Publications & Testimony

In a clear nation­al trend, sev­en states (Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and South Carolina) have used pen­to­bar­bi­tal instead of sodi­um thiopen­tal in their exe­cu­tions in 2011. The most recent such exe­cu­tion was that of Donald Beaty in Arizona on May 25, fol­low­ing a tem­po­rary stay as the state made a sud­den switch to the new drug. Ohio is the only one of the sev­en states to use…

The Arizona Supreme Court stayed the exe­cu­tion of Donald Beaty that was sched­uled for May 25 after the state Department of Corrections tried to make last-minute changes to the exe­cu­tion pro­to­col. On May 24 the U.S. Department of Justice told Arizona not to use its sup­ply of sodi­um thiopen­tal because it had been obtained ille­gal­ly from a com­pa­ny in Great Britain. Arizona’s Attorney General filed notice with the Arizona Supreme Court stat­ing that, to ​“avoid…

A recent edi­to­r­i­al in the Philadelphia Inquirer con­cludes the pub­lic is ready to scrap the death penal­ty in Pennsylvania, even if the leg­is­la­ture is not. According to the edi­to­r­i­al, juries opt­ed for the death penal­ty in just 3% of first-degree mur­der cas­es over the past four years: ​“Pennsylvania juries clear­ly are more com­fort­able with the alter­na­tive sen­tence of life with­out parole, which assures that first-degree mur­der con­victs will waste away…

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has deter­mined that the intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abiled (men­tal­ly retard­ed) are barred from the death penal­ty, the deci­sion of whether a defen­dant meets this dis­abil­i­ty stan­dard is not made by men­tal health experts but by jurors and judges. A recent study pub­lished in Law & Psychology Review found that jurors expect a much low­er lev­el of intel­lec­tu­al func­tion­ing than men­tal health experts to arrive at a find­ing of dis­abil­i­ty. Moreover,…

Attorneys for a mur­der defen­dant who may be inno­cent have called for reforms in the sys­tem of fed­er­al review, and par­tic­u­lar­ly to the ​“accu­mu­lat­ed bar­ri­ers to habeas cor­pus review of claims of fac­tu­al inno­cence.” Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, along with attor­neys for Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald in North Carolina, point­ed to the mount­ing evi­dence of MacDonald’s pos­si­ble inno­cence that was dis­missed by the fed­er­al courts until DNA evi­dence final­ly became available:…

Lundbeck Inc., a Danish phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny that is the sole man­u­fac­tur­er of pen­to­bar­bi­tal for sale in the U.S., is fac­ing an eth­i­cal dilem­ma regard­ing the use of its drug in exe­cu­tions. Pentobarbital is increas­ing­ly being used in the U.S. in place of sodi­um thiopen­tal for lethal injec­tions. Pentobarbital was most recent­ly used in exe­cu­tions in Texas, South Carolina, and Mississippi. Andrew Schroll, a spokesman for Lundbeck, said that the com­pa­ny has…