Publications & Testimony

An Oklahoma fed­er­al judge has ordered a tri­al in a suit filed by the state’s death-row pris­on­ers chal­leng­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of Oklahoma’s three-drug lethal-injec­tion process. Judge Stephen Friot of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma ruled on August 11, 2021 that the suit, which alleges that Oklahoma’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col vio­lates the Eighth Amendment ban on cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment, may pro­ceed to tri­al. Judge Friot denied several other…

NEWS (8/​12/​21) — California: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has reversed a rul­ing by a California fed­er­al dis­trict court that had grant­ed a new tri­al to death-row pris­on­er Ernest Jones.

Seventeen U.S. Senators and four Members of Congress who are lead­ing the effort to abol­ish the fed­er­al death penal­ty have called on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland (pic­tured) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to stop seek­ing the death penal­ty in pend­ing and future federal murder…

Alabama and Mississippi have under­tak­en prepara­to­ry steps towards resum­ing exe­cu­tions in the face of con­tin­u­ing legal chal­lenges to their methods of…

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released its annu­al report, The State of Criminal Justice 2021, exam­in­ing major issues, trends, and sig­nif­i­cant changes in America’s criminal justice…

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) has reversed a low­er court rul­ing and ordered the court to rein­state the death penal­ty against a Birmingham man whose tri­al judge had sen­tenced him to death even though the jury had vot­ed 10 – 2 to rec­om­mend a life…

A Death Penalty Information Center analy­sis of data from the National Registry of Exonerations has found that law enforce­ment use or threat of cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion against sus­pects or wit­ness­es con­tributed to the wrong­ful con­vic­tions of 10% of the peo­ple exon­er­at­ed in the United States and more than one-fifth of all mur­der exonerations in…

Legal reform advo­cates and a com­mit­tee of high-pro­file Supreme Court prac­ti­tion­ers have urged the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States to rec­om­mend changes in the way the Court han­dles emer­gency appli­ca­tions for stays of exe­cu­tions in death-penalty…

As President Biden con­sid­ers his administration’s pol­i­cy on the fed­er­al death penal­ty, his expressed oppo­si­tion to the pun­ish­ment may be buoyed by a new study that has found that ​“Americans sup­port cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment less than they have at any time since the mod­ern death penal­ty sys­tem was established in…

Racial bias in jury selec­tion is com­pro­mis­ing the ​“cred­i­bil­i­ty, reli­a­bil­i­ty, and integri­ty of the legal sys­tem,” and its effects are espe­cial­ly pro­nounced in death penal­ty cas­es, a new report from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has…