Publications & Testimony

“The more peo­ple know about how the sys­tem of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment real­ly works, the less sup­port they will have for that pol­i­cy,” says Marc Bookman, the author of A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. Bookman’s crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed col­lec­tion of essays — described by Publishers Weekly as​“a cogent and har­row­ing primer on what’s wrong with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment” — chan­nels his decades of capital…

A sur­vey of 500 reg­is­tered vot­ers in Oklahoma, con­duct­ed June 24 – 28, 2021 by the Oklahoma polling firm Amber Integrated, has found that 60% of those who said they knew any­thing about the case of death-row pris­on­er Julius Jones believe Oklahoma author­i­ties should com­mute his death sen­tence. The poll results are vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal to those in an Amber Integrated pub­lic affairs sur­vey con­duct­ed from December 14 – 17,…

In a mem­o­ran­dum that left to Congress the task of address­ing sys­temic ques­tions of arbi­trari­ness, racial dis­crim­i­na­tion, and wrong­ful con­vic­tions affect­ing the admin­is­tra­tion of the fed­er­al death penal­ty, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland (pic­tured) issued a direc­tive for­mal­ly paus­ing fed­er­al exe­cu­tions while the Department of Justice (DOJ) under­takes a review of exec­u­tive branch poli­cies adopt­ed in the last two years…

The first half of 2021 spot­light­ed two con­tin­u­ing death-penal­­ty trends in the United States, accord­ing to the Death Penalty Information Center’s 2021 Mid-Year Review. On one hand, the con­tin­u­ing ero­sion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in law and prac­tice across the coun­try; on the oth­er hand, the extreme and often law­less con­duct of the few juris­dic­tions that have attempt­ed to car­ry out exe­cu­tions this year. The year began with three exe­cu­tions that con­clud­ed the Trump…

Texas exe­cut­ed John Hummel on June 30, 2021, an hon­or­ably dis­charged for­mer Marine with ser­vice-relat­ed trau­ma whose tri­al lawyer now works for the pros­e­cu­tor who was trying…

Wiley Bridgeman (pic­tured, left), who spent 39 years in prison for a crime he did not com­mit, died June 27, 2021, after a long ill­ness. Bridgeman…

For the sec­ond time in three years, the Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC) and the state of Nevada are fac­ing legal action from a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal man­u­fac­tur­er after obtain­ing drugs for an exe­cu­tion in vio­la­tion of the drug manufacturer’s…

Three quar­ters of Dallas, Texas vot­ers say they pre­fer some ver­sion of life impris­on­ment over the death penal­ty for peo­ple con­vict­ed of first-degree mur­der, a new…

NEWS (6/​25/​21) — Alabama: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has affirmed an Alabama fed­er­al dis­trict court deci­sion dis­miss­ing James Barber​’s habeas cor­pus chal­lenge to his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence. In an unsigned, unpub­lished opin­ion, the appeals court denied Barber’s claim that his lawyers pro­vid­ed inef­fec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the penal­ty phase of his cap­i­tal tri­al by fail­ing to inves­ti­gate and present mitigating…

The num­ber of pris­on­ers on death row across the United States con­tin­ues to decline while the aver­age amount of time they have been on death row approach­es 19 years, accord­ing to a new report from the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics…