Publications & Testimony

In Louisiana, a lack of adequate funding for indigent defense in death penalty cases is causing a critical shortage of qualified counsel and long delays in cases. John Di Giulio, a member of the Louisiana Public Defender Board, said that public defenders and regional offices that represent death penalty clients are “overworked and underfunded.” Mike Mitchell, chief public defender of the East Baton Rouge Public Defender’s office, attributed the shortage of lawyers to the demanding nature of…

On June 19, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights held hearings on solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, including the conditions of many state death rows. The hearings marked the first time lawmakers on Capitol Hill have considered this issue. Anthony Graves (pictured r., along with Sen. Richard Durbin), a former Texas death row inmate, described the conditions of his incarceration in a 8 by 12 foot cage with no physical human contact for years. Meals…

On June 18, the Ohio Supreme Court stayed the execution of Abdul Awkal (pictured) indefinitely following a county court’s ruling that he was mentally incompetent to face execution. Awkal was originally scheduled for execution on June 6, but shortly before the execution Governor John Kasich granted a two-week reprieve to allow time for a mental competency hearing. Judge Stuart Friedman presided over that hearing and subsequently ruled that Awkal was too mentally ill to be put to death, citing…

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row USA shows a decrease of 19 inmates between January 1 and April 1, 2012. Over the last decade, the total population of state and federal death rows has decreased significantly, from 3,682 inmates in 2000 to 3,170 inmates as of April 2012. California continues to have the largest death row population (724), followed by Florida (407), Texas (308), Pennsylvania (204), and Alabama (200). Neither California nor Pennsylvania have carried…

On June 13, the North Carolina House of Representatives approved a bill to essentially overturn the state’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), a groundbreaking law that allowed a finding of racial bias in sentencing or jury selection based on sophisticated statistical studies. If passed into law, the new bill would require courts to revert to the older and more problematic process of finding direct racial bias by the prosecution or jury against an individual defendant in order to reverse a death…

The prosecutor who helped secure the death sentence of John Eley (pictured) and one of the presiding judges who sentenced him to death recently asked the Ohio Parole Board to recommend clemency instead. Former Mahoning County prosecutor Gary Van Brocklin told the state parole board that Eley should be spared from execution because the type of crime he committed is no longer usually prosecuted as a death penalty case and is not so egregious as to deserve capital punishment. Van Brocklin said…

Two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Professors Justin Wolfers (pictured) and Betsey Stevenson, recently explained why decades of studies have failed to show a reliable deterrent effect from the death penalty. The authors cited a 2012 report from the National Academy of Sciences, concluding that the deterrence studies of the past 30 years “should not influence policy judgments about capital punishment.” Wolfers and Stevenson explain why these studies cannot be…

On June 1, former Tennessee death row inmate Erskine Johnson (pictured; now known as Ndume Olatushani) was freed after serving nearly 27 years in prison, 19 of which were spent on death row. Johnson, who maintained his innocence throughout the process, was sentenced to death for the 1983 murder of a grocer in Memphis. In 2004, he was resentenced to life in prison after the state Supreme Court found that prosecutors did not disclose important information to the defense. In December 2011, Johnson…