerns about his innocence. The execution would be Georgia’s fifth since December 2014 — each raising serious questions about systemic problems in Georgia’s application of the death penalty. In a commentary for The Marshall Project, Sara Totonchi, executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, says these cases “are emblematic” of death sentences imposed before Georgia’s statewide capital…

Raphael Holiday (pictured) is scheduled to be executed in Texas on November 18 after appeals lawyers who were appointed to his case unilaterally decided not to seek clemency or pursue additional appeals and then opposed Holiday’s efforts to replace them with lawyers who would. James “Wes” Volberding and Seth Kretzer say that they were unable to find new evidence on which to base any appeal and that seeking clemency from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would give Holiday “false hope” and is pointless.

In light of the FBI’s acknowledgement in April that flawed forensic testimony by its expert hair-comparison analysts had tainted at least 268 cases, including 32 death penalty cases, forensic science is coming under increased scrutiny. A commentary in the Boston Review argues that “mounting horror stories,” including instances of crime-lab “corruption and dysfunction, have created a moment of crisis in forensic science.” Referencing “scores of individual cases in which forensic science failures…

Both executions and new death sentences in the United States are on pace for significant declines to their lowest levels in a generation, Reuters reports. With 25 executions conducted so far this year, and only two more scheduled, the United States could have its lowest number of executions since 1991, significantly below the peak of 98 executions in 1999. Only 8 states have carried out executions in the last two years, down from a high of 20, also in 1999. New death sentences, which peaked at…

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit has overturned a California federal district court decision that had declared California’s death penalty unconstitutional, saying that the issue presented “a novel constitutional rule” that was beyond the power of the federal courts to address in a habeas corpus proceeding. The appeals court did not address the constitutionality of California’s death penalty, saying that because of technical procedural rules “we may not assess…

Robert Patton (pictured), the director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections who oversaw the botched execution of Clayton Lockett, the use of the wrong third drug in the execution of Charles Warner, and the failed execution of Richard Glossip, was also involved in a number of Arizona executions that violated that state’s execution protocol, a BuzzFeed investigation revealed. Lockett was Oklahoma’s first execution under Patton, just two months after he became corrections director. For the…

In an op-ed for USA Today, three retired generals call for systemic review of the status of veterans on death row nationwide and urge decision-makers in capital cases to seriously consider the mental health effects of service-related PTSD in determining whether to pursue or to impose the death penalty against military veterans. Calling DPIC’s new report, “Battle Scars: Military Veterans and the Death Penalty,” “a wake-up call for an issue that few have focused on,” Brigadiers General (Ret.)