Publications & Testimony

A newly published study by Professor John Donohue of Stanford Law School found that arbitrary factors, including race and geography, significantly affected death sentencing decisions in Connecticut. While controlling for a variety of factors related to the severity of the crime, the study’s abstract indicated that “[M]inority defendants who kill white victims are capitally charged at substantially higher rates than minority defendants who kill minorities, [and] that geography influences both…

Dr. Marc Stern, the former assistant secretary of healthcare for the Washington Department of Corrections, recently commented on physician participation in executions in the wake of the botched lethal injections in Oklahoma and Arizona. Dr. Stern resigned rather than cooperate with his state’s execution plan. He explained his views, “Although its foundation is in medical science, lethal injection is not a medical procedure: it has no therapeutic value, and it is not taught in medical school. A…

A joint committee of 32 senators and representatives held the first public hearing on Kentucky’s death penalty since capital punishment was reinstated there in 1975. The hearing was prompted by a death penalty repeal bill proposed by Republican Rep. David Floyd, who said the death penalty should be ended because of the cost and time it takes for cases to complete the appeals process. He was also concerned about the number of death penalty cases that have been overturned. A 2011 study by the…

On August 1, the Arizona Department of Corrections (DOC) released 330 pages of documents related to the execution of Joseph Wood on July 23. Although not a report on why the execution took nearly 2 hours to complete, the documents reveal that Wood was injected with 15 consecutive doses (50 mg each) of midazolam and hydromorphone, far more than indicated in the state’s protocol. Dale Baich, an attorney for Wood, said, “The Arizona execution protocol explicitly states that a prisoner will be…

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004. His conviction was based largely on forensic evidence of arson that both prosecutors and defense attorneys now agree was seriously flawed. Prosecutors have maintained that other evidence pointed towards Willingham’s guilt, especially the testimony of a jailhouse informant who said Willingham confessed to the crime of murdering his children. Now according to an investigative article by Maurice Possley for the Marshall Project and published…

On July 31, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke about the death penalty review underway at the Department of Justice and the need for greater transparency in lethal injection methods. Holder said he was “greatly troubled” by the recent botched executions, adding that states should provide more information about the drugs they plan to use. He said, “[F]or the state to exercise that greatest of all powers, to end a human life, it seems to me… that transparency would be a good thing, and to…

A new study by Prof. Meredith Martin Rountree of Northwestern University Law School examined the characteristics of Texas death row inmates who waived all or part of their normal appeals, thus hastening their execution. Referring to these inmates as “volunteers,” she compared them with similarly-situated inmates who did not waive their appeals. She found that more volunteers experienced depression or had attempted suicide than non-volunteers. She also examined the role of “self-blame” in…

Alabama is the only state that in which judges regularly impose death sentences even after a jury recommends a life sentence. Death row inmate Courtney Lockhart has asked the Alabama Supreme Court to reconsider his sentence imposed as a result of this unique process. Lockhart was convicted of capital murder in 2010. The jury unanimously found that his post-traumatic stress disorder, resulting from his military service in Iraq, was sufficiently mitigating to recommend a sentence of life without…

Although Arizona officials have claimed that Joseph Wood was “brain dead” during his two-hour execution on July 23, prominent medical experts from around the country strongly disagreed. David Waisel, associate professor of anaesthesia at Harvard medical school, said a person who is brain dead will stop breathing unless kept alive on a ventilator. “There is no way anyone could ever look at someone and make that kind of diagnosis. He was still breathing, so he was not brain dead. This is an…