Publications & Testimony

Susie Williams Carter was just a baby when her 16-year-old brother, Alexander McClay Williams, was convicted of murder and executed in Pennsylvania in 1931. Over 90 years later, Ms. Carter, now 94, continues her family’s determination to clear her brother’s name. In June 2022, a Delaware County, Pennsylvania judge agreed that law enforcement had disregarded evidence and coerced Mr. Williams into signing multiple false confessions. All charges against Mr. Williams were posthumously dismissed and…

On May 20, 2024, Jefferson County, Alabama District Attorney Danny Carr asked a circuit judge to grant a new trial to Toforest Johnson (center), an Alabama death row prisoner whose conviction DA Carr believes is “fundamentally unreliable.” This extraordinary request is the latest in a series of appeals for Mr. Johnson, who was sentenced to death in 1998 for the 1995 murder of Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff William Hardy but has always maintained his innocence. “A thorough review and…

As of October 2023, the number of people in the United States sentenced to death or facing the possibility of a death sentence continued its more than two-decade decline, according to the latest report issued by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). In its Fall 2023 edition of Death Row USA (DRUSA), LDF reports that the number of people on state, federal, and military death rows or facing pending capital trials or resentencing proceedings has fallen to 2,262. Of that total, LDF reports that 804…

On May 9, Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a bill authorizing the death penalty for aggravated rape of a child, following Florida’s passage of a similar law last year. Both laws contradict longstanding Supreme Court precedent holding the death penalty unconstitutional for non-homicide crimes. Tennessee’s law takes effect on July 1. The state has had a death penalty moratorium in place since May 2022 after Governor Lee learned that state officials had failed to test execution drugs for…

On Tuesday, the Death Penalty Information Center released a new report that connects Ohio’s racial history to the modern use of the death penalty in the state. Broken Promises: How a History of Racial Violence and Bias Shaped Ohio’s Death Penalty documents how racial discrimination is the throughline that runs from the state’s founding to its application of capital punishment today. The report notes that Ohio’s Black Laws, adopted in the early 1800s, made race a critical element of the state’s…

Furman v. Georgia was one of the most monumental cases in American legal history: the 1972 decision overturned every state death penalty statute in the country and spared the lives of nearly six hundred people sentenced to die. But the lead petitioner, William Henry Furman, was little aware of his impact. Poor, Black, mentally ill, and physically and intellectually disabled, he was sentenced to death for the killing of a homeowner during a botched robbery, which he maintains was accidental.

Oklahoma prisoner Wade Lay (pictured) will not be executed on June 6, 2024 as scheduled because a Pittsburg County judge has found him mentally incompetent to be executed. “The available evidence demonstrates, by a preponderance or greater weight of the evidence, that Mr. Lay is currently incompetent to be executed according to the governing legal standards,” Judge Tim Mills wrote. Defense and state experts who examined Mr. Lay found that, due to his schizophrenia, delusions, and paranoia, he…

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled on May 7 to extend the interval between executions to occur approximately 90-days apart, specifying that executions should be scheduled for Thursdays, and that the Department of Corrections must be provided notice at least 35 days in advance. The Court also denied the Attorney General’s motion to set execution dates for groups of prisoners, as has been done in the past, instead choosing to schedule executions individually. “Attorney General Drummond…

In a May 7, 2024 editorial, the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board cites the deeply engrained racial disparities in the California death penalty system and how those facts led them to conclude that “even if the state could perform painless and anxiety-free executions and racial biases were eliminated, the death penalty would still be wrong.” “Black defendants were 4.6 to 8.7 times more likely to be sentenced to death than other defendants facing similar charges” the Board notes, and “Latinos…

A new article, “Gender Matters: Women on Death Row in the United States,” explores the cases of 48 women who were sentenced to death in the United States between 1990 and 2023. “We believe that women’s capital sentences are best explained by examining the events of their lives within a larger social context, and by analyzing how those experiences — and the women themselves — were treated within the legal system,” said the authors, who include Sandra Babcock (pictured left), a Clinical Professor of…