Publications & Testimony

The out­come of a cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion can be pre­dict­ed based upon the rel­a­tive social sta­tus of the vic­tim, the defen­dant, and the jurors, apply­ing a soci­ol­o­gy con­cept known as the geo­met­ri­cal the­o­ry of law, accord­ing to the authors of a new book, Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in…

An Alabama appeals court has upheld a fifth non-unan­i­mous death sen­tence imposed on a death-row pris­on­er who has faced six cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing tri­als for the same offense and was once found to be inel­i­gi­ble for the death penal­ty because of intellectual…

A new study of the Texas death penal­ty, released as the state was con­duct­ing its 400^th mod­ern-era exe­cu­tion in a case involv­ing a white vic­tim, has doc­u­ment­ed over­whelm­ing racial dis­par­i­ties in the Lone Star state’s cap­i­tal punishment…

A South Carolina tri­al court has issued an injunc­tion pre­vent­ing the state from car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions using a fir­ing squad or the elec­tric chair, rul­ing that those meth­ods vio­late the state’s con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tion against ​“cru­el, unusu­al, and corporal…

Pope Francis has issued a renewed call to ​“all peo­ple of good will to mobi­lize for the abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty through­out the world,” devot­ing the September 2022 world­wide prayer inten­tion of his papa­cy to end­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. In a video announc­ing his month­ly prayer inten­tion, the pon­tiff said, ​“Capital pun­ish­ment offers no jus­tice to vic­tims, but rather encour­ages revenge. And it pre­vents any pos­si­bil­i­ty of undo­ing a pos­si­ble mis­car­riage of…

With no exe­cu­tions in more than a decade and no new death sen­tences since 2014, Indiana​’s cost­ly death penal­ty has reached a ​“de fac­to mora­to­ri­um,” says Indiana Capital Chronicle edi­tor-in-chief Niki Kelly. “[M]aybe it’s time to be intel­lec­tu­al­ly hon­est and admit Indiana no longer has the death penal­ty,” Kelly wrote in a September 2, 2022…

As fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors con­sid­er what pun­ish­ment to seek against the accused gun­man in the May 2022 mass shoot­ing at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, sur­vivors and fam­i­ly mem­bers of vic­tims of the shoot­ing are con­cerned that pur­su­ing the death penal­ty will fur­ther spread the racial hatred that fueled the mas­sacre and divert atten­tion from mean­ing­ful action to com­bat white supremacist…

The California leg­is­la­ture has tak­en a major stride towards reform­ing the state’s death-penal­ty prac­tices, pass­ing two bills that would remove from death row indi­vid­u­als whose cap­i­tal con­vic­tions were the prod­uct of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and those whose dete­ri­o­rat­ed men­tal con­di­tion has left them per­ma­nent­ly mentally…

The nation­wide ero­sion of the death penal­ty in the United States con­tin­ued in the quar­ter of 2022, as the death rows of eleven states decreased in size and no state or fed­er­al death row grew larg­er, accord­ing to the Legal Defense Fund’s Spring 2022 Death Row USA (DRUSA) report on capital…