Publications & Testimony

Five years after former Gov. Eric Greitens issued an execution-day reprieve for a Board of Inquiry to address questions of innocence, Marcellus Williams remains on Missouri’s death row. Though the board presented its recommendations more than a year ago, current Gov. Mike Parson has taken no action on the case. Williams was set to be executed on August 22, 2017. Mounting evidence of his innocence produced a groundswell in opposition to his execution and calls for an independent investigation…

On the eighth anniversary of the August 19, 2014 murder of kidnapped journalist James Foley, a U.S. federal district court in Virginia sentenced his killer, Islamic State militant El Shafee Elsheikh, to eight life sentences in prison. His mother, Diane Foley (pictured), a leading advocate for Americans held hostage abroad, hailed the life sentence as “a huge victory” and “a very important deterrent.” Elsheikh was convicted of kidnapping and murdering Foley and three other Americans…

Racial disparities in U.S. death sentences imposed on late adolescent offenders have grown substantially since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of capital punishment against juvenile offenders in 2005, according to a new report by University of North Carolina political scientist Frank R. Baumgartner (pictured). Baumgartner’s report, Race and Age Characteristics of those Sentenced to Death before and after Roper, released on June 21, 2022 reviewed death sentences imposed on more than…

A Death Penalty Information Center review of data from the National Registry of Exonerations has found that the pursuit or threatened use of the death penalty by police or prosecutors in nine different states led to the wrongful murder convictions of at least twelve innocent people who were exonerated in 2021. DPIC’s analysis of the National Registry’s 2021 Annual Report on Exonerations found that prosecutors in California, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, and New York wrongfully sought the…

The Idaho Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s constitution permits a governor to reject clemency recommendations made by the Commission of Pardons and Parole, reversing a lower court’s decision that had blocked the state from executing terminally ill prisoner Gerald Pizzuto (pictured). The ruling may allow Idaho to carry out its first execution in more than a decade. The August 23, 2022 decision effectively reinstates Pizzuto’s death sentence, which the Commission of Pardons and Parole…

In the August 2022 Discussions With DPIC podcast, former Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry and former U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Lester (pictured), two of the co-chairs of the bipartisan Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, call on state officials not to rush forward with the state’s planned execution of 25 prisoners. Speaking with DPIC executive director Robert Dunham, Governor Henry, a Democrat, and Judge Lester, a Republican, discuss the commission’s findings of a broken system that risks…

Oklahoma executed James Coddington (pictured, right, at his clemency hearing) on August 25, 2022, after Governor Kevin Stitt rejected the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board’s recommendation of clemency, greenlighting the start of what one faith leader described as a 25-prisoner “bloodbath.” Stitt’s denial of clemency came as leaders across Oklahoma had been urging the governor to commute Coddington’s sentence. Former Oklahoma Department of Corrections (ODOC) director Justin Jones and former…

The Tarrant County District Attorney’s office has asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) to vacate Paul Storey’s death sentence, saying that his trial prosecutor “blatantly lied” to his jury that the victim’s family wanted the death penalty and subsequently committed perjury in state post-conviction proceedings to cover up that lie. In an extraordinary filing on August 17, 2022 shortly after being granted permission to reenter the case to “set the record straight with respect to the…

Texas prosecutors have indicted former death-row prisoner Clinton Young for a 21-year-old murder in one county after his conviction and death sentence for another murder allegedly committed as part of the same criminal episode in another county was overturned because a lead prosecutor in that case also secretly acted as a paid law clerk to judges who presided over Young’s trial and state post-conviction appeals. On August 12, 2022, a special grand jury convened in Harrison County by the Texas…

A decision on the constitutionality of South Carolina’s newly adopted execution methods now rests in the hands a trial court judge after lawyers for death-row prisoners and the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) presented four days of conflicting expert testimony about the amount of pain suffered during firing squad and electric chair executions. The trial before Circuit Court Judge Jocelyn Newman (pictured) was conducted in response to a lawsuit filed on March 21, 2022 by…