Publications & Testimony

The top med­ical offi­cer for the Department of Corrections in the state of Washington has resigned in order to avoid any par­tic­i­pa­tion in the state’s exe­cu­tion process. As the doc­tor respon­si­ble for prepar­ing oth­ers to car­ry out lethal injec­tions, Dr. Marc Stern con­clud­ed that his eth­i­cal oblig­a­tions as a physi­cian required that he recuse him­self from such actions and that resign­ing was the only way to ful­ly remove him­self from this process. Dr. Stern, who…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a $14 mil­lion award to John Thompson, a for­mer death row inmate in Louisiana who was exon­er­at­ed after with­held evi­dence was revealed. Thompson spent 18 years in prison, includ­ing 14 years in the soli­tary con­fine­ment of death row in Angola Prison. He came with­in one month of being exe­cut­ed in 1999 when his attor­neys dis­cov­ered blood evi­dence that should have been turned over to the defense years ago. The…

Ray Samuels, a police offi­cer for 33 years and Chief of Police in Newark, California, for 5 years, recent­ly expressed con­cern that state bud­get cuts will pre­vent impor­tant crime-fight­ing mea­sures from being passed, while an expen­sive death penal­ty con­tin­ues to drain the state’s finances. In an op-ed in the Contra Costa Times, Samuels…

The Presiding Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, Oliver Diaz, dis­sent­ed in a recent cap­i­tal case, Doss v. Mississippi, stat­ing he had come to the con­clu­sion that the death penalty is…

Research on death qual­i­fi­ca­tion – the selec­tion of jurors who are qual­i­fied to serve on a cap­i­tal case because they are will­ing to sen­tence some­one to death – has revealed addi­tion­al char­ac­ter­is­tics among such jurors. Professor Brooke Butler of the University of South Florida in Sarasota has stud­ied such jurors and pub­lished her results in the jour­nal of Behavioral Sciences and the Law. Her study, ​“Death qual­i­fi­ca­tion and prej­u­dice: the effect of implic­it racism, sex­ism, and homophobia on…

Brian Nichols was sen­tenced to life in prison with­out parole in Georgia on December 13 after the jury could not reach a unan­i­mous ver­dict of death. Nichols had been found guilty of killing a judge, a court reporter, a police deputy, and a U.S. Customs agent dur­ing his escape from a cour­t­house hear­ing on oth­er charges. The jury remained dead­locked in a 9 – 3 vote after four days of delib­er­a­tions. A unan­i­mous vote is required for a death sen­tence, just as it is…