Publications & Testimony

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has vot­ed to deny clemen­cy to Quintin Jones (pic­tured, right), dis­re­gard­ing the request by the fam­i­ly of Berthena Bryant, whom Jones killed in 1999, ask­ing Texas Governor Greg Abbott to com­mute his sen­tence to life in prison. The board­’s vote on May 18, 2021 comes one day before Jones is sched­uled to be…

In a case the late Justice Antonin Scalia tout­ed as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, a North Carolina fed­er­al jury has award­ed two intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled death-row exonerees $75 mil­lion for the police mis­con­duct that sent them to death row. On May 14, 2021, half-broth­ers Henry McCollum (pic­tured, left) and Leon Brown (pic­tured, right) were each award­ed $31 mil­lion, $1 mil­lion for each year they spent in prison, plus an addi­tion­al $13…

The Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office has asked the United States Supreme Court to stay an Oklahoma appeals court rul­ing that void­ed the con­vic­tion of an Oklahoma death-row pris­on­er for a triple mur­der com­mit­ted on trib­al lands against mem­bers of the Chickasaw Nation while state pros­e­cu­tors seek review of that rul­ing by the U.S. high…

One day after Governor Bill Lee signed a bill cur­ing a defect in Tennessee law that had pre­vent­ed death-row pris­on­ers from chal­leng­ing their death sen­tences on the basis of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, Pervis Payne’s (pic­tured) lawyers asked a Memphis tri­al court to vacate his death…

The leg­is­la­ture doesn’t want cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, the exec­u­tive branch can’t obtain exe­cu­tion drugs, and Nebraska pros­e­cu­tors have moved for­ward this year with the pan­dem­ic-delayed cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing tri­als of two defen­dants sep­a­rate­ly con­vict­ed of a mur­der out of a voyeuris­tic true-crime nov­el. The state, writes Associated Press reporter Grant Schulte in a May 9, 2021 analy­sis, is ​“still wed­ded to the idea of exe­cut­ing pris­on­ers, just not the prac­ti­cal part of doing it” and…

Posthumous foren­sic test­ing of evi­dence in the case of Ledell Lee (pic­tured), who was exe­cut­ed in Arkansas in 2017, has found DNA from an uniden­ti­fied male on a bloody club used to kill Debra Reese 29 years ago and on a blood-soaked shirt that was wrapped around the weapon. The DNA results, released by the Innocence Project and the ACLU on April 30, 2021, raise addi­tion­al trou­bling ques­tions about Lee’s…

A fed­er­al appeals court has reversed the death sen­tence of an African-American Georgia death-row pris­on­er who was rep­re­sent­ed at tri­al by a defense lawyer noto­ri­ous for his his­to­ry of sub­stan­dard rep­re­sen­ta­tion and racial bias in death-penalty…

In an over­whelm­ing bipar­ti­san vote, the Texas House of Representatives has passed a bill that ends death-penal­ty lia­bil­i­ty under the state’s con­tro­ver­sial ​“law of par­ties” for felony accom­plices who nei­ther kill nor intend­ed that a killing take place and were minor par­tic­i­pants in the con­duct that led to the death of the vic­tim. Currently, Texas law makes any par­tic­i­pant in a felony crim­i­nal­ly liable for the acts of every­one else involved in the crime, irre­spec­tive of how…