Publications & Testimony

Lawyers for Oklahoma death-row prisoner Benjamin Cole have filed a petition with the Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Parole asking the Board to recommend to Governor Kevin Stitt that Cole’s sentence be commuted to life without parole. The petition, submitted to the board on September 16, 2022, states that “Benjamin Cole today is a frail, 57-year-old man with a damaged and deteriorating brain, suffering from progressive and severe mental illness who poses no threat to anyone in any way.” Cole…

A federal district court issued an order on September 19, 2022 to halt the scheduled September 22, 2022 execution of Alabama death-row prisoner Alan Miller “by any method other than nitrogen hypoxia,” leading to a series of last-minute appeals by Alabama prosecutors and an after-hours execution-night ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to let the execution go forward. Alabama subsequently called off the execution when it became apparent more than two hours later that execution personnel would be…

Equatorial Guinea has abolished the death penalty, becoming the 25^th African nation to end capital punishment and the fourth in the past two years. According to state television reports, on September 19, 2022, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo signed into law a new criminal code that removes the death penalty from the statute books of the central African nation of 1.3 million people on the continent’s Atlantic coast. The new law is considered a major reform for one of the world’s most…

Bell County prosecutors have dropped their efforts to impose the death penalty on Marvin Guy (pictured), an African American man who has been held eight years without trial in connection with the death of a white police officer during a botched no-knock raid in Killeen, Texas in May 2014. In the pre-dawn hours of May 9, 2022, a SWAT team from the Killeen Police Department ignited a flash grenade and broke a window attempting, unannounced, to enter Guy’s residence to serve a warrant to search…

A second military commissions prosecutor who had advocated using testimony obtained by torture against defendants in the death penalty trial of the Guantánamo detainees charged with the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole (pictured) in waters off the coast of Yemen has been removed from the case. Mark A. Miller, the lead prosecutor in the Cole case, was not present at a scheduled status conference on September 14, 2022 and defense lawyers for the five men charged in the bombing said they…

Alabama prosecutors have told a federal judge that the state will not execute death-row prisoner Alan Miller by nitrogen hypoxia on September 22, 2022, three days after suggesting there was a “very good chance” it would be ready to attempt the first-ever execution by that method. In a sworn affidavit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama on September 15, 2022, Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Q. Hamm contradicted that assertion, stating “The…

The outcome of a capital prosecution can be predicted based upon the relative social status of the victim, the defendant, and the jurors, applying a sociology concept known as the geometrical theory of law, according to the authors of a new book, Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in America. In their new book, released in the Summer of 2022, University of Denver criminology and sociology professor Scott Phillips and University of Georgia sociologist Mark Cooney apply the concept of…

An Alabama appeals court has upheld a fifth non-unanimous death sentence imposed on a death-row prisoner who has faced six capital sentencing trials for the same offense and was once found to be ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. On September 2, 2022, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals (ACCA) affirmed the death sentence imposed on Jerry Jerome Smith by a Houston County trial judge in 2018 following a 10 – 2 jury sentencing recommendation for death. It was the…

A new study of the Texas death penalty, released as the state was conducting its 400^th modern-era execution in a case involving a white victim, has documented overwhelming racial disparities in the Lone Star state’s capital punishment system. Reviewing more than 15,000 capital murder convictions in Texas from 1973 to 2018, University of Detroit Mercy School of Law Dean Jelani Jefferson Exum (pictured left) and University of Cincinnati School of Public and International Affairs Associate…

A South Carolina trial court has issued an injunction preventing the state from carrying out executions using a firing squad or the electric chair, ruling that those methods violate the state’s constitutional prohibition against “cruel, unusual, and corporal punishments.” In a 38-page opinion issued September 6, 2022, Richland County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jocelyn Newman (pictured) opinion offered a sweeping condemnation of the state’s 2021 method-of-execution statute, which made the…