Publications & Testimony

The United States Supreme Court has declined to review a case in which the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) flout­ed a pre­vi­ous Supreme Court rul­ing by deny­ing relief to a death-row pris­on­er a sec­ond time after the Court had returned the case with direc­tions to fur­ther con­sid­er defense counsel’s fail­ure to inves­ti­gate and present a ​“tidal wave” of avail­able mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence in the penal­ty phase of his capital…

Oklahoma state pros­e­cu­tors are push­ing to sched­ule 25 exe­cu­tions over approx­i­mate­ly two years, after a fed­er­al judge denied death-row pris­on­ers’ chal­lenge to the state’s controversial lethal-injection…

Louisiana’s death penal­ty is dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly imposed in cas­es involv­ing white female vic­tims, espe­cial­ly if the defen­dant in the case is a Black man, a new study by three lead­ing death-penal­ty researchers has con­firmed. Louisiana pros­e­cu­tors were more than five times as like­ly to seek the death penal­ty, and juries more than five times as like­ly to impose it, in cas­es involv­ing a Black male offend­er and a white female vic­tim than in crimes in which both the alleged offend­er and the victim…

Judge Stephen Friot (pic­tured) of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma has ruled that Oklahoma​’s lethal-injec­tion pro­to­col is con­sti­tu­tion­al. After hold­ing a week-long hear­ing on the state’s three-drug pro­to­col in February and March 2022, Judge Friot cred­it­ed the tes­ti­mo­ny of state experts over the pris­on­ers’ expert tes­ti­mo­ny on the like­li­hood that the pro­to­col would result in severe pain. While attor­neys for the 28 prisoners who…

A Tennessee death-row pris­on­er who coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors agree is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled is appeal­ing a tri­al judge’s refusal to vacate his death sen­tence under a law designed to pro­vide con­demned pris­on­ers a mech­a­nism to enforce the con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tion against exe­cut­ing indi­vid­u­als with intellectual…

Federal courts denied relief in two law­suits brought by Arizona death-row pris­on­er Frank Atwood, clear­ing the path for his exe­cu­tion on June 8, 2022. Atwood had sought an oppor­tu­ni­ty to present new evi­dence of his inno­cence, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reject­ed that peti­tion. The appel­late court also affirmed the Arizona fed­er­al dis­trict court’s denial of Atwood’s chal­lenge to the state’s lethal-injec­tion pro­ce­dure, which Atwood said would cause him excruciating pain…

More coun­tries aban­doned the death penal­ty and a record low num­ber car­ried it out, but extreme prac­tices in a few out­lier nations caused glob­al exe­cu­tions to rise in 2021, accord­ing to the human rights group Amnesty…

Court records from a law­suit brought by Tennessee death-row pris­on­ers have revealed wide­spread irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the state’s execution…

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…