Publications & Testimony

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…

84 years after Pennsylvania executed a black 16-year-old for the 1931 murder of his white school matron, the descendants of the boy’s trial lawyers are trying to exonerate him. Samuel Lemon, the great-grandson of Alexander McClay Williams’ defense attorney, William Ridley (pictured), has researched the case and concluded that Williams was innocent of murdering Vida Robare. He is trying to obtain a posthumous pardon for Williams. Robare had been granted a divorce from her ex-husband — whom…

CORRECTION: On June 18, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Brumfield v. Cain, a Louisiana death penalty case dealing with intellectual disability. The Court held that the federal district court was entitled to conduct an evidentiary hearing to determine whether Kevan Brumfield has intellectual disability and is therefore ineligible for execution. It reversed a ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that would have deferred to a Lousiana state court…

Petition for a Writ of Certiorari Opinion of U.S. District Judge Finding Mr. Brumfield Intellectually Disabled Opinon of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Mr. Brumfield’s Opening Brief The State’s Brief in Opposition Mr. Brumfield’s Reply Amicus Brief of Chief Justice Pascal Calogero Summary of the Case The Court granted certiorari in Brumfield v. Cain, a death penalty case from Louisiana dealing with intellectual disability. Kevan Brumfield was sentenced to death prior to the…

The Spring 2015 update to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s publication, Death Row, USA, reports that 3,002 men and women were on death rows across the United States as of April 1, 2015. This reflects a continuing decline in the size of death row, down 13% since Spring 2005, when 3,452 people were on America’s death rows. Several states saw significant drops in their death row populations over that period while carrying out few or no executions: Pennsylvania dropped from 230 to 184 (no…

On June 12, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rebuffed what it described as “a concerted effort” by Pennsylvania prosecutors to bar lawyers from the Philadelphia federal community defender’s capital habeas unit from representing death row inmates in Pennsylvania state-level appeals. The former Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania state courts had sharply critized the unit — which has overturned more than 100 Pennsylvania death sentences — for what he termed its…

On June 12, the State Bar of Texas disbarred Burleson County District Attorney Charles Sebesta, the prosecutor whose misconduct led to the wrongful conviction of death row exoneree Anthony Graves (pictured, r.). The bar found that Sebesta violated no fewer than five of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, including making a false statement to a court, using evidence known to be false, and failing to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense. In 2006, the U.S. Court of…