Publications & Testimony

In a case that reflects the wan­ing use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, even in the some of the coun­ties that have car­ried out the most exe­cu­tions in mod­ern times, Rick Rhoades on September 28, 2021 became the first per­son con­vict­ed in Harris County (Houston), Texas to be exe­cut­ed in two…

Nine dif­fer­ent groups of advo­cates, includ­ing for­mer pros­e­cu­tors and judges, lead­ing legal schol­ars, inno­cence advo­cates, and defense attor­neys, have filed friend-of-the-court ami­cus briefs in the United States Supreme Court ask­ing the court to rule in favor of Arizona death-row pris­on­ers Barry Jones and David Ramirez in cas­es that could have broad impli­ca­tions for the avail­abil­i­ty of fed­er­al judi­cial review of state…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has vacat­ed the con­vic­tion of death-row pris­on­er Clinton Young, whose pros­e­cu­tor was also on the pay­roll of the judge who presided over the tri­al and decid­ed his trial court…

The Nevada Supreme Court has found that a pris­on­er who has been on the state’s death row for more than forty years is ​“actu­al­ly inno­cent” of the death penal­ty and must be…

After more than six years with no exe­cu­tions and with a tri­al pend­ing on the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the state’s lethal injec­tion process, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has issued death war­rants set­ting sev­en exe­cu­tion dates in a less than five-month peri­od between late October 2021 and mid-March…

On September 19, 2021, com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers in Chattanooga, Tennessee ded­i­cat­ed a memo­r­i­al to Ed Johnson, an inno­cent Black man wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 1906 for alleged­ly rap­ing a white woman and lynched by a white mob after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order stay­ing his exe­cu­tion. The memo­r­i­al also hon­ors the two lawyers who worked to save…

An African-American man sen­tenced to death in Hamilton County, Ohio in 1999 for the mur­der of a white man is seek­ing to over­turn his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence based on evi­dence from a recent­ly pub­lished study that he was more than five times more like­ly to be sen­tenced to death because of his race and the race of the vic­tim in his…

“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…