Publications & Testimony

Lawyers for Texas death-row pris­on­er Rodney Reed (pic­tured) pre­sent­ed four days of tes­ti­mo­ny in a Bastrop County cour­t­house in an attempt to estab­lish his inno­cence of the mur­der of Stacey Stites, as activists, reli­gious lead­ers, and mem­bers of Reed’s fam­i­ly ral­lied in sup­port of his…

In a video inter­view posthu­mous­ly released on the anniver­sary of the first mod­ern exon­er­a­tion of a Florida death-row pris­on­er, for­mer Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerald Kogan has called for abo­li­tion of the state’s death penal­ty. ​“I believe that the death penal­ty should absolute­ly not be a pun­ish­ment deliv­ered by the State of Florida, or for that mat­ter, nei­ther any place in the United States or the world,” Kogan…

After clash­ing with Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials over the pro­pri­ety of using state­ments obtained through tor­ture from Guantánamo detainees, Army Brigadier General Mark S. Martins (pic­tured), the chief pros­e­cu­tor in the Guantánamo Military Commissions tri­als, will retire from the mil­i­tary on September 30, 2021. Martins, who had served as the com­mis­sions’ chief pros­e­cu­tor through­out the Obama and Trump admin­is­tra­tions, abrupt­ly sub­mit­ted papers on July 7…

In a unan­i­mous rul­ing, the California Supreme Court has lim­it­ed the reach of a con­tro­ver­sial vot­er ini­tia­tive that was intend­ed to accel­er­ate judi­cial review of death-penal­ty cas­es. In In re: Friend, decid­ed June 28, 2021, the court ruled that pro­vi­sions of Proposition 66 that strict­ly lim­it a death-row prisoner’s abil­i­ty to file suc­ces­sive chal­lenges to his or her cap­i­tal con­vic­tion or death sen­tence do not bar a cap­i­tal peti­tion­er from fil­ing a…

As the first court hear­ing on Pervis Payne​’s claim that his death sen­tence must be vacat­ed because of his intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty was about to get under­way, promi­nent civ­il rights lead­ers and rel­a­tives of a civ­il rights icon added their voic­es to efforts to free the Tennessee death-row pris­on­er, who has con­sis­tent­ly assert­ed his…

DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham appeared on the July 16, 2021 episode of New Generation, a pod­cast pro­duced by the Sharon (Pennsylvania) Herald, in con­nec­tion with the newspaper’s Crime of Punishment editorial…

NEWS (7/​21/​21) — Ohio: The Ohio Supreme Court has vacat­ed the con­vic­tion and death sen­tence for George Brinkman, find­ing that he had not been advised of crit­i­cal con­sti­tu­tion­al rights when he entered a guilty plea in his 2018 cap­i­tal tri­al and that his plea was there­fore invalid. The jus­tices vacat­ed Brinkman’s plea and returned his case to the Cuyahoga County court to con­duct a new…

In a rul­ing ren­dered along par­ti­san lines with­out ben­e­fit of oral argu­ment, the United States Supreme Court has over­turned the deci­sion of a fed­er­al appeals court that had vacat­ed the death sen­tence imposed on an Alabama death-row pris­on­er whose tri­al lawyers had failed to obtain expert assis­tance to present evi­dence of his intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. By a vote of 6 – 3, with all mem­bers of the con­ser­v­a­tive bloc of jus­tices vot­ing for the pros­e­cu­tion, the Court on…

Studies have con­sis­tent­ly found that a sys­tem of crim­i­nal law in which the death penal­ty is avail­able as a pun­ish­ment is far more expen­sive than a sys­tem in which the most severe pun­ish­ment is life with­out parole or a long prison term. Now, as the num­ber of mur­der exon­er­a­tions mounts across the United States, a pre­vi­ous­ly hid­den cost is emerg­ing: the cost of lia­bil­i­ty for police and pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct asso­ci­at­ed with the wrong­ful use or threat­ened use of the death…

At 3:00 a.m. Central time on July 14, 2020, after his notice of exe­cu­tion had expired, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) strapped Daniel Lewis Lee to an exe­cu­tion gur­ney in the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. With the exe­cu­tion cham­ber cur­tains closed, cor­rec­tion­al offi­cials left him there for four hours while fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors filed plead­ings in a fed­er­al appeals court to lift a stay of exe­cu­tion they had for­got­ten was still in…