Publications & Testimony

The per­cent­age of Americans who find the death penal­ty moral­ly accept­able remains near a record low, accord­ing to a new poll released by the Gallup orga­ni­za­tion on June 9, 2022. 55% of respon­dents to Gallup’s annu­al Values and Beliefs Survey told Gallup that they con­sid­er the death penal­ty moral­ly accept­able, frac­tion­al­ly above the record low of 54% in the orga­ni­za­tion’s 2020 sur­vey. The num­ber match­es the 55% lev­el of accept­abil­i­ty report­ed in the 2021 Values and Beliefs…

At his June 8, 2022 exe­cu­tion in Arizona, Frank Atwood helped prison offi­cials find a suit­able vein for the IV line that would admin­is­ter the lethal-injec­tion drugs to end his life. Jimmy Jenkins, a reporter at the Arizona Republic who wit­nessed the exe­cu­tion, called the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing Atwood direct the state to his vein ​“sur­re­al.” He wrote in his account of the exe­cu­tion that ​“I have wit­nessed life. And I have wit­nessed death. But nothing…

The United States Supreme Court has declined to review a case in which the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) flout­ed a pre­vi­ous Supreme Court rul­ing by deny­ing relief to a death-row pris­on­er a sec­ond time after the Court had returned the case with direc­tions to fur­ther con­sid­er defense counsel’s fail­ure to inves­ti­gate and present a ​“tidal wave” of avail­able mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence in the penal­ty phase of his capital…

Oklahoma state pros­e­cu­tors are push­ing to sched­ule 25 exe­cu­tions over approx­i­mate­ly two years, after a fed­er­al judge denied death-row pris­on­ers’ chal­lenge to the state’s con­tro­ver­sial lethal-injection…

Louisiana’s death penal­ty is dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly imposed in cas­es involv­ing white female vic­tims, espe­cial­ly if the defen­dant in the case is a Black man, a new study by three lead­ing death-penal­ty researchers has con­firmed. Louisiana pros­e­cu­tors were more than five times as like­ly to seek the death penal­ty, and juries more than five times as like­ly to impose it, in cas­es involv­ing a Black male offend­er and a white female vic­tim than in crimes in which both the alleged offend­er and the victim…

Judge Stephen Friot (pic­tured) of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma has ruled that Oklahoma​’s lethal-injec­tion pro­to­col is con­sti­tu­tion­al. After hold­ing a week-long hear­ing on the state’s three-drug pro­to­col in February and March 2022, Judge Friot cred­it­ed the tes­ti­mo­ny of state experts over the pris­on­ers’ expert tes­ti­mo­ny on the like­li­hood that the pro­to­col would result in severe pain. While attor­neys for the 28 pris­on­ers who…

A Tennessee death-row pris­on­er who coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors agree is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled is appeal­ing a tri­al judge’s refusal to vacate his death sen­tence under a law designed to pro­vide con­demned pris­on­ers a mech­a­nism to enforce the con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tion against exe­cut­ing indi­vid­u­als with intellectual…

Federal courts denied relief in two law­suits brought by Arizona death-row pris­on­er Frank Atwood, clear­ing the path for his exe­cu­tion on June 8, 2022. Atwood had sought an oppor­tu­ni­ty to present new evi­dence of his inno­cence, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reject­ed that peti­tion. The appel­late court also affirmed the Arizona fed­er­al dis­trict court’s denial of Atwood’s chal­lenge to the state’s lethal-injec­tion pro­ce­dure, which Atwood said would cause him excru­ci­at­ing pain…

More coun­tries aban­doned the death penal­ty and a record low num­ber car­ried it out, but extreme prac­tices in a few out­lier nations caused glob­al exe­cu­tions to rise in 2021, accord­ing to the human rights group Amnesty…

Court records from a law­suit brought by Tennessee death-row pris­on­ers have revealed wide­spread irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the state’s execution…