Publications & Testimony

Lawyers for Oklahoma death-row pris­on­er Benjamin Cole have filed a peti­tion with the Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Parole ask­ing the Board to rec­om­mend to Governor Kevin Stitt that Cole’s sen­tence be com­mut­ed to life without…

A fed­er­al dis­trict court issued an order on September 19, 2022 to halt the sched­uled September 22, 2022 exe­cu­tion of Alabama death-row pris­on­er Alan Miller ​“by any method oth­er than nitro­gen hypox­ia,” lead­ing to a series of last-minute appeals by Alabama pros­e­cu­tors and an after-hours exe­cu­tion-night rul­ing by the U.S. Supreme Court to let the exe­cu­tion go for­ward. Alabama sub­se­quent­ly called off the exe­cu­tion when it became appar­ent more than two hours later…

Equatorial Guinea has abol­ished the death penal­ty, becom­ing the 25^th African nation to end cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and the fourth in the past two years. According to state tele­vi­sion reports, on September 19, 2022, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo signed into law a new crim­i­nal code that removes the death penal­ty from the statute books of the cen­tral African nation of 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple on the continent’s Atlantic…

Bell County pros­e­cu­tors have dropped their efforts to impose the death penal­ty on Marvin Guy (pic­tured), an African American man who has been held eight years with­out tri­al in con­nec­tion with the death of a white police offi­cer dur­ing a botched no-knock raid in Killeen, Texas in May…

A sec­ond mil­i­tary com­mis­sions pros­e­cu­tor who had advo­cat­ed using tes­ti­mo­ny obtained by tor­ture against defen­dants in the death penal­ty tri­al of the Guantánamo detainees charged with the October 2000 bomb­ing of the U.S.S. Cole (pic­tured) in waters off the coast of Yemen has been removed from the…

Alabama pros­e­cu­tors have told a fed­er­al judge that the state will not exe­cute death-row pris­on­er Alan Miller by nitro­gen hypox­ia on September 22, 2022, three days after sug­gest­ing there was a ​“very good chance” it would be ready to attempt the first-ever exe­cu­tion by that…

The out­come of a cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion can be pre­dict­ed based upon the rel­a­tive social sta­tus of the vic­tim, the defen­dant, and the jurors, apply­ing a soci­ol­o­gy con­cept known as the geo­met­ri­cal the­o­ry of law, accord­ing to the authors of a new book, Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in…

An Alabama appeals court has upheld a fifth non-unan­i­mous death sen­tence imposed on a death-row pris­on­er who has faced six cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing tri­als for the same offense and was once found to be inel­i­gi­ble for the death penal­ty because of intellectual…

A new study of the Texas death penal­ty, released as the state was con­duct­ing its 400^th mod­ern-era exe­cu­tion in a case involv­ing a white vic­tim, has doc­u­ment­ed over­whelm­ing racial dis­par­i­ties in the Lone Star state’s cap­i­tal punishment…

A South Carolina tri­al court has issued an injunc­tion pre­vent­ing the state from car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions using a fir­ing squad or the elec­tric chair, rul­ing that those meth­ods vio­late the state’s con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tion against ​“cru­el, unusu­al, and corporal…