Publications & Testimony

Studies have con­sis­tent­ly found that a sys­tem of crim­i­nal law in which the death penal­ty is avail­able as a pun­ish­ment is far more expen­sive than a sys­tem in which the most severe pun­ish­ment is life with­out parole or a long prison term. Now, as the num­ber of mur­der exon­er­a­tions mounts across the United States, a pre­vi­ous­ly hid­den cost is emerg­ing: the cost of lia­bil­i­ty for police and pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct asso­ci­at­ed with the wrong­ful use or threat­ened use of the death…

At 3:00 a.m. Central time on July 14, 2020, after his notice of exe­cu­tion had expired, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) strapped Daniel Lewis Lee to an exe­cu­tion gur­ney in the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. With the exe­cu­tion cham­ber cur­tains closed, cor­rec­tion­al offi­cials left him there for four hours while fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors filed plead­ings in a fed­er­al appeals court to lift a stay of exe­cu­tion they had for­got­ten was still in…

Major U.S. edi­to­r­i­al writ­ers have crit­i­cized the Biden administration’s June 30, 2021 announce­ment of a tem­po­rary mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions while the Department of Justice reviews Trump admin­is­tra­tion changes to U.S. exe­cu­tion prac­tices, say­ing that the pause for a lim­it­ed pol­i­cy review fails to ful­fill the President’s cam­paign pledge to work to end the federal death…

The Arizona Supreme Court has reject­ed the efforts of Arizona pros­e­cu­tors to expe­dite the exe­cu­tions of two death-row pris­on­ers and fur­ther lim­it appeals judi­cial review of legal issues in their cas­es. The Arizona Attorney General’s office had sought to short­en judi­cial review in the cas­es of death-row pris­on­ers Frank Atwood and Clarence Dixon after learn­ing that the shelf life of the drugs it intend­ed to use in the exe­cu­tions would expire…

The Arizona Attorney General’s office has asked the Arizona Supreme Court to cur­tail the time allot­ted to judi­cial review of legal issues in the cas­es of two death-row pris­on­ers pros­e­cu­tors want to exe­cute, say­ing that the drugs they intend to use in the exe­cu­tions remain potent half as long as it had previously…

Anthony Porter, an Illinois death-row exoneree whose case sparked a chain of events that ulti­mate­ly led the state to abol­ish the death penal­ty, has died. He was 66 years…

A Jewish con­gre­ga­tion whose mem­bers were among the eleven peo­ple killed by a white suprema­cist in an attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life syn­a­gogue in October 2018 has renewed its request for the Department of Justice to drop the death penal­ty against the accused…

“The more peo­ple know about how the sys­tem of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment real­ly works, the less sup­port they will have for that pol­i­cy,” says Marc Bookman, the author of A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. Bookman’s crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed col­lec­tion of essays — described by Publishers Weekly as ​“a cogent and har­row­ing primer on what’s wrong with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment” — chan­nels his decades of cap­i­tal lit­i­ga­tion experience into…

A sur­vey of 500 reg­is­tered vot­ers in Oklahoma, con­duct­ed June 24 – 28, 2021 by the Oklahoma polling firm Amber Integrated, has found that 60% of those who said they knew any­thing about the case of death-row pris­on­er Julius Jones believe Oklahoma author­i­ties should com­mute his death sen­tence. The poll results are vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal to those in an Amber Integrated pub­lic affairs sur­vey con­duct­ed from December 14 – 17, 2020, except that a…

In a mem­o­ran­dum that left to Congress the task of address­ing sys­temic ques­tions of arbi­trari­ness, racial dis­crim­i­na­tion, and wrong­ful con­vic­tions affect­ing the admin­is­tra­tion of the fed­er­al death penal­ty, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland (pic­tured) issued a direc­tive for­mal­ly paus­ing fed­er­al exe­cu­tions while the Department of Justice (DOJ) under­takes a review of exec­u­tive branch poli­cies adopt­ed in the last two years of the Trump…