Publications & Testimony

Arizona vio­lat­ed state law, state cor­rec­tions poli­cies, and a court order by deny­ing a reporter from the state’s largest dai­ly cir­cu­la­tion news­pa­per access to view the May 11 exe­cu­tion of Clarence Dixon and by block­ing wit­ness­es’ views of a por­tion of the exe­cu­tion process, a lawyer for the news­pa­per has…

Autopsies of the four men exe­cut­ed by Oklahoma between October 2021 and February 2022 show that all four pris­on­ers had excess flu­id in their lungs, giv­ing addi­tion­al cre­dence to death-row pris­on­ers’ claims that Oklahoma’s lethal-injec­tion process will sub­ject them to an uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly torturous…

Two more African nations have tak­en major steps towards abol­ish­ing the death…

The fates of two men sub­ject to poten­tial­ly immi­nent exe­cu­tion in Texas hang in the bal­ance, as the state’s attor­ney gen­er­al and one local pros­e­cu­tor chal­lenge the dis­cre­tion of oth­er key offi­cials not to move for­ward with exe­cu­tions. The con­tro­ver­sy over the exe­cu­tion dates high­lights emerg­ing ten­sions between pros­e­cu­tors about enforce­ment of death sen­tences and the pro­vi­sion of fair process before a pris­on­er is…

A Missouri judge has reject­ed the state’s first jury rec­om­men­da­tion for a death sen­tence in nine years, and has instead re-sen­tenced for­mer death-row pris­on­er Marvin D. Rice (pic­tured) to life without…

In an opin­ion legal experts have blast­ed as ​“night­mar­ish” and ​“an abom­i­na­tion,” the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in two Arizona death penal­ty cas­es that 1990s amend­ments to the fed­er­al habeas cor­pus law per­mit state pris­on­ers who were pro­vid­ed inef­fec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion at tri­al and in post-con­vic­tion pro­ceed­ings to argue that their coun­sel were inef­fec­tive but bar them from pre­sent­ing evi­dence of their inef­fec­tive­ness that com­pe­tent lawyers had dis­cov­ered once the case had reached federal…

Florida has joined the grow­ing num­ber of states that have end­ed auto­mat­ic per­ma­nent soli­tary con­fine­ment for pris­on­ers sen­tenced to…

The U.S. State Department and the European Union have joined human rights and pro-democ­ra­cy advo­cates in con­demn­ing the expan­sion of the death penal­ty in Belarus to include non-lethal ​“attempt­ed acts of ter­ror­ism,” call­ing the mea­sure an act of repres­sion against oppo­nents of the nation’s auto­crat­ic regime and its assis­tance to the Russian inva­sion of neighboring…

After 37 years of silence, a South Carolina prison doc­tor who was in the exe­cu­tion cham­ber when eight pris­on­ers it was his duty to treat were put to death has for the first time pub­licly dis­cussed his conflicting…

In an exe­cu­tion an expert has char­ac­ter­ized as ​“botched,“ Arizona Department of Corrections per­son­nel failed for 25 min­utes to set an intra­venous line in Clarence Dixon​’s arms on May 11, 2022 before per­form­ing a bloody and appar­ent­ly unau­tho­rized ​“cut­down“ pro­ce­dure to insert the IV line into a vein in his groin. It was the first exe­cu­tion the state had car­ried out after a near­ly eight-year hia­tus fol­low­ing the botched two-hour exe­cu­tion of Joseph Wood on…