Publications & Testimony

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…

Pope Francis has issued a renewed call to “all people of good will to mobilize for the abolition of the death penalty throughout the world,” devoting the September 2022 worldwide prayer intention of his papacy to ending capital punishment. In a video announcing his monthly prayer intention, the pontiff said, “Capital punishment offers no justice to victims, but rather encourages revenge. And it prevents any possibility of undoing a possible miscarriage of justice.” Pope Francis has been a…

With no executions in more than a decade and no new death sentences since 2014, Indiana’s costly death penalty has reached a “de facto moratorium,” says Indiana Capital Chronicle editor-in-chief Niki Kelly. “[M]aybe it’s time to be intellectually honest and admit Indiana no longer has the death penalty,” Kelly wrote in a September 2, 2022 commentary. “Instead of having eight men sit for years under the nebulous threat of death,” Kelly argues, “perhaps [Governor Eric] Holcomb and/or legislators…

As federal prosecutors consider what punishment to seek against the accused gunman in the May 2022 mass shooting at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, survivors and family members of victims of the shooting are concerned that pursuing the death penalty will further spread the racial hatred that fueled the massacre and divert attention from meaningful action to combat white supremacist violence. In interviews with ABC News aired September 1, 2022, Wayne Jones (pictured) and Garnell Whitfield Jr.

The California legislature has taken a major stride towards reforming the state’s death-penalty practices, passing two bills that would remove from death row individuals whose capital convictions were the product of racial discrimination and those whose deteriorated mental condition has left them permanently mentally incompetent. On August 31, 2022, the California Assembly concurred in Senate Amendments and sent to the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom The Racial Justice Act for All, which makes…

The nationwide erosion of the death penalty in the United States continued in the quarter of 2022, as the death rows of eleven states decreased in size and no state or federal death row grew larger, according to the Legal Defense Fund’s Spring 2022 Death Row USA (DRUSA) report on capital punishment. Overall, the number of people sentenced to death in the United States or facing continuing jeopardy of execution in pending capital retrial or resentencing proceedings on April 1, 2022 fell by 22…

A federal appeals court in Ohio has overturned the death sentence imposed on an African American defendant whose defense lawyer presented testimony from a clinical psychologist that one quarter of urban Black men were sociopaths who should be locked up or thrown away. In a unanimous ruling on August 22, 2022, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the “racialized testimony” offered by a defense expert at the trial of Malik Allah-U-Akbar (pictured)…