Publications & Testimony

As national execution numbers drop to historic lows and a growing number of states halt executions or repeal the death penalty altogether, Missouri has recently increased the number of executions it is carrying out and overtaken Texas for the highest per-capita execution rate. Missouri and Texas have carried out all of the last 15 executions in the U.S. and 80% of executions through September 1 of this year. A report by The Marshall Project explores why Missouri is bucking national trends…

U.S. District Court Judge Gregory M. Sleet has criticized the lack of judicial review provided by the state and federal courts prior to Delaware’s 2012 execution of Shannon Johnson, saying Johnson’s execution “highlights profound failings in our judicial process.” In an article in the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice magazine, Judge Sleet — who was Chief Judge at the time of the case — called “[t]he Johnson case, and its result, … by far the most troubling I have encountered.”

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winning legal commentator Linda Greenhouse analyzes the significance of and interplay between the recent Connecticut Supreme Court decision striking down the state’s death penalty and Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the U.S. Supreme Court case Glossip v. Gross. “[T]he Connecticut Supreme Court not only produced an important decision for its own jurisdiction; but it addressed the United States Supreme Court frankly and directly,” Greenhouse…

The Dutch public employees’ pension fund, Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP (ABP), has divested from the pharmaceutical company Mylan after learning that the Virginia Department of Corrections had supplies of one of Mylan’s products in stock for use in executions. A spokesman for ABP — which with net assets of $416 billion is the world’s third largest pension fund — said, “As the Dutch government and Dutch society as a whole renounced the death penalty a long time ago, we do not want Dutch pension…

On August 31, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard argument in Jones v. Davis, an appeal by California of the 2014 U.S. District Court ruling that declared California’s death penalty unconstitutional. In 2014, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney held that the decades-long delays caused by California’s failure to provide lawyers for nearly 350 of its death-row prisoners made its death penalty system unconstitutionally cruel and unusual. He said that the “random few” whom…

A new study by Professor Frank Baumgartner of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Tim Lyman, a Documentation Specialist in New Orleans, reports stark disparities in Louisiana death sentences and executions depending upon the race and gender of the homicide victim. The study — to be published in the Loyola University of New Orleans Journal of Public Interest Law — finds that defendants accused of killing white victims are nearly twice as likely to be sentenced to death and nearly…

A Colorado jury has returned a life sentence in the capital trial of Dexter Lewis in the stabbing deaths of 5 people in a Denver bar in 2012. After less than 3 hours of deliberation, the jury determined that the aggravating factors relating to the killing did not outweigh Lewis’ mitigating evidence detailing the extensive history of abuse and neglect in his upbringing, including chronic alcohol abuse by his mother while she was pregnant and nearly daily beatings when he was a child. The defense…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected an appeal in the case of Texas death row inmate Duane Buck, who argued that his trial was tainted by ineffective representation and racial bias when Buck’s own mental health expert testified that he could be a future danger to society because he is black. Dr. Walter Quijano, a clinical psychologist, testified in the sentencing phase of Buck’s case on the issue of future dangerousness. The prosecutor asked Quijano, “You have determined…

The Kansas Federation of College Republicans unanimously adopted a resolution calling for repeal of the death penalty in their state. “More young conservatives like myself recognize that our broken and fallible system of capital punishment in no way matches up with our conservative values,” said Dalton Glasscock, a Wichita State University student and chairman of the federation. Citing pro-life views and fiscal responsibility, the group urged Kansas legislators to repeal the state’s death…

In an op-ed for Newsweek, Stanford Law Professor John Donohue argues that there is “not the slightest credible statistical evidence that capital punishment reduces the rate of homicide” and presents data to show that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent. Comparisons between neighboring jurisdictions show no effect of capital punishment: “Whether one compares the similar movements of homicide in Canada and the U.S., when only the latter restored the death penalty, or in American…