Publications & Testimony

An edi­to­r­i­al in the Dallas Morning News urges the Texas leg­is­la­ture to pass a bill to ban the death penal­ty for peo­ple with severe men­tal ill­ness, stat­ing, it ​“seems like an obvi­ous deci­sion in a decent soci­ety.” House Bill 727, spon­sored by Rep. Toni Rose (D‑Dallas), passed the Texas House on April 5, 2023, by a vote of 97 – 48 and is pend­ing before the Texas…

On April 6, 2023, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Richard Glossip’s con­vic­tion and death sen­tence and to remand the case to the District Court for fur­ther pro­ceed­ings. He cit­ed the U.S. Supreme Court’s admo­ni­tion that the prosecutor’s inter­est is ​“not that it shall win a case, but that jus­tice shall be…

Stephen Oliphant’s recent study on the death penalty’s effect on homi­cide rates pub­lished in Criminology & Public Policy found ​“no evi­dence of a deter­rent effect attrib­ut­able to death penal­ty statutes.” Oliphant first dis­cuss­es deter­rence the­o­ry, which ​“posits that pun­ish­ment, or the threat of pun­ish­ment, dis­cour­ages indi­vid­u­als from com­mit­ting crime,” and its role in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment dis­course, where pro­po­nents of the death penal­ty have argued that the threat of the death…

In their forth­com­ing book, ​“The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts,” renowned death-penal­ty attor­ney Stephen B. Bright and legal schol­ar James Kwak describe the many ways in which the U.S. legal sys­tem fails to uphold the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of defen­dants, espe­cial­ly poor defen­dants and peo­ple of…

Clarence Brandley (pic­tured) was wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 1981 in Texas for the rape and mur­der of a 16-year-old white girl. From the out­set, he was tar­get­ed based on his race. On the day of the mur­der, a police offi­cer said to the two jan­i­tors at the school who had found the deceased, ​“One of you two is going to hang for this.” Then, turn­ing to Brandley, said, ​“Since you’re the n****r, you’re…

Dr. Joseph Thornton, a psy­chi­a­trist who for­mer­ly treat­ed death row pris­on­ers as the med­ical direc­tor of a Florida max­i­mum secu­ri­ty prison, called for an end to the death penal­ty for those with severe men­tal ill­ness: ​“We should not be exe­cut­ing any­one, let alone the sick and the bro­ken,” he said. ​“As some­one with over 40 years’ expe­ri­ence see­ing patients with seri­ous men­tal ill­ness who are stig­ma­tized, ostra­cized and blamed for their symp­toms, I believe that recov­ery care, not ostracization,…

Prominent death penal­ty attor­ney, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson (pic­tured with President Joe Biden), was award­ed the National Humanities Medal on March 21, 2023 at the White House. The pres­i­dent com­mend­ed Stevenson for his long-term efforts to rep­re­sent the impov­er­ished and exon­er­ate the wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed, in addi­tion to found­ing the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both locat­ed in Montgomery,…

In a forth­com­ing update to their ground­break­ing 2018 research on the impor­tance of mit­i­ga­tion in death penal­ty cas­es, researchers Russell Stetler, Maria McLaughlin, and Dana Cook (pic­tured) have great­ly expand­ed the num­ber of cap­i­tal cas­es reviewed and drawn the con­clu­sion that ​“the effec­tive inves­ti­ga­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion of mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence can fore­stall a death sen­tence no mat­ter how death-wor­thy the crime facts may appear at first glance.” Their study — titled ​“Mitigation Works” — focused…

After years of silence regard­ing his views on the death penal­ty, Governor John Bel Edwards of Louisiana expressed his oppo­si­tion to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in a sem­i­nar at Loyola University in New Orleans. On March 22, 2023, Edwards said, ​“The death penal­ty is so final. When you make a mis­take, you can’t get it back. And we know that mis­takes have been made in sen­tenc­ing peo­ple to…

Idaho will become the fifth state to autho­rize the fir­ing squad as a method of exe­cu­tion and may become the first state to manda­to­ri­ly impose it on a death row pris­on­er since 1976. Idaho’s Governor Brad Little signed HB 186 into law on March 24, 2023, and it goes into effect on July 1. The law gives the direc­tor of the Idaho Department of Correction up to five days after a death war­rant is issued to deter­mine if lethal injec­tion is avail­able. If it is declared unavail­able, the exe­cu­tion will…