Publications & Testimony

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…

Posted July 27,…

Amid a vio­lent crack­down on pro-democ­ra­cy move­ments, Myanmar’s mil­i­tary jun­ta exe­cut­ed four men, includ­ing a promi­nent activist and a former…

Former Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry (pic­tured) and for­mer U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Lester, who co-chaired the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission in 2017, have called on state offi­cials to halt the sched­uled exe­cu­tions of 25 death-row…

Lawyers for James Coddington (pic­tured), the first per­son sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed as part of Oklahoma’s two-year exe­cu­tion spree, are seek­ing clemen­cy for a man they say ​“exem­pli­fies the prin­ci­ples of redemp­tion.” In a peti­tion filed July 15, 2022, they ask the Oklahoma Pardons and Parole Board to com­mute Coddington’s death sen­tence to life with­out parole, describ­ing Coddington’s sin­cere remorse and exem­plary behav­ioral record on death…

If Alabama exe­cutes Joe Nathan James on July 28, 2022 for the mur­der of Faith Hall, it can­not claim to be doing jus­tice for her or her fam­i­ly. Hall’s two daugh­ters, Terrlyn and Toni Hall (pic­tured, far left and far right) and her broth­er Helvetius Hall (pic­tured, mid­dle), oppose James’ exe­cu­tion and say Faith would oppose it,…

Data from fifty years of the mod­ern U.S. death penal­ty reveal ​“a sys­tem that is rife with error, filled with dis­crim­i­na­tion, [and] very, very dif­fi­cult to fair­ly admin­is­ter,” Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham says in the July episode the Discussions with DPIC pod­cast. The episode, a dis­cus­sion between Dunham and 2021 – 2022 DPIC Data Fellow Aimee Breaux about the launch of DPIC’s ground­break­ing Death Penalty Census data­base, was released July 20,…

As Richard Glossip faces an exe­cu­tion date for the fourth time, his case is a per­fect exam­ple of the prob­lems in the death-penal­ty sys­tem that then-Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (pic­tured) iden­ti­fied in his 2015 land­mark dis­sent in Glossip v. Gross. In an analy­sis pub­lished by Slate, Jeremy Stahl writes, ​“Whether or not Richard Glossip is ulti­mate­ly exe­cut­ed for a crime he like­ly did not com­mit, his and Breyer’s names will be…

A new study sug­gests that Idaho​’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment statute fails to nar­row the use of the death penal­ty to the ​“worst of the worst” crimes, rais­ing ques­tions about its con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty. In Narrowing Death Eligibility in Idaho: An Empirical and Constitutional Analysis, pub­lished in the February 2022 issue of the Idaho Law Review, Aliza Plener Cover (pic­tured) argues based on data from near­ly 20 years of mur­der con­vic­tions that the Idaho…

The Mississippi Supreme Court has denied addi­tion­al DNA test­ing to death-row pris­on­er Willie Manning (pic­tured). Manning, who was sen­tenced to death in Oktibbeha County in 1994 and in 1996 for two sep­a­rate crimes, has main­tained his inno­cence of both crimes. He was exon­er­at­ed of the 1996 con­vic­tion in 2015 after police and pros­e­cu­tors unlaw­ful­ly with­held excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence from the…