Publications & Testimony

The U.S. Supreme Court has heard argu­ment in two death penal­ty cas­es that present high­ly tech­ni­cal legal issues that could pro­found­ly affect the extent to which pris­on­ers con­vict­ed in state courts will have mean­ing­ful access to fed­er­al review of their…

Carman Deck (pic­tured) has been sen­tenced to death three times. Each of those death sen­tences were over­turned — once by the U.S. Supreme Court — as a result of prej­u­di­cial con­sti­tu­tion­al vio­la­tions in his tri­als. Nonetheless, he faces exe­cu­tion in Missouri on May 3, 2022 because a pro­ce­dur­al tech­ni­cal­i­ty over­turned his third grant of relief, block­ing him from pre­sent­ing his claim that crit­i­cal mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence call­ing for a sen­tence less than death had…

Five years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas death sen­tence when an expert wit­ness had tes­ti­fied that a Black defen­dant posed an increased risk of com­mit­ting future acts of vio­lence because of his race, the Court has refused to review anoth­er Texas cap­i­tal case in which the tri­al court per­mit­ted a juror to serve who expressed the very same…

On April 27, 2017, Kenneth Williams con­vulsed vio­lent­ly as he died on the gur­ney, the fourth pris­on­er put to death in an eleven-day exe­cu­tion spree in which Arkansas intend­ed to exe­cute eight men before its sup­ply of exe­cu­tion drugs expired. It has not executed anyone…

The South Carolina Supreme Court has halt­ed two sched­uled exe­cu­tions, includ­ing one that would have been the state’s first exe­cu­tion by fir­ing squad, amid ongo­ing legal chal­lenges by state death-row pris­on­ers to the state’s execution…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has halt­ed the sched­uled April 27, 2022 exe­cu­tion of Melissa Lucio and direct­ed that a Cameron County tri­al court con­duct a hear­ing to address evi­dence that she may be inno­cent of charges that she mur­dered her two-year-old daugh­ter, Mariah (pic­tured, being held by her…

In a coin­ci­dence that brought atten­tion to the aging of death row across the United States, the old­est death-row pris­on­ers in Tennessee and Texas faced exe­cu­tion in their respec­tive states on April 21, 2022. After the U.S. Supreme Court denied stays of exe­cu­tion for both pris­on­ers, their cas­es took different…

On April 22, 1987, the United States Supreme Court ruled in McCleskey v. Kemp that the same types of sta­tis­ti­cal data that were rou­tine­ly accept­ed as proof of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in hous­ing, employ­ment, edu­ca­tion, and the denial of oth­er civ­il rights were not suf­fi­cient as proof that a death sen­tence had been unconstitutionally…

Days after his office asked to set an exe­cu­tion date for Texas death row pris­on­er John Ramirez, Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez (pic­tured) asked Ramirez’s tri­al court to withdraw the…

A Missouri cap­i­tal defen­dant whose jury was the first in nine years to rec­om­mend the death penal­ty in the state is chal­leng­ing the ver­dict as based sole­ly on a nonexistent aggravating…