Publications & Testimony

Malcolm Rent Johnson, a Black man, was tried, con­vict­ed, and sen­tenced to death by an all-white jury for the rape and mur­der of an elder­ly white woman in Oklahoma City in 1982.[1] Johnson was tried by Bob Macy, and his con­vic­tion was based in part on tes­ti­mo­ny from Joyce Gilchrist. Johnson was exe­cut­ed in January 2000, only a year before Gilchrist’s wide­spread mis­con­duct came to light. [2] Doubts about Johnson’s guilt…

Tremane Wood was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in Oklahoma County in 2004.[1] He was sen­tenced to death for the mur­der of Ronnie Wipf dur­ing the com­mis­sion of a rob­bery, a mur­der that his broth­er, Zjaiton​“Jake” Wood, admit­ted com­mit­ting.[2] However, Jake was rep­re­sent­ed by a lit­i­ga­tion team that worked dili­gent­ly to secure a life sen­tence.[3] Meanwhile, Tremane was appoint­ed John Albert, an over­worked attor­ney who was strug­gling with alco­hol and substance use…

On October 14, 2022, the Death Penalty Information Center released Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty, a report plac­ing Oklahoma’s death penal­ty sys­tem in his­tor­i­cal con­text. Below are some of the impor­tant facts peo­ple should know as the state con­tin­ues its 25-person execution…

A non-unan­i­­mous Florida jury has returned a ver­dict of life with­out parole for Nikolas Cruz, the teen offend­er con­vict­ed of killing 17 peo­ple in the February 14, 2018 shoot­ing at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (pic­tured) in Parkland, Florida. The October 13, 2022 ver­dict, in which three jurors vot­ed to spare Cruz’s life, con­clud­ed a six-month sen­tenc­ing tri­al. Florida law, like that of near­ly every death-penalty…

The U.S. Supreme Court heard argu­ment on October 11, 2022 on whether a Texas death-row pris­on­er was time-barred from obtain­ing fed­er­al review of the state’s refusal to grant him DNA test­ing that could prove his inno­cence because he wait­ed for the state appeals process to fin­ish before filing his…

Supreme Court of…

In its land­mark deci­sion in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the use of the death penal­ty against indi­vid­u­als with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty con­sti­tut­ed cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment in vio­la­tion of the Eighth Amendment. Twenty years lat­er, how­ev­er,​“there is not just the risk, but the cer­tain­ty” that states con­tin­ue to sen­tence intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled defen­dants to death, three legal scholars argue,…

Alabama has set a November 17, 2022 exe­cu­tion date for a death-row pris­on­er whose jury vot­ed 11 – 1 to…

A Pittsburg County, Oklahoma judge has denied a com­pe­ten­cy hear­ing for death-row pris­on­er Benjamin Cole (pic­tured), clear­ing the path for his exe­cu­tion on October…

A study of more than 400 death-eli­gi­ble mur­der cas­es in St. Louis County, Missouri over a 27-year peri­od has found sig­nif­i­cant racial dis­par­i­ties in the county’s admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty based upon the race…