Publications & Testimony

The week of the 25^th anniversary of Florida’s gruesome botched electric chair execution of Jesse Tafero (pictured), the Tennessee Supreme Court began hearing a challenge to the administration of a state law that would resurrect the use of that State’s electric chair if lethal injection drugs are unavailable. On May 6, 2015, the Tennessee justices heard argument on death-row inmates’ right to know which method of execution will be used in their cases. The Justices voiced concerns about the…

In an interview with Salon, Anthony Ray Hinton (pictured, l.), the 152^nd death row exoneree, spoke about his wrongful conviction and spending 30 years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he did not commit. “They had every intention of executing an innocent man,” Hinton said. “If you’re poor and black you don’t stand a chance.” Hinton spoke about the inadequate representation he received at his trial: “My ballistics expert was blind in one eye. He was paid $500. It came down to, ‘Who do you…

The number of people sentenced to death in Virginia has plummeted from 40 in the years 1998 – 2005 to only 6 from 2006 through April 2015. A recent study suggests that improvements in capital representation in the state may have played a significant role in that dramatic change. In 2004, Virginia established four regional capital defender offices, which are completely devoted to handling death penalty cases. The year before the defender offices opened, Virginia juries imposed 6 death sentences…

On April 21, 2015, Oktibbeha County (Mississippi) District Attorney Forrest Allgood announced that he would drop charges against death row inmate Willie Manning. In February, the Mississippi Supreme court granted Manning a new trial, saying that key evidence was withheld. Justice Michael K. Randolph wrote, “The State violated Manning’s due-process rights by failing to provide favorable, material evidence.” A witness testified that he saw Manning enter the victims’ apartment, but police records…

Dr. Jay Chapman, the Oklahoma medical examiner who created the three-drug lethal injection protocol that was used from 1982 to 2010, recently told The Guardian that he has doubts about the death penalty.“I am ambivalent about the death penalty – there have been so many incidents of prosecutorial misconduct, or DNA testing that has proved a prisoner’s innocence. It’s problematic,” Chapman said. He said he believed lethal injection would be a more humane method of execution, “At that time we put…

In an article for the University of Richmond Law Review, Stephen Bright (pictured), President and Senior Counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, describes the arbitrary factors that continue to influence the death penalty. Bright first describes the historical context that led the Supreme Court to strike down the death penalty in 1976. He draws comparisons between lynchings, which he says were “used to maintain racial control after the Civil War,” and capital punishment, which in 1976…

On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Glossip v. Gross, a case challenging the use of midazolam in lethal injections. Midazolam was used as the first drug in three botched executions in 2014, including the execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma exactly one year ago. Prisoners on Oklahoma’s death row argued that midazolam should not be used in executions because it could not reliably anesthesize the prisoner to prevent him or her from experiencing extreme pain when the…

In a case spotlighting issues of mental illness and the death penalty, the Florida Supreme Court on April 23 unanimously overturned the death sentence imposed on a severely mentally ill death-row inmate, Humberto Delgado (pictured). Delgado, who was convicted of killing a Tampa police officer, will be resentenced to life without parole. The court said, “We do not downplay the fact that Corporal Roberts lost his life as a result of Delgado’s actions. However … we are compelled to reduce…

Nebraska’s unicameral legislature recently voted 30 – 13 in favor of repealing the State’s death penalty, advancing the bill to a second round of legislative review. (In Nebraska, a bill must pass three times before it is sent to the Governor.) A majority (17 out of 30) of Republican legislators voted in favor of the bill, which was also supported by 12 Democrats and one Independent legislator. Sen. Colby Coash (R‑Lincoln), said, “If any other system in our government was as ineffective and…

Four retired death-row prison officials — two wardens, a chaplain, and an execution supervisor — recently described the effect that carrying out executions has had on them. Frank Thompson (pictured), who served as a warden in Oregon and Arkansas, said he believed in capital punishment until he thought “about those flaws in the back of my mind that I knew existed with capital punishment. It’s being administered against the poor; it lacks proof that it deters anything.” He trained his staff to…