Publications & Testimony

On January 16, 2026, Chancellor I’Aesha L. Myles grant­ed a tem­po­rary injunc­tion order­ing the Tennessee Department of Corrections (TDOC) to expand access to exe­cu­tions for pub­lic and media wit­ness­es. The order was in response to a suit filed by a media coali­tion that includes the Associated Press, Gannett Co., Inc., Nashville Public Media, Inc., Nashville Public Radio, Scripps Media, Inc., Six Rivers Media, LLC, and TEGNA Inc.. The TDOC has faced scruti­ny in recent years for its…

September 30, 1953 was an event­ful night for 19-year-old Tommy Lee Walker. After catch­ing a ride home from work at 6 p.m. — he didn’t have a car — he spent a few hours with friends in Exall Park near his home in Dallas. He then vis­it­ed his girl­friend Mary Louise Smith, who was nine months preg­nant. It seemed like the baby would come any minute, and sure enough, Mary Louise went into labor that night. Their son Ted was born in the ear­ly hours of October 1. Yet despite the many…

Justin D. Levinson and Rachel G. Schaefer recent­ly pub­lished Flawed Framework, Fatal Discretion: Unraveling Implicit Bias in Capital Punishment Decisions. The arti­cle syn­the­sizes mul­ti­ple stud­ies exam­in­ing the role of implic­it bias among key deci­sion­mak­ers with­in the legal sys­tem. The authors use this research as evi­dence of both the his­tor­i­cal and ongo­ing influ­ence of implic­it bias on the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty. In 2025, **75% of defendants against…

For decades, Texas per­formed exe­cu­tions at the high­est rate in the coun­try. It has car­ried out the most exe­cu­tions in the mod­ern era, with near­ly five times the num­ber as the next high­est state. However, that trend has changed in recent years, as both the num­ber of new death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions has sig­nif­i­cant­ly declined. The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s (TCADP) 2025 Annual Report exam­ines the dwin­dling use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and the…

Today is the ten-year anniver­sary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s deci­sion in Hurst v. Florida. Heralded as a water­shed rul­ing for cap­i­tal defen­dants, Hurst reaf­firmed the prin­ci­ple that the jury alone must find the facts nec­es­sary to con­demn a per­son to die — impli­cat­ing the death sen­tences of hun­dreds of pris­on­ers across three states. The Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury…

On December 15, 2025, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole put a hold on the exe­cu­tion of Stacey Humphreys and post­poned his clemen­cy hear­ing, orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled for December 16,​“indef­i­nite­ly.” Mr. Humphreys was to be exe­cut­ed December 17 — despite claims that his tri­al was taint­ed by what three Supreme Court jus­tices described as​“extreme juror mis­con­duct.” He was the first per­son sched­uled for exe­cu­tion in Georgia in 2025. Last week, Mr. Humphreys’ attorneys…