Publications & Testimony

District Attorney Doug Evans, who gained notoriety for his misconduct in the six trial of Curtis Flowers, was defeated November 29, 2022 in his attempt to become a Mississippi Circuit Court judge. In a runoff election, Winona Municipal Court Judge Alan “Devo” Lancaster (pictured) defeated Evans for Mississippi Fifth District Circuit Court judge. Based on unofficial election results, Lancaster received 70% of the vote while Evans received 30% of the vote. Evans came under national scrutiny for…

In what human rights groups warn is just the start of a violent campaign of political repression, the Islamic Republic of Iran has begun executing protesters in the ongoing civil unrest following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini while in custody of the government’s morality police. On December 8, 2022, the Iranian regime hanged 23-year-old Mohsen Shekari (pictured, left), after a secret trial in Iran’s Revolutionary Court. Four days later, in defiance of international condemnation of…

During a December 5, 2022 press conference, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (pictured) discussed the state’s review of its lethal injection process, rejecting the media’s characterization of it as a “moratorium” on executions and urging that the review be carried out quickly. Governor Kay Ivey announced a “top-to-bottom review” of the state’s execution protocol on November 21, 2022, after two executions in a two-month period had to be called off when executioner were unable to set…

In Shattered Justice: Crime Victims’ Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations, released in August 2022, University of North Carolina-Wilmington sociology and criminology professor Kimberly Cook explores how crime victims and their family members experience and process the trauma associated with the crime itself, the legal process, and the exoneration of the person they once believed to be the perpetrator. Through direct interviews with twenty-one victims of fifteen different…

On December 7, 1982, Texas strapped Charles Brooks to a gurney, inserted an intravenous line into his arm, and injected a lethal dose of sodium thiopental into his veins, launching the lethal-injection era of American executions. In the precisely forty years since, U.S. states and the federal government have put 1377 prisoners to death by some version of the method. Touted as swift and painless and a more humane way to die — just as execution proponents had said nearly a century before about…

In a year that featured massive campaign advertising attempting to portray legal reformers as responsible for increases in violent crime, candidates committed to criminal legal reform or who promised to continue statewide moratoria on executions posted key election wins in the 2022 midterm elections. Defying a pre-election narrative forecasting a backlash against progressive prosecutors and conventional wisdom that fear of crime drives political outcomes, reform prosecutors were re-elected to…

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and a coalition of more than 30 non-governmental organizations have condemned the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for a series of executions for drug crimes carried out in violation of international law. Human rights organizations reported that Saudi authorities executed 20 men in November for drug offenses — 12 of them foreign nationals — after suddenly lifting a moratorium on executions for defendants convicted of drug-related crimes. In a November 22, 2022…

Idaho has called off the scheduled December 15, 2022 execution of terminally death-row prisoner Gerald Pizzuto, Jr. (pictured), saying it has not been able to obtain the drugs it needs to put him to death. Instead, prosecutors said, the state would allow the death warrant to expire. Pizzuto has been in hospice care confined to a wheelchair, suffering from late-stage bladder cancer, chronic heart and coronary artery disease, coronary obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and Type 2 diabetes…

A Utah judge has granted a new trial to death-row prisoner Douglas Carter, finding that prosecutors knowingly withheld from the defense evidence that police coerced false testimony from two key witnesses, coached them to lie, provided them “thousands of dollars in financial benefits” to implicate Carter, and threatened them with deportation and loss of their son if they did not cooperate. Carter, who is black, was charged with murdering a white woman, Eva Oleson, who was the aunt of the Provo…

Alabama officials have agreed not to make a second attempt to execute Alan Miller by lethal injection after the state had to call off his September 22, 2022 execution because of the failure to establish an IV line. If the state seeks to execute Miller in the future, it will use nitrogen hypoxia, a method that has never been used for an execution. In the months since Miller’s execution attempt, Alabama also attempted and failed to execute Kenneth Smith. In response to the series of problems…