Publications & Testimony

After years of silence regarding his views on the death penalty, Governor John Bel Edwards of Louisiana expressed his opposition to capital punishment in a seminar at Loyola University in New Orleans. On March 22, 2023, Edwards said, “The death penalty is so final. When you make a mistake, you can’t get it back. And we know that mistakes have been made in sentencing people to death.” Edwards based his opposition to the death penalty on his religious faith and said it was “fortuitous” that a…

Idaho will become the fifth state to authorize the firing squad as a method of execution and may become the first state to mandatorily impose it on a death row prisoner since 1976. Idaho’s Governor Brad Little signed HB 186 into law on March 24, 2023, and it goes into effect on July 1. The law gives the director of the Idaho Department of Correction up to five days after a death warrant is issued to determine if lethal injection is available. If it is declared unavailable, the execution will be…

According to the Louisiana Public Defender’s Office, the state spent $7.7 million on the legal representation of defendants in death penalty cases just in 2022. That total does not include the costs of prosecutors, judges, and other criminal justice personnel. The state has not carried out an execution in 13 years and has had only one execution in the past 21 years. State officials have attributed the most recent execution delays to difficulties obtaining the drugs needed for lethal injection…

An in-depth piece in the Huffington Post examines Harris County’s (Texas) system for providing representation to those facing the death penalty who cannot afford their own attorney. The process is explored through the story of Obel Cruz-Garcia, a prisoner on Texas’ death row. The author described his case: “Like most people who end up on death row, Cruz-Garcia could not afford to hire a lawyer for the resource-intensive process of a capital trial, and Harris County, Texas, doesn’t offer public…

In the latest episode of “Discussions with DPIC,” Robert Dunham, former Executive Director of DPIC, interviews Karen Steele (pictured), a researcher and defense attorney in Oregon, regarding the special characteristics of late adolescent defendants facing the death penalty. Research by Steele and others points to the incomplete brain development in those aged 18 – 21 and how that can be exacerbated in those suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The research has also found that…

On March 14, 2023, at the direction of Attorney General Merrick Garland (pictured), the U.S. Attorney for the District of North Dakota withdrew the notice of intent to seek a death sentence for Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr., who had been convicted in 2006 of the 2003 kidnapping and killing of college student Dru Sjodin. Rodriguez had originally been sentenced to death in 2007, but U.S. District Court Judge Ralph Erickson reversed the death sentence because of misleading testimony presented at trial…

Death-sentenced prisoners in California will be moved out of San Quentin State Prison (pictured) and placed in other maximum security facilities, as part of a broad plan announced by Governor Gavin Newsom on March 17, 2023. The governor seeks to “transform” the state’s oldest prison into “a one-of-a-kind facility focused on improving public safety through rehabilitation and education.” The state launched a pilot program in 2020 allowing some death-row prisoners to voluntarily move to other…

On March 13, 2023 in Japan, Tokyo’s High Court granted a retrial for Iwao Hakamada, a former boxer known as the “longest serving death row” prisoner in the world. He was convicted of murder in 1968. Hideaki Nakagawa, Director of Amnesty International Japan, described the ruling as a “long-overdue chance to deliver some justice to Hakamada.” Although Hakamada had initially denied the charges brought against him, he claimed he later confessed to the police after being subjected to brutal…

In an op-ed for the National Review, psychiatrist Sally Satel writes, “No civilized or lawful purpose is served by executing the severely mentally ill.” Satel is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and she highlights the deficits in the current legal system that permit capital sentences and executions for those suffering from severe mental illness. “The requirements to qualify for the insanity defense set the bar so high that few mentally ill defendants can meet it,” she…

A 2022 article in the Columbia Journal of Law & Social Problems presents both a historical overview of the practice of death-row confinement in the U.S. and the findings of a survey of the conditions on death rows in every jurisdiction with capital punishment in America. Regarding the use of highly restrictive confinement, the author states that “the system of permanent solitary confinement on death row has neither the weight of history nor the support of the majority in either contemporary…