Publications & Testimony

Death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers in California will be moved out of San Quentin State Prison (pic­tured) and placed in oth­er max­i­mum secu­ri­ty facil­i­ties, as part of a broad plan announced by Governor Gavin Newsom on March 17, 2023. The gov­er­nor seeks to ​“trans­form” the state’s old­est prison into ​“a one-of-a-kind facil­i­ty focused on improv­ing pub­lic safe­ty through reha­bil­i­ta­tion and edu­ca­tion.” The state launched a pilot pro­gram in 2020 allow­ing some death-row pris­on­ers to vol­un­tar­i­ly move to other…

On March 13, 2023 in Japan, Tokyo’s High Court grant­ed a retri­al for Iwao Hakamada, a for­mer box­er known as the ​“longest serv­ing death row” pris­on­er in the world. He was con­vict­ed of mur­der in 1968. Hideaki Nakagawa, Director of Amnesty International Japan, described the rul­ing as a ​“long-over­due chance to deliv­er some justice to…

In an op-ed for the National Review, psy­chi­a­trist Sally Satel writes, ​“No civ­i­lized or law­ful pur­pose is served by exe­cut­ing the severe­ly men­tal­ly ill.” Satel is a senior fel­low at the American Enterprise Institute, and she high­lights the deficits in the cur­rent legal sys­tem that per­mit cap­i­tal sen­tences and exe­cu­tions for those suf­fer­ing from severe men­tal ill­ness. ​“The require­ments to qual­i­fy for the insan­i­ty defense set the bar so high that few men­tal­ly ill defen­dants can meet it,” she…

A 2022 arti­cle in the Columbia Journal of Law & Social Problems presents both a his­tor­i­cal overview of the prac­tice of death-row con­fine­ment in the U.S. and the find­ings of a sur­vey of the con­di­tions on death rows in every juris­dic­tion with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in America. Regarding the use of high­ly restric­tive con­fine­ment, the author states that ​“the sys­tem of per­ma­nent soli­tary con­fine­ment on death row has nei­ther the weight of his­to­ry nor the sup­port of the major­i­ty in either…

During the sen­tenc­ing phase of cap­i­tal cas­es, sym­pa­thet­ic evi­dence about the life of the defen­dant is typ­i­cal­ly pre­sent­ed to jurors, who then must decide whether such mit­i­gat­ing fac­tors mer­it spar­ing his or her life. Mitigation spe­cial­ists play a cru­cial role in col­lect­ing such evi­dence. They doc­u­ment ​“the trau­mas, pol­i­cy fail­ures, fam­i­ly dynam­ics and indi­vid­ual choic­es that shape the lives of peo­ple who kill.” According to an arti­cle from The Marshall Project, there are few­er than 1,000…

On March 13, 2023, a jury in the fed­er­al death penal­ty pros­e­cu­tion of Sayfullo Saipov in New York City con­clud­ed its delib­er­a­tions with­out com­ing to a unan­i­mous deci­sion regard­ing sen­tenc­ing. As a result, Saipov will be sen­tenced to life in prison with­out parole. On January 26, the jury had unan­i­mous­ly found the defen­dant guilty of mur­der­ing eight peo­ple in 2017 by delib­er­ate­ly ram­ming a truck onto a crowd­ed Manhattan bike path. Neither Saipov nor his attor­neys con­test­ed his involvement in…

Prompted by the high-pro­file cas­es of Melissa Lucio, Andre Thomas, and John Ramirez, bills have been intro­duced in the Texas leg­is­la­ture to help pre­vent mis­car­riages of jus­tice. Representative Joe Moody (pic­tured right) has authored two bills, one that would autho­rize Texas pros­e­cu­tors to can­cel sched­uled exe­cu­tions, and anoth­er to facil­i­tate the use of sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence to lessen a person’s sen­tence. Lucio and Thomas both had exe­cu­tion dates, but were grant­ed tem­po­rary reprieves. Lucio…

In an arti­cle in the Cornell Law Review, Professors Jeffrey Fagan, Garth Davies, and Raymond Paternoster show how arbi­trari­ness and race oper­ate at each stage of a cap­i­tal case, from charg­ing death-eli­gi­ble cas­es to plea nego­ti­a­tions to the selec­tion of eli­gi­ble cas­es for exe­cu­tion and ulti­mate­ly to the exe­cu­tion itself. The authors applied rig­or­ous ana­lyt­ic meth­ods to a dataset of 2,328 first-degree mur­der cas­es in Georgia from 1995 – 2004 and found that two fac­tors have significant…

A Grayson County, Texas court has with­drawn the April 5, 2023 exe­cu­tion date for Andre Thomas (pic­tured), a seri­ous­ly men­tal­ly ill pris­on­er whose legal team request­ed more time to demon­strate that Thomas is incom­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed. While incar­cer­at­ed, Thomas gouged out his own eyes and claimed divine direc­tion for his crimes. More than 100 reli­gious lead­ers, along with oth­er experts, had asked Gov. Greg Abbott to halt Thomas’…

In Crossing the River Styx: The Memoir of a Death Row Chaplain, (March 2023), author Russ Ford recounts the abus­es he wit­nessed as the head chap­lain of Virginia’s death row and the strong rela­tion­ships he formed with more than a dozen con­demned pris­on­ers. Through sto­ries, he describes the core of human dig­ni­ty he expe­ri­enced among death row pris­on­ers, as well as the treach­er­ous con­di­tions these indi­vid­u­als faced dur­ing their final…