Publications & Testimony

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will hear arguments on September 23 regarding Scott Panetti’s competency to be executed. Panetti is a severely mentally ill man who represented himself at his trial wearing a cowboy costume, and attempted to subpoena the Pope, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. As the court prepares to hear Panetti’s case, opinion pieces in two Texas newspapers used it to illustrate larger problems with the death penalty and mental illness. In an op-ed in The…

A shipment of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic once widely used in executions, was recently stopped in India before it could reach Nebraska. The Indian distributor sold more than $50,000 worth of sodium thiopental to the state in May, but the shipment was stopped before leaving the country because of “improper or missing paperwork.” FedEx said it halted the shipment because it did not have Food And Drug Administration clearance: “As with any international importation of a drug, data about that…

So far in 2015, no one has been sentenced to death in Texas. The death row population has dropped to 257, down from 460 at its peak in 1999. In that year, Texas sentenced 48 people to death, the most in any year since the death penalty was reinstated. Among the reasons for the decline in death sentences has been the adoption of the alternative sentence of life without parole (adopted in 2005), and a change in the political climate that had led politicians to compete in trying to appear “tough…

In his new book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities, and in media interviews accompanying its release, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer discusses the relationship between American laws and those of other countries and his dissent in Glossip v. Gross, which questioned the constitutionality of the death penalty. In an interview with The National Law Journal, Breyer summarized the core reasons underlying his Glossip dissent: “You know, sometimes people make…

In a sweeping look at the current state of the U.S. death penalty, USA Today reporters Richard Wolf and Kevin Johnson highlight several recent story lines that collectively illustrate a dramatic decline in the country’s use of capital punishment. Their conclusion: “The death penalty in America may be living on borrowed time.” Wolf and Johnson recount recent cases in which high-profile crimes resulted in a life without parole sentence, in many instances because victims’ families raised concerns…

Montez Spradley, sentenced to death by an Alabama judge in 2008 over a jury’s 10 – 2 recommendation for life without parole, was freed from prison on September 4. Spradley spent 9.5 years incarcerated, including 3.5 years on death row. He was granted a new trial in 2011 as a result of multiple evidentiary errors in his trial. The state’s key witness against Spradley, his ex-girlfriend, Alisha Booker, later testified that she had lied at trial because Spradley was cheating on her. “I just felt he…

UPDATE: Former Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn (pictured), former Oklahoma Sooners and Dallas Cowboys football coach Barry Switzer, and John W. Raley, Jr., the former chief federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Oklahoma, have joined with innocence advocates Barry Scheck, Co-Director of the Innocence Project, and Samuel Gross, editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, in a letter to Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin urging her to stay the execution of Richard Glossip. Glossip is…

Richard Glossip, who is scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma on September 16, is seeking a stay of execution to allow consideration of his claims of innocence. Glossip was convicted solely on the testimony of Justin Sneed, then 19 years old, who confessed to the crime and said he hired Glossip to help him. No physical evidence linked Glossip to the crime, and Sneed gave investigators multiple contradictory descriptions of the murder before adopting police suggestions that Glossip was involved.

Riverside County, California is “the buckle of a new Death Belt,” says Professor Robert J. Smith of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, producing 7 death sentences in the first half of 2015. This, Smith says, is “more than California’s other 57 counties combined, more than any other state, and more than the whole Deep South combined.” Los Angeles County has produced 33 death sentences since 2010 — the most in the Nation — and 5 Southern California counties (also including Kern…

Robert Cindrich, a former U.S. District Judge and U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, recently wrote an op-ed for the Harrisburg Patriot-News calling Governor Tom Wolf’s moratorium on executions in Pennsylvania “appropriate” and “reasonable.” Expressing concerns about “multiple, serious problems with the death penalty” in Pennsylvania, Judge Cindrich says Governor Wolf “was absolutely correct” that no executions should take place until the Pennsylvania Advisory Committee and…