Publications & Testimony

At least 40 death row inmates, some on the day of their exe­cu­tion, were grant­ed stays last­ing beyond their sched­uled dates in 2006-08 based in whole or in part on chal­lenges to the lethal injec­tion process. Some stays were lift­ed and the inmates even­tu­al­ly exe­cut­ed. In many states, all exe­cu­tions were effec­tive­ly on hold until the lethal injec­tion con­tro­ver­sy is resolved. At the same time, oth­er exe­cu­tions were allowed to go for­ward with no stays. Almost all…

Below are exam­ples of state media cov­er­age of Baze v. Rees regard­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of lethal injec­tion. In many instances, the arti­cles dis­cuss the pos­si­ble impact of the deci­sion on specific…

The Dallas Morning News renewed its call for a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions in Texas because of the numer­ous errors in the state’s death penal­ty sys­tem. The paper high­light­ed the cas­es of Michael Blair and Charles Hood as exam­ples of how the sys­tem has bro­ken down. Blair was exon­er­at­ed in 2008 after 14 years on death row. DNA evi­dence revealed that he had not been the mur­der­er of 7‑year-old Ashley Estel in 1993, despite the fact that the…

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…