Publications & Testimony

A Russian national on the U.S. federal death row has filed a civil rights lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the federal government’s use of automatic and prolonged solitary confinement to house individuals sentenced to death. The class action complaint, filed January 12, 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana on behalf of Jurijus Kadamovas (pictured) and 37 other prisoners incarcerated on death row in the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute…

Alabama death-row prisoner Kenneth Smith spent four hours on November 17, 2022 strapped to an execution gurney while state prosecutors attempted to lift a stay of execution issued by a federal appeals court and his execution team repeatedly failed in attempts to set the intravenous execution line intended to kill him. He was left strapped to the gurney after prison officials called off the botched execution, unaware that he was not to be put to death that night. These revelations, and more…

Tennessee will not resume executions until it fixes systemic problems with the administration of its execution protocol, Governor Bill Lee has announced. “It’s a very important issue that has to be done correctly,” Lee told reporters on January 5, 2023. “And we will take the time to fix the protocol and to make certain that we don’t move forward until everything’s in place.” Lee, a Republican, halted the execution of Oscar Smith on April 21, 2022 after learning that the Tennessee Department of…

The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed the denial of relief to a Texas death-row prisoner whose request for new trial is supported by local prosecutors. In a two-sentence decision, the Court granted certiorari to Areli Escobar, vacated the judgment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA), and sent the case back for reconsideration. The Court’s summary reversal relied on Travis County prosecutors’ admission that Escobar’s conviction is based on “flawed and misleading forensic evidence.”

Oklahoma has carried out the first of eleven executions scheduled for 2023, administering a lethal injection to death-row prisoner Scott Eizember on January 12. The execution was a continuation of a 29-month execution spree between August 2022 and December 2024 in which the state intends to put 25 prisoners to death — 58% of the state’s death row. It was the third execution of 2023, following the January 3 execution of Amber McLaughlin in Missouri and the January 10 execution of Robert Fratta…

January 11, 2023 marks the twentieth anniversary of former Illinois Governor George Ryan’s decision to grant clemency to every death row prisoner in Illinois, the largest blanket clemency in the modern era of the death penalty. It was a watershed moment in both Illinois’ criminal justice history and in the ongoing national conversation about the death penalty. In a 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Ryan explained what led him to make the decision to commute 167 death sentences, even…

Nearly 47 years after being convicted of a quadruple murder, Florida death-row prisoner Tommy Zeigler has finally been permitted to independently conduct new DNA testing on evidence he claims will prove his innocence. Circuit Court Judge Patricia L. Strowbridge approved Zeigler’s request for DNA testing in October 2022. As soon as her ruling was finalized in December, more than 100 pieces of previously untested evidence were shipped to a California lab to be tested at Zeigler’s own expense.

Less than two years after being exonerated in two different cases, Philadelphia death-row exoneree Christopher Williams (pictured) has been murdered. Williams, who spent nearly three decades in prison, including 25 years on death row, for separate wrongful murder convictions, was fatally shot after attending the funeral of Tyree Little, another formerly incarcerated man, in North Philadelphia on December 16, 2022. Philadelphia prosecutors framed Williams for six murders and subjected him to…

Longtime civil and human rights lawyer, Diann Rust-Tierney, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Racial Justice Institute, joins Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robert Dunham in the first DPIC podcast of 2023 for a discussion of race, human rights, and the U.S. death penalty. Prof. Rust-Tierney, who served as the Robert F. Drinan visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center Human Rights Institute in 2020 – 2021 after sixteen years as executive…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has granted an application by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block a state trial court from reviewing a civil lawsuit filed by three death-row prisoners who challenged the state’s intent to execute them using lethal-injection drugs they claimed were “unlawfully obtained and long-expired.” In a ruling issued on January 4, 2023, the court directed Travis County Judge Catherine A. Mauzy “to refrain from issuing any order purporting to stay the…