Publications & Testimony

Death row in Texas has shrunk from 460 men and women at its peak in 1999 to 260 today. The main reason for that drop, according to an article in The Texas Tribune, is the dramatic decline in death sentences imposed in the state. In 1999 alone, Texas sentenced 48 people to death. But in the first 6 months of 2015, no death sentences have been imposed in Texas. This development is unprecedented, according to the Texas Defender Service (TDS). “This is the longest we’ve gone in a calendar year in…

Michelle Byrom (pictured, seated) was released from prison in Mississippi on June 26 after spending 16 years behind bars, 14 of them on death row, for the murder of her husband. Byrom maintains her innocence for the crime, but agreed to an Alford plea — which means that she pleaded no contest to the charges against her — in exchange for her release. In 2014, the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed Byrom’s conviction and death sentence and ordered a new trial, citing numerous problems in her…

Glenn Ford, who was exonerated last year after spending almost 30 years on Louisiana’s death row, died of lung cancer on June 29 at the age of 65. At the time of his release, Ford was the nation’s longest-serving death row exoneree. Just hours after his death, Ford’s case was cited in the dissenting opinion of Justice Breyer in Glossip v. Gross, as providing “striking” evidence “that the death penalty has been wrongly imposed.” Justice Breyer mentioned innocence, prosecutorial wrongdoing, the…

On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court held (5 – 4) in Glossip v. Gross 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…

Lester Bower was executed in Texas on June 3 despite maintaining his innocence throughout the 30 years he spent on death row. The evidence of Bower’s innocence included testimony from a woman who said that her boyfriend and three of his friends — not Bower — had committed the murders for which Bower was executed. The witness came forward in 1989, after reading that Bower had been sentenced to death for the crime her boyfriend had confessed to committing six years earlier. In 2012, a judge…

In an interview with The Marshall Project, Bryan Stevenson (pictured), director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy, discussed the role the history of slavery, lynchings, and racial terrorism in the South played in the racially-motivated killings of nine black people in an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the interview, Stevenson described the historical use of the death penalty as a tool to reinforce a racially discriminatory social order. This, he…

This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a Georgia case, Foster v. Humphrey, in which an all-white jury sentenced a black man to death after prosecutors struck every black prospective juror in the case. The Court will determine whether prosecutors violated the Court’s 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky, which banned the practice of dismissing potential jurors on the basis of race. In anticipation of the case, The New Yorker published an analysis of tactics used to evade Batson challenges by…

Recent editorials from leading newspapers in three of the largest death row states critique flaws in the death penalty and call for its abolition. The Sacramento Bee quoted federal district court judge Cormac Carney’s recent ruling finding California’s death penalty unconstitutional because executions are so rare that they “serve no retributive or deterrent purpose.” The Bee called the state’s capital punishment system “an abject failure” and said, “[t]he death penalty has not worked, and never…

A new study by North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation examines the financial and human costs of cases in which, “prosecutors sought the death penalty despite a clear lack of evidence, resulting in acquittal or dismissal of charges.” The report found 56 such cases in North Carolina since 1989, in which innocent people spent a total of 112 years spent in jail, with $2.4 million spent in defense costs alone in these weak death penalty cases. The authors compare these cases to those…