Publications & Testimony

Alabama has set a November 17, 2022 execution date for a death-row prisoner whose jury voted 11 – 1 to spare his life. On September 30, 2022, barely a week after the botched attempted lethal injection of Alan Miller, the Alabama Supreme Court granted a motion by state prosecutors to issue a death warrant for Kenneth Smith. Smith, now 57, was sentenced to death in 1996 when his trial judge overrode the jury’s near-unanimous recommendation for a life sentence. At the time, Alabama was one of only…

A Pittsburg County, Oklahoma judge has denied a competency hearing for death-row prisoner Benjamin Cole (pictured), clearing the path for his execution on October 20, 2022. In a three-page ruling issued on October 4, 2022, Judge Mike Hogan conclusorily asserted that Cole’s lawyers had not met the required “substantial threshold showing of insanity” to receive a jury trial on his competency to be executed. The ruling asserted that the expert reports submitted by the parties “are conflicting”…

A study of more than 400 death-eligible murder cases in St. Louis County, Missouri over a 27-year period has found significant racial disparities in the county’s administration of the death penalty based upon the race of the victim. An expert report by University of North Carolina political scientist Frank R. Baumgartner released on September 20, 2022 found that the likelihood that a death sentence would be imposed in St. Louis County was 3.5 times greater if the victim was white, as compared…

California Governor Gavin Newsom (pictured) has signed into law a bill that provides death-row prisoners relief from convictions or death sentences obtained “on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin.” The California Racial Justice Act for All applies the provisions of the state’s 2020 Racial Justice Act to people previously convicted of felonies. The original law applied only to criminal cases in which the trial court judgment was issued on or after January 1, 2021. The expanded…

Black people are about 7½ times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder in the U.S. than are whites, and about 80% more likely to be innocent than others convicted of murder, according to a new report by the National Registry of Exonerations. The already disproportionate risk of wrongful conviction, the Registry found, was even worse if the murder victim in a case was white. The report, Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States 2022, reviewed the cases of 3,200 innocent…

A Texas district attorney has asked a Dallas judge to overturn the capital murder conviction of Jewish death-row prisoner Randy Halprin (pictured) because of the virulent anti-Semitism of the judge who presided over his trial and death sentence. On September 27, 2022, the second day of the Jewish high holy day of Rosh Hashanah, Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson filed a legal memorandum with proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law that recommended Halprin be granted a new…

An Oklahoma state representative has called for an investigation into the practices of the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s office following additional revelations that county prosecutors deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence and manufactured false testimony to secure a conviction and death sentence against Richard Glossip in his 2004 retrial. At a news conference on September 22, 2022, the fourth date Oklahoma had set to execute Glossip, State Representative Justin Humphrey (R – Lane…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has denied a stay of execution to a Texas man facing an October 5, 2022 execution date that was scheduled as a result of a death-warrant motion the local district attorney says was against his office policy and “unethical.” In a September 22 order issued without opinion, the TCCA rejected an effort by John Henry Ramirez and Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez to withdraw the death warrant issued by 94^th Judicial District Court Judge Bobby…

A federal district court has ordered Alabama state officials to preserve evidence related to the state’s failed attempt to execute death-row prisoner Alan Miller on September 22, 2022. The botched execution attempt, Alabama’s third since 2018, came after a divided U.S. Supreme Court issued an after-hours execution-night order setting aside without opinion an injunction that had barred the state from executing Miller “by any method other than nitrogen hypoxia.” Prison officials then…

Lawyers for a North Carolina capital defendant have filed a sweeping challenge to the method by which death-penalty jurors are empaneled, arguing that the combination of a process known as “death qualification” and discretionary jury strikes produces a jury so racially and sexually unrepresentative that it violates a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Death qualification refers to the process of removing potential jurors from service in a capital case because of their expressed opposition to…