Publications & Testimony

On March 24, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in Jennings v. Stephens (No. 13 – 7211), a Texas death penalty case involving ineffectiveness of counsel. In his request for federal relief from his death sentence, Robert Jennings cited three instances in which his trial lawyers failed to adequately represent him. A U.S. District Court granted him relief on two of those claims (including failure to present evidence of his mental problems), while denying the third (his own lawyers told…

In his book, “Quest for Justice: Defending the Damned,” Richard Jaffe explores the problems of the American death penalty system through his experience as a capital defense attorney in Alabama. During the past twenty years, Jaffe has helped secure the release of three death row inmates: Randall Padgett and Gary Drinkard, who were fully exonerated, and James Cochran, who was cleared of murder charges, but pleaded guilty to a related robbery charge. In his book, Jaffe wrote, “I always keep in…

A recent editorial in the Jackson Free Press in Mississippi called for a halt to the scheduled execution of Michelle Byrom, saying she is “clearly not guilty of the crime for which the state plans to execute her next week.” The editorial noted that Byrom’s son had confessed to the crime four times.” He said the story he originally told sheriffs implicating his mother was made up because he was “scared, confused and high” when he was interrogated. The paper pointed to mitigating evidence about…

Michelle Byrom is scheduled to be executed in Mississippi on March 27 for conspiring to murder her husband, Edward Byrom, Sr. Her son, Edward Byrom, Jr., known as Junior, confessed to the crime on multiple occasions, and wrote that he lied when he told police his mother and a friend were involved. “I was so scared, confused, and high, I just started spitting the first thought out, which turned in to this big conspiracy thing, for money, which was all BS, that’s why I had so many different…

A new, but limited, study of the costs of the death penalty in Idaho found that capital cases are more costly and take much more time to resolve than non-capital cases. One measure of death-penalty costs was reflected in the time spent by attorneys handling appeals. The State Appellate Public Defenders office spent about 44 times more time on a typical death penalty appeal than on a life sentence appeal (almost 8,000 hours per capital defendant compared to about 180 hours per non-death penalty…

(UPDATE: The executions of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner were stayed until April 22 and 29 respectively.) Oklahoma does not have the necessary drugs to carry out the upcoming executions of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, scheduled for March 20 and 26. According to a brief filed on behalf of the Department of Corrections, the department has made a “Herculean effort” to obtain pentobarbital and vecuronium bromide for the lethal injections, but still lacks a supply of either drug. The…

In a lecture at the Widener University School of Law, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Thomas G. Saylor criticized the poor state of death penalty representation in Pennsylvania. He offered numerous cases in which death sentences were overturned because attorneys had failed to present mitigating evidence to the jury. Quoting from a special concurrence he wrote on a capital case involving ineffective assistance of counsel, he said, “Of greatest concern, these sorts of exceptionally costly…

The Georgia State Bar’s constitutional symposium recently staged a reenactment of Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court case that led to the temporary suspension of the death penalty in 1972. Stephen Bright (pictured), president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, played the role of Anthony Amsterdam, who argued on behalf of death row inmates in two of the four cases that the Court decided in Furman. The roles of the justices were performed by Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Hugh…

In his Sidebar column in the N.Y. Times, Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak recently discussed the concerns about states denying death row inmates information about how they will be executed. Liptak highlighted the recent execution of Michael Taylor in Missouri, where the state has made the pharmacy providing the drugs for lethal injection part of its “execution team,” thus obscuring any failings the pharmacy may have. This secretive approach drew criticism from a minority of judges on the U.S.

Attorneys representing the family of George Stinney, Jr., recently filed a request for a posthumous exoneration of Mr. Stinney, the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20^th century. Stinney, an African-American 14-year-old, was executed in 1944 for the murder of two young white girls less than three months after a trial that was filled with errors. Although Clarendon County, South Carolina, where the trial took place, had a population that was 72% black, only whites served on Stinney’s…