Publications & Testimony

On April 29, Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett died of a heart attack approximately 40 minutes after the state began administering a new lethal injection protocol. Lockett received an injection of midazolam, the first drug in a three-drug protocol, at 6:23 pm. At 6:33, Lockett was declared unconscious, but about three minutes later, witnesses said he began to nod, mumble, and writhe on the gurney. Some witnesses described his movements as a seizure. At 7:06, Lockett died of a massive heart…

Three former Chief Justices of the Oregon Supreme Court have recently called for an end to the death penalty in their state. Retired Chief Justice Wallace P. Carson, Jr. (l.), was the most recent Justice to call for a change: “In my opinion, the exceptional cost of death penalty cases and the seemingly haphazard selection of which cases deserve the death penalty outweigh any perceived public benefit of this sanction,” Carson said. “The fairly recent addition of a ‘true life’ (no parole) penalty…

On April 28 a study published in the prestigous Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicated that far more innocent people have been sentenced to death than those found through the legal process. According to the study, many innocent defendants are probably not being identified because they were taken off death row and given a lesser sentence. The rate of exonerations for those sentenced to death would be over twice as high if all cases were given the heightened scrutiny often…

On April 23 the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death sentence of Kentucky inmate Robert Woodall, reversing an earlier ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. At Woodall’s trial, his attorney asked the judge to instruct the jury not to draw any negative inference from the fact that Woodall had not testified in the sentencing phase. The judge refused to give the instruction. The 6^th Circuit held that the failure to instruct the jury was a violation of Woodall’s right to…

In a petition to the Ohio Parole Board, Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty (pictured) requested the death sentence of Arthur Tyler be reduced to life in prison without parole. McGinty said, “At the time of Tyler’s trial, Ohio law did not allow for the possibility of a sentence of life without parole for an aggravated murder conviction….In light of the limited sentencing options, the absence of the option of a sentence of life without the possibility of parole in this case may have led to…

UPDATE: On April 23, the Oklahoma Supreme Court held that the inmates facing execution do not have a right to be informed of the source of the drugs that will be used in their executions. The Court lifted the stays of execution, which means they could occur on April 29. ‑Earlier: On April 21, the Oklahoma Supreme Court indefinitely stayed the executions of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner so it could resolve the constitutionality of a state law making the sources of its lethal injection drugs…

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles will soon consider the clemency petition of Robert Holsey describing a near complete failure in the judicial process that sent him to death row in 1997. As Marc Bookman described in the latest edition of Mother Jones, Holsey was assigned a lawyer, Andy Prince, who consumed a quart of vodka every night of the trial. While preparing Holsey’s case, he was arrested in an incident after pointing a gun at a black neighbor and using a racial slur. Despite…

UPDATE: (4/21). The Oklahoma Supreme Court (5 – 4) has stayed the executions of Lockett and Warner. Earlier:In a 3 – 2 decision on April 18, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (OCCA) said it could not grant a stay of execution to two death row inmates facing imminent execution because they had not filed a proper motion. Earlier, the Oklahoma Supreme Court said the OCCA should be the court to grant a stay, especially since there were unsettled questions about the constitutionality of the state’s…

On April 17, the New Hampshire Senate voted 12 – 12 on a bill to repeal the death penalty. The Senate then voted to table the bill, meaning it could be brought up for reconsideration later in the legislative session. New Hampshire has not had an execution since 1939 and has only 1 person on death row, whose status would not have been affected by the bill. The bill had overwhelmingly passed the House earlier, and Gov. Maggie Hassan indicated she would have signed the bill if it passed the Senate.

A new study published by Professors Jon Gould (l.) of American University and Richard Leo of the University of San Francisco, along with other researchers, examined factors that have contributed to wrongful convictions in criminal cases. The study compared cases in which “guilty” defendants were eventually exonerated to those in which defendants were not convicted in the first place. The researchers found a number of variables that separated wrongful convictions from so-called “near misses,”…