Publications & Testimony

Corey Maye was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death for the mur­der of a police offi­cer in Prentiss, Mississippi, on the day after Christmas in 2001. The police offi­cer was part of a drug raid on a neigh­bor’s apart­ment. Maye claims that the police broke into his duplex unan­nounced and that he fired his gun in defense of him­self and his 18-month-old daugh­ter. Mississippi Circuit Court Judge Michael Eubanks recent­ly ruled that Maye was enti­tled to a new sen­tenc­ing hear­ing because his…

A Los Angeles Times arti­cle on the recent hear­ings in fed­er­al District Court regard­ing the California’s lethal injec­tion process was enti­tled​“The Chaos Behind California Executions.” Excerpts from the…

On October 10^th, 2006, John Grisham​’s first non-fic­­tion book, The Innocent Man, will be released. The book is the com­pelling true sto­ry of Ron Williamson, a for­mer home­town base­ball hero of Ada, Oklahoma, who was con­vict­ed in 1988 of rap­ing and mur­der­ing Debbie Carter. In 1999, Williamson was exon­er­at­ed of the crime after serv­ing eleven years on death row. In the con­text of this case, Grisham address­es many of the fun­da­men­tal issues that sur­round the death…

Christopher Slobogin of the University of Florida’s Law School has writ­ten a new book about the state’s legal author­i­ty to deprive peo­ple with men­tal dis­abil­i­ties of life or lib­er­ty. The book dis­cuss­es a num­ber of well known cas­es such as that of John Hinckley and Andrea Yates. It also includes dis­cus­sion of laws deal­ing with the insan­i­ty defense, the death penal­ty, com­mit­ment of sex­u­al preda­tors, and hos­pi­tal­iza­tion of peo­ple con­sid­ered unable to make…

Monday, October 2, 2006The Chaos Behind California ExecutionsTrial tes­ti­mo­ny paints lethal injec­tion meth­ods as hap­haz­ard, with lit­tle med­ical over­sight.By Maura Dolan and Henry WeinsteinLos Angeles Times Staff WritersSAN JOSE — ​“Operational Procedure No. 770,” the state’s name for exe­cu­tion by lethal injec­tion, is per­formed in a dark, cramped room by men and women who know lit­tle, if any­thing, about the dead­ly drugs they inject under extreme…

One attor­ney’s appeal brief on behalf of a Texas death row inmate was so poor­ly writ­ten that State District Judge Noe Gonzalez of Edinburg wrote that​“Applicant total­ly mis­in­ter­prets what actu­al­ly occurred in this case.” A com­mit­tee of cit­i­zens and attor­neys filed a com­plaint about the appel­late lawyer with the State Bar of Texas, but noth­ing was done: the lawyer remains on the state’s list of approved death penal­ty attor­neys, and the client remains on death row. The…

The Charlotte School of Law is spon­sor­ing a symposium on ​“Mental Illness and the Death Penalty: Seeking a​‘Reasoned Moral Response’ to an Unavoidable Condition” on October 20, 2006 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The con­fer­ence will bring togeth­er med­ical experts, judges, defense attor­neys, pros­e­cu­tors, and oth­er experts to dis­cuss whether cur­rent law ade­quate­ly accounts for the role of men­tal ill­ness in cap­i­tal cas­es. Among those sched­uled to speak are…

The for­mer Director of the FBI, William Sessions (pic­tured), along with Timothy Lewis, a for­mer judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, called on mem­bers of Congress to refrain from bar­ring death row inmates and oth­er defen­dants from the full access to the fed­er­al courts in their appeals. Some leg­is­la­tors have pro­posed elim­i­nat­ing fed­er­al habeas cor­pus review in many cas­es, and bar­ring access to the fed­er­al courts to many of those raising…

The lat­est edi­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s​“Death Row USA” shows that the num­ber of peo­ple on the death row in the United States is con­tin­u­ing to decline, falling to 3,366 as of July 1, 2006. The size of death row increased every year between 1976 and 2000, but since then it has been in…

The FBI recent­ly released the lat­est ver­sion of its Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States 2005. The report showed that the mur­der rate in 2005 (5.6 mur­ders per 100,000 peo­ple) was the same as in 2001, with lit­tle change in the inter­ven­ing years. Death sen­tences, exe­cu­tions and the size of death row all declined dur­ing this peri­od. As in pre­vi­ous years, the South had the high­erst mur­der rate, 6.6, among the 4 geo­graph­i­cal regions. Over 80% of the…