Publications & Testimony

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…

One day shy of the tenth anniver­sary of the state’s last exe­cu­tion, the South Carolina leg­is­la­ture, frus­trat­ed by the state’s inabil­i­ty to obtain exe­cu­tion drugs, approved a bill that would autho­rize putting pris­on­ers to death in the elec­tric chair or by firing…

A new poll of reg­is­tered Texas vot­ers has found that sup­port for the death penal­ty, while still strong, has fall­en sig­nif­i­cant­ly over the past decade. A University of Texas/​Texas Tribune inter­net sur­vey of 1,200 reg­is­tered vot­ers con­duct­ed from April 16 – 22, 2021 found that 63% say they favor keep­ing the death penal­ty for peo­ple con­vict­ed of vio­lent crimes. That num­ber is down from 75% in February 2015 and 78% when the poll began in…

A for­mer Utah defense lawyer has received a $250,000 set­tle­ment after suing Weber County for alleged­ly fir­ing him in retal­i­a­tion for his pub­lic crit­i­cism of the county’s refusal to prop­er­ly fund a death-row prisoner’s cap­i­tal appeal and its inter­fer­ence in the…

Finding ​“brazen mis­con­duct” by a pros­e­cu­tor who with­held excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence from the defense and then secret­ly served as the tri­al judge’s law clerk in the case, a Midland County, Texas judge has rec­om­mend­ed that death-row pris­on­er Clinton Young (pic­tured) be grant­ed a new…

Kentucky pros­e­cu­tors have dropped cap­i­tal charges against two defen­dants who had chal­lenged the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the death penal­ty for crimes com­mit­ted by offend­ers younger than 21 years old. On April 21, 2021, pros­e­cu­tors announced that they will no longer seek the death penal­ty against Efrain Diaz, Jr. and Justin Delone Smith, two of the three ado­les­cents accused of the 2015 killing University of Kentucky stu­dent Jonathan Krueger. A…

The Supreme Court of Appeal in Malawi has declared the country’s death-penal­ty law uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, mak­ing the south­east African nation the 22^nd sub-Saharan coun­try to abol­ish the death penal­ty for all offens­es. Amnesty International report­ed that 27 pris­on­ers were on Malawi’s death row at the end of 2020. The high court’s rul­ing, issued April 28, 2021, direct­ed that they be…

The his­to­ry of racial oppres­sion and lynch­ing in the U.S. South has, civ­il rights advo­cate Martin Luther King III writes, ​“too fre­quent­ly … gone untold and unad­dressed.” But, he says in an April 17, 2021 op-ed in USA Today, Virginia​’s repeal of the death penal­ty ​“shows us what is pos­si­ble when we con­front this country’s racist past, and acknowl­edge how racism per­me­ates this country’s practices and…