Publications & Testimony

According to Amnesty International’s annu­al death penal­ty report for 2023, 16 coun­tries car­ried out the 1,153 known exe­cu­tions last year, con­sti­tut­ing the low­est num­ber of exe­cut­ing coun­tries on record with the orga­ni­za­tion but the high­est record­ed exe­cu­tion num­bers since 2015. The 31% glob­al increase in record­ed exe­cu­tions is attrib­ut­able to the 48% rise in exe­cu­tions in Iran (at least 853 exe­cu­tions), which account­ed for 74% of record­ed exe­cu­tions world­wide. Saudi Arabia came in sec­ond with…

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the impact of men­tal ill­ness is keen­ly felt on death row: at least two in five peo­ple exe­cut­ed have a doc­u­ment­ed seri­ous men­tal ill­ness, and research sug­gests that many more death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers are undi­ag­nosed. A nation­al major­i­ty, 60% of Americans, oppos­es exe­cut­ing peo­ple with seri­ous men­tal ill­ness. In the past two decades, sci­ence and med­i­cine have con­tributed to a much bet­ter under­stand­ing of how seri­ous men­tal ill­ness, which refers to…

On May 3, 2024, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals announced its deci­sion in the case of Christopher Henderson, a death-sen­tenced man who had been tried by an all-white jury in Madison County, Alabama, where the pop­u­la­tion is 24.6% Black. Prosecutors in his cap­i­tal tri­al used peremp­to­ry strikes to remove six of the 10 qual­i­fied Black poten­tial jurors and all remain­ing jurors of col­or. Mr. Henderson’s coun­sel from the Equal Justice Initiative iden­ti­fied evi­dence that the prosecutor’s…

In a May 23, 2024 op-ed pub­lished in The Dallas Morning News, Brian Wharton, the retired super­vis­ing detec­tive in Robert Roberson’s case, urged Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell to reex­am­ine the case and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to reex­am­ine a pend­ing motion on Mr. Roberson’s inno­cence claims, which have pre­vi­ous­ly been denied. ​“It would be a ter­ri­ble lega­cy for all of us to be asso­ci­at­ed with exe­cut­ing an inno­cent man based on a rush to judg­ment and…

Susie Williams Carter was just a baby when her 16-year-old broth­er, Alexander McClay Williams, was con­vict­ed of mur­der and exe­cut­ed in Pennsylvania in 1931. Over 90 years lat­er, Ms. Carter, now 94, con­tin­ues her family’s deter­mi­na­tion to clear her brother’s name. In June 2022, a Delaware County, Pennsylvania judge agreed that law enforce­ment had dis­re­gard­ed evi­dence and coerced Mr. Williams into sign­ing mul­ti­ple false con­fes­sions. All charges against Mr. Williams were posthu­mous­ly dismissed…

On May 20, 2024, Jefferson County, Alabama District Attorney Danny Carr asked a cir­cuit judge to grant a new tri­al to Toforest Johnson (cen­ter), an Alabama death row pris­on­er whose con­vic­tion DA Carr believes is ​“fun­da­men­tal­ly unre­li­able.” This extra­or­di­nary request is the lat­est in a series of appeals for Mr. Johnson, who was sen­tenced to death in 1998 for the 1995 mur­der of Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff William Hardy but has always main­tained his inno­cence. ​“A thor­ough review and…

As of October 2023, the num­ber of peo­ple in the United States sen­tenced to death or fac­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a death sen­tence con­tin­ued its more than two-decade decline, accord­ing to the lat­est report issued by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund…

On May 9, Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a bill autho­riz­ing the death penal­ty for aggra­vat­ed rape of a child, fol­low­ing Florida’s pas­sage of a sim­i­lar law last year. Both laws con­tra­dict long­stand­ing Supreme Court prece­dent hold­ing the death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al for non-homi­cide crimes. Tennessee’s law takes effect on July 1. The state has had a death penal­ty mora­to­ri­um in place since May 2022 after Governor Lee learned that state offi­cials had failed to test exe­cu­tion drugs for…

On Tuesday, the Death Penalty Information Center released a new report that con­nects Ohio’s racial his­to­ry to the mod­ern use of the death penal­ty in the state. Broken Promises: How a History of Racial Violence and Bias Shaped Ohio’s Death Penalty doc­u­ments how racial dis­crim­i­na­tion is the through­line that runs from the state’s found­ing to its appli­ca­tion of cap­i­tal punishment…

Furman v. Georgia was one of the most mon­u­men­tal cas­es in American legal his­to­ry: the 1972 deci­sion over­turned every state death penal­ty statute in the coun­try and spared the lives of near­ly six hun­dred peo­ple sen­tenced to die. But the lead peti­tion­er, William Henry Furman, was lit­tle aware of his impact. Poor, Black, men­tal­ly ill, and phys­i­cal­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled, he was sen­tenced to death for the killing of a home­own­er dur­ing a botched rob­bery, which he main­tains was…