Publications & Testimony

The American Psychological Association (APA) has over­whelm­ing­ly adopt­ed a res­o­lu­tion call­ing for courts and leg­is­la­tors to ban the use of the death penal­ty against peo­ple charged with com­mit­ting crimes while they were under age 21. Saying that ​“the same sci­en­tif­ic and soci­etal rea­sons” that led the U.S. Supreme Court to bar cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment for offend­ers younger than age 18 also ​“apply to the late ado­les­cent class,” the APA, the nation’s largest pro­fes­sion­al orga­ni­za­tion of psychologists,…

An Illinois woman who was sen­tenced to death with­out a tri­al as a result of a false con­fes­sion coerced by a dis­graced Chicago detec­tive has been exon­er­at­ed after 29…

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released its annu­al report, The State of Criminal Justice 2022, exam­in­ing the state of the American crim­i­nal legal…

Tennessee vot­ers have issued a stun­ning rebuke to con­tro­ver­sial Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich (pic­tured), oust­ing her from office after an eleven-year tenure marred by charges of racism and…

The sis­ter of death-row pris­on­er Joe Nathan James Jr. has called for an inves­ti­ga­tion into his botched exe­cu­tion fol­low­ing a state­ment by an Alabama Department of Correction’s spokesper­son that ADOC could not con­firm that James was ful­ly con­scious when he was…

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board has rec­om­mend­ed clemen­cy for James Coddington (pic­tured at his clemen­cy hear­ing), the first of 25 death-row pris­on­ers sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed in Oklahoma between August 2022 and December…

As the tri­al chal­leng­ing South Carolina​’s exe­cu­tion meth­ods began on August 1, 2022, a review of the state’s death penal­ty by the Greenville News revealed a pat­tern of dis­crim­i­na­tion, geo­graph­ic arbi­trari­ness, and high error rates in the imple­men­ta­tion of the pun­ish­ment. In a two-part exam­i­na­tion, reporter Kathryn Casteel ana­lyzed racial and coun­ty demo­graph­ics on death row, rever­sal rates in cap­i­tal cas­es, and the tim­ing of death sen­tences to pro­vide con­text for the…

Three groups of fair jus­tice advo­cates have filed friend-of-the-court briefs ask­ing the U.S. Supreme Court to review and over­turn a Texas appeals court rul­ing that denied a new tri­al to a death-row pris­on­er who pros­e­cu­tors and the tri­al court agree was con­vict­ed based on false DNA tes­ti­mo­ny by a dis­graced police crime…

The inno­cence case of Alabama death-row pris­on­er Toforest Johnson (pic­tured, cen­ter) has drawn sub­stan­tial sup­port from for­mer judges, jurors, pros­e­cu­tors, and state bar pres­i­dents, but dis­in­ter­est by cur­rent Alabama offi­cials has left Johnson lan­guish­ing on death row. So argues jour­nal­ist Radley Balko in his Washington Post col­umn on July 28,…

As Massachusetts for­mal­ly exon­er­at­ed the last per­son con­demned for witch­craft in the colony, efforts are under way to clear the names of the 46 peo­ple wrong­ful­ly charged with witch­craft in neigh­bor­ing Connecticut dur­ing the 17^th cen­tu­ry Puritan witch…