Publications & Testimony

Tennessee vot­ers have issued a stun­ning rebuke to con­tro­ver­sial Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich (pic­tured), oust­ing her from office after an eleven-year tenure marred by charges of racism and…

The sis­ter of death-row pris­on­er Joe Nathan James Jr. has called for an inves­ti­ga­tion into his botched exe­cu­tion fol­low­ing a state­ment by an Alabama Department of Correction’s spokesper­son that ADOC could not con­firm that James was ful­ly con­scious when he was…

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board has rec­om­mend­ed clemen­cy for James Coddington (pic­tured at his clemen­cy hear­ing), the first of 25 death-row pris­on­ers sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed in Oklahoma between August 2022 and December…

As the tri­al chal­leng­ing South Carolina​’s exe­cu­tion meth­ods began on August 1, 2022, a review of the state’s death penal­ty by the Greenville News revealed a pat­tern of dis­crim­i­na­tion, geo­graph­ic arbi­trari­ness, and high error rates in the imple­men­ta­tion of the pun­ish­ment. In a two-part exam­i­na­tion, reporter Kathryn Casteel ana­lyzed racial and coun­ty demo­graph­ics on death row, rever­sal rates in cap­i­tal cas­es, and the tim­ing of death sen­tences to pro­vide con­text for the…

Three groups of fair jus­tice advo­cates have filed friend-of-the-court briefs ask­ing the U.S. Supreme Court to review and over­turn a Texas appeals court rul­ing that denied a new tri­al to a death-row pris­on­er who pros­e­cu­tors and the tri­al court agree was con­vict­ed based on false DNA tes­ti­mo­ny by a dis­graced police crime…

The inno­cence case of Alabama death-row pris­on­er Toforest Johnson (pic­tured, cen­ter) has drawn sub­stan­tial sup­port from for­mer judges, jurors, pros­e­cu­tors, and state bar pres­i­dents, but dis­in­ter­est by cur­rent Alabama offi­cials has left Johnson lan­guish­ing on death row. So argues jour­nal­ist Radley Balko in his Washington Post col­umn on July 28,…

As Massachusetts for­mal­ly exon­er­at­ed the last per­son con­demned for witch­craft in the colony, efforts are under way to clear the names of the 46 peo­ple wrong­ful­ly charged with witch­craft in neigh­bor­ing Connecticut dur­ing the 17^th cen­tu­ry Puritan witch…

Alabama put Joe Nathan James, Jr. to death on July 28, 2022 against the wish­es of his victim’s fam­i­ly in an exe­cu­tion marred by an hours-long fail­ure to set a lethal-injec­tion intra­venous line and an embar­rass­ing dress-code con­tro­ver­sy in which a cor­rec­tions offi­cial told a female reporter she would not be able to wit­ness the exe­cu­tion because her skirt was too short and she was wear­ing open-toed shoes and sub­ject­ed anoth­er female reporter to a clothing…

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has over­turned a South Carolina death-row prisoner’s death sen­tence after find­ing that the sen­tenc­ing judge in his case had ignored uncon­test­ed evi­dence of the defendant’s men­tal ill­ness and his­to­ry of severe child­hood abuse and…

State and fed­er­al courts have over­turned three California death sen­tences in a span of two weeks from late June to mid-July 2022. Death-row pris­on­ers Richard Clark, Michael Bramit, and Andrew Lancaster were all grant­ed relief on claims relat­ed to defense counsel’s inad­e­quate per­for­mance or jury-relat­ed issues. Clark and Bramit will receive new penalty-phase…