Publications & Testimony

In a 4 – 1 vote, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied clemency to Richard Fairchild, the third of 25 people the state scheduled for execution between August 2022 and December 2024. Fairchild’s attorneys argued that he was represented at trial by incompetent counsel who never presented evidence of Fairchild’s severe childhood abuse and of his repeated traumatic brain injuries. Fairchild’s clemency petition also detailed the debilitating effects of his serious mental illness and organic…

The Death Penalty Information Center has released a new report on race and the death penalty in Oklahoma, placing the state’s death penalty system in historical context. The report documents the role that race has played in Oklahoma’s death penalty and details the pervasive impact that racial discrimination continues to have in the administration of capital punishment. Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty, released October 14, 2022, notes that Oklahoma is at an…

Tremane Wood was convicted and sentenced to death in Oklahoma County in 2004.[1] He was sentenced to death for the murder of Ronnie Wipf during the commission of a robbery, a murder that his brother, Zjaiton “Jake” Wood, admitted committing.[2] However, Jake was represented by a litigation team that worked diligently to secure a life sentence.[3] Meanwhile, Tremane was appointed John Albert, an overworked attorney who was struggling with alcohol and substance use disorders while handling…

On October 14, 2022, the Death Penalty Information Center released Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty, a report placing Oklahoma’s death penalty system in historical context. Below are some of the important facts people should know as the state continues its 25-person execution spree. There have been racial disparities in executions since before Oklahoma was granted statehood. The earliest recorded execution in Oklahoma was in 1841. Of the 39 people executed in…

A non-unanimous Florida jury has returned a verdict of life without parole for Nikolas Cruz, the teen offender convicted of killing 17 people in the February 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (pictured) in Parkland, Florida. The October 13, 2022 verdict, in which three jurors voted to spare Cruz’s life, concluded a six-month sentencing trial. Florida law, like that of nearly every death-penalty state, requires a unanimous jury verdict before a death sentence may be…

The U.S. Supreme Court heard argument on October 11, 2022 on whether a Texas death-row prisoner was time-barred from obtaining federal review of the state’s refusal to grant him DNA testing that could prove his innocence because he waited for the state appeals process to finish before filing his federal lawsuit. The technical issue in Reed v. Goertz is when the two-year time clock began to run on Rodney Reed’s federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that Texas had unconstitutionally denied him…

The South Carolina Supreme Court will hear argument one month sooner on the state’s appeal of a trial court ruling that declared two of its statutorily methods of execution — death by electric chair and firing squad — unconstitutional. The argument will now be held on December 13, 2022 in the Supreme Court Courtroom in Columbia. Argument initially had been set for January 12, 2023 at Coastal Carolina University. The court did not provide any explanation for the scheduling change. The appeal…

In its landmark decision in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the use of the death penalty against individuals with intellectual disability constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Twenty years later, however, “there is not just the risk, but the certainty” that states continue to sentence intellectually disabled defendants to death, three legal scholars argue, and the federal courts are letting them get away with it. Cornell…