Publications & Testimony

On November 30, the United States Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of George Porter, a Korean War veteran from Florida who had been convicted of murder in 1988. The Court stated that Porter’s trial lawyer failed to investigate and present ample mitigating evidence, including the fact that Porter’s battle service in the war left him severely traumatized. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit had held that such evidence would not have made a difference at sentencing. The…

Christopher Slobogin, Professor of Law and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, has written an evaluation of Florida’s death penalty to be published in a forthcoming edition of the Elon University Law Review. The evaluation is based on a study by an assessment team sponsored by the American Bar Association. Florida is one of the leading states in sentencing people to death, but it also has the most death row exonerations of any state in the country. Florida was chosen by the ABA to be one of…

On November 23, Kentucky Public Advocate Ed Monahan and Louisville Metro Chief Public Defender Dan Goyette called on the governor and the state’s Attorney General to stay all executions until an assessment team formed by the American Bar Association can objectively review the state’s death penalty. Monahan and Goyette wrote letters asking Attorney General Jack Conway not to request any further execution warrants and asking Governor Steven Beshear not to sign execution warrants until the ABA…

James Tyrone Woodson’s death sentence was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 because the jury had not been allowed to consider any mitigating factors in his life or about his peripheral role in the crime. The Court not only rejected Woodson’s death sentence, but held that a mandatory death penalty system was unconstitutional. Woodson had been convicted in 1974 of first-degree murder, which was automatically punishable by the death penalty under North Carolina law. Woodson had been in…

The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates is a book by John Temple about the courageous work of a death penalty defense attorney in the south. Ken Rose is an attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in North Carolina. He has handled many capital cases, but the focus of this book is his defense of Bo Jones, a mentally handicapped farmhand convicted of a murder that occurred in 1987 and sentenced to death. The case highlights issues such as inadequate defense, mental…

Virginia has not had a death verdict from a jury since March 2008, the longest stretch of time without a death verdict since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s. Nationally, there has also been a decline in death sentences: according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 115 death sentences in 2007, 65% less than the 326 that were handed down in 1995. In Virginia, part of this decline might be attributed to a change in state law made effective in 1995 that eliminated the…

On November 16, the United States Supreme Court accepted for review and handed down a per curiam decision in Wong v. Belmontes (No. 08 – 1263). The Court reinstated Fernando Belmontes’ death sentence and overturned the decision of the Ninth Circuit granting relief because of ineffectiveness of counsel. Belmontes was sentenced to death for murdering a woman during a robbery in 1981 in California. The appeals court ruled in 2008 that Belmontes’ lawyer had represented him incompetently by neglecting…