Publications & Testimony

“What should become of indi­vid­u­als who are await­ing exe­cu­tion fol­low­ing the repeal or judi­cial inval­i­da­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment leg­is­la­tion?,” ask authors James R. Acker (pic­tured, left) and Brian W. Stull (pic­tured, right) in a recent arti­cle pub­lished in the Akron Law Review. If his­to­ry is a guide, they say, the pris­on­ers’ lives should be…

Four Utah dis­trict attor­neys, rep­re­sent­ing coun­ties that com­prise 57.5% of the state’s pop­u­la­tion, have urged the state leg­is­la­ture and Utah Governor Spencer Cox to enact leg­is­la­tion to repeal and replace Utah’s death…

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board has vot­ed to rec­om­mend that Governor Kevin Stitt com­mute the death sen­tence imposed on Julius Jones (pic­tured) by an Oklahoma County jury in 1999 to a sen­tence of life in prison with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of…

Former Mississippi death-row pris­on­er Curtis Flowers (pic­tured), who was exon­er­at­ed in 2020, is suing the offi­cials whose mis­con­duct led to his arrest and repeat­ed wrong­ful con­vic­tion. Flowers was tried six times and spent 23 years wrong­ful­ly incar­cer­at­ed for a quadru­ple mur­der in a white-owned fur­ni­ture store in Winona, Mississippi. In a com­plaint filed September 3, 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Flowers alleges…

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (pic­tured) has issued reprieves fur­ther post­pon­ing four exe­cu­tions that had been sched­uled between January and May 2022. The governor’s orders, announced September 10, 2021, resched­uled the exe­cu­tions for between December 2024 and May…

The num­ber of peo­ple on death row or fac­ing pos­si­ble cap­i­tal resen­tenc­ing across the United States now match­es a three-decade low, accord­ing to data com­piled by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and ana­lyzed by the Death Penalty Information…

The California Supreme Court has upheld the state’s death-penal­ty statute against a con­sti­tu­tion­al chal­lenge that had the poten­tial to over­turn the sen­tences of hun­dreds of peo­ple on California’s death row. In a unan­i­mous rul­ing issued August 26, 2021 in People v. McDaniel, the court held that a cap­i­tal jury need not unan­i­mous­ly agree to the exis­tence of an aggra­vat­ing cir­cum­stance before weigh­ing it in the sen­tenc­ing deci­sion so long as every juror found that the…

In an after-hours order issued on September 8, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court halt­ed Texas​’s planned exe­cu­tion of John Henry Ramirez and agreed to review his claim that the state’s refusal to allow his pas­tor to ​“lay hands” on him or pray audi­bly dur­ing the exe­cu­tion vio­lat­ed fed­er­al law and his First Amendment right to the free exer­cise of…

Efforts to end the death penal­ty in Utah edged for­ward on September 8, 2021 as two Republican leg­is­la­tors revealed plans to intro­duce leg­is­la­tion to ​“repeal and replace” the state’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment law and the pros­e­cut­ing attor­ney in the state’s sec­ond most pop­u­lous coun­ty declared that he would no longer seek the death penal­ty in future…

Texas death-row pris­on­er John Ramirez (pic­tured) is ask­ing the United States Supreme Court to stay his September 8, 2021 exe­cu­tion, argu­ing that the state’s refusal to allow his pas­tor to pray out loud with him and lay hands on him while he is being exe­cut­ed vio­lates fed­er­al law and his First Amendment right to free exer­cise of…