Publications & Testimony

The three final executions scheduled in 2022 highlighted broader trends in the year’s executions — the execution of vulnerable defendants, unavailability of lethal-injection drugs, and the scheduling of executions without regard for the ability to actually carry them out. Mississippi executed Thomas “Eddie” Loden Jr. (pictured) on December 14, the 18^th execution of the year, while two executions set for December 15 — John Hanson’s in Oklahoma and Gerald Pizzuto Jr.’s in Idaho — did not take…

The death penalty continued its long-term decline in the U.S. in 2022, as Oregon commuted its death row and new death sentences and public support for the death penalty remained near 50-year lows. But perhaps more dramatically than anything else, the fortieth anniversary of lethal injection could be known as “the Year of the Botched Execution,” the Death Penalty Information Center said in its 2022 Year End Report. Oregon Governor Kate Brown cleared the state’s death row on December 13…

As part of her response to a series of botched executions, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey has sent a letter to the Alabama Supreme Court asking it to allow the Department of Corrections to extend the time within which executions can be carried out. Governor Ivey’s letter follows her November announcement of a “top-to-bottom review” of the state’s execution procedures. The letter offered no explanation of the execution teams’ length delays in placing IV lines, nor has Governor Ivey made any public…

Calling the death penalty “both dysfunctional and immoral,” Oregon Governor Kate Brown (pictured) has commuted the death sentences of the 17 prisoners on the state’s death row. The commutations, which the governor announced on December 13, 2022, went into effect December 14 and resentenced the prisoners to life without parole. Brown’s commutations are the culmination of what she characterized as “the near abolition of the death penalty” by the state legislature in 2019. At that time, Oregon…

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…