Publications & Testimony

A report by University of Virginia Law Professor Brandon L. Garrett describes the effects of false confessions in cases in which DNA evidence later led to an exoneration. Garrett reports that half of the 20 death row inmates who were exonerated by DNA testing had falsely confessed to the crime. He uses the recent exonerations of intellectually disabled defendants Leon Brown and Henry McCollum in North Carolina to illustrate the problem: “The police claimed that Brown and McCollum had each…

On August 7, a jury in Aurora, Colorado, sentenced James Holmes to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 2012 movie theater shooting that killed 12 people and injured dozens more. The jury said they could not reach a unanimous decision on Holmes’ sentence, an outcome that results in a sentence of life without parole. After the trial, one juror said that the prosecution had not persuaded three of the jurors to impose a death sentence. The deliberations, she said, were very…

On August 6, 1890, New York executed William Kemmler. It was the first time ever a state used the electric chair to carry out an execution. Proponents of electrocution — including Thomas Edison — touted the new method as quick, effective, painless, and humane: the same arguments later used by legislators to support lethal injection and execution by nitrogen gas. In May 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Kemmler’s challenge that the electric chair was cruel and unusual punishment.

Eight former state and federal prosecutors have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Timothy Foster’s death sentence because Georgia prosecutors discriminatorily used their discretionary strikes during jury selection in his case “to ensure that a black defendant accused of a crime against a white victim would face an all-white jury.” In their “amici curiae” (friends-of-the-court) brief in Foster v. Chatman, the former prosecutors said that “race discrimination persists in jury selection”…

The American Bar Association has released a new publication, The State of Criminal Justice 2015, examining major issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. The chapter devoted to capital punishment was written by Ronald Tabak, an attorney at Skadden Arps and board member of the Death Penalty Information Center. Tabak presents evidence of the declining use of the death penalty in death sentences and executions, particularly noting the growing geographic…

A new study to be published in the University of Denver Law Review shows that whether prosecutors seek the death penalty in Colorado “depends to an alarming extent on the race and geographic location of the defendant.” The study — based upon 10 years of data collected by attorney Meg Beardsley and University of Denver law professors Sam Kamin and Justin Marceau and sociology professor Scott Phillips — shows that race and place are statistically significant predictors of whether prosecutors will…

Former Texas prosecutor, Tim Cole — described by the Dallas Morning News as “a no-holds-barred lawman” in 4 terms as District Attorney for Archer, Clay, and Montague counties — now says that “Texas should join the 19 U.S. states where the death penalty has been abolished.” In an op-ed in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Cole says Texas’ dramatic decline in imposing the death penalty, from a record 49 death sentences in 1994 and 48 in 1999 to none in the first 7 months of 2015, is “proving as a…

On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court held (5 – 4) that Oklahoma inmates “failed to establish a likelihood of success on the merits of their claim that the use of midazolam violates the Eighth Amendment.” Three inmates on Oklahoma’s death row had challenged the state’s use of midazolam as the first drug in a three-drug protocol, saying that it “fails to render a person insensate to pain.” In a narrow decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court deferred to a District Court ruling upholding…

In an interview at Duke Law School, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reflected on the past term at the U.S. Supreme Court. She discussed several landmark cases from the past year, including Glossip v. Gross, in which she joined Justice Stephen Breyer in a dissent that questioned the constitutionality of the death penalty. Ginsburg said she had waited to take such a stance on the death penalty because past justices, “took themselves out of the running,” when they did so, leaving, “no room for them to…