Publications & Testimony

A fed­er­al dis­trict court has ruled that Texas uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly denied DNA test­ing to a death-row pris­on­er who is alive today only because of a last-minute stay of exe­cu­tion grant­ed because the state refused to allow his reli­gious advis­er to accom­pa­ny him in the exe­cu­tion cham­ber. In a 26-page rul­ing issued on March 23, 2021, Judge Hilda Tagle of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas paved the way for Ruben Gutierrez (pic­tured) to obtain DNA test­ing that…

Clemency efforts on behalf of Tennessee death-row pris­on­er Pervis Payne (pic­tured) are surg­ing, as a peti­tion on his behalf by The Innocence Project had col­lect­ed more than 600,000 sig­na­tures by March 26, 2021 and social media cam­paigns sup­port­ing his cause con­tin­ue to attract increas­ing attention…

California Governor Gavin Newsom has appoint­ed Rob Bonta (pic­tured), a state leg­is­la­tor who co-authored a pro­posed state con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment to ban cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, as California’s attor­ney gen­er­al. Bonta fills the vacan­cy cre­at­ed by President Joe Biden’s appoint­ment of for­mer state attor­ney gen­er­al Xavier Becerra as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human…

In the March 31, 2021 pod­cast episode of Discussions with DPIC, man­ag­ing direc­tor of DPIC, Anne Holsinger, and Raphael Sperry, pres­i­dent of Architects/​Designers/​Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), dis­cuss the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) new ethics pol­i­cy pro­hibit­ing mem­bers from design­ing exe­cu­tion cham­bers and death-row soli­tary con­fine­ment cells. ​“Architects have been com­plic­it in human rights abuse by designing…

Virginia​’s cap­i­tal defend­ers have ​“worked them­selves out of a job,” accord­ing to David Johnson, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Virginia Indigent Defense Commission. The commonwealth’s four cap­i­tal defense offices, which opened in 2002, are cred­it­ed with bring­ing about a dra­mat­ic decline in death sen­tences. That decline was a major fac­tor in Virginia becom­ing the first south­ern state to abol­ish the death…

The North Carolina state bar has sus­pend­ed the law license of a lawyer whose preda­to­ry rep­re­sen­ta­tion of two intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled death-row exonerees defraud­ed them of hun­dreds of thou­sands of…

The Georgia Supreme Court is con­sid­er­ing a chal­lenge to the unique­ly high bur­den of proof the state impos­es on cap­i­tal defen­dants and death-row pris­on­ers to deter­mine whether they are inel­i­gi­ble for the death penal­ty because of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. On March 23, 2021, the court heard argu­ment in a case brought by Rodney Young, a death-row pris­on­er who asserts that Georgia’s harsh stan­dard uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly sub­jects defen­dants with intel­lec­tu­al disability…

Describing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as an ​“inher­ent­ly flawed” and ​“abhor­rent prac­tice,” United Nations human rights experts have called on President Joe Biden to take action to end the death penal­ty in the…

Saying “[t]here is no place today for the death penal­ty in this com­mon­wealth, in the South, or in this nation,” Governor Ralph Northam (pic­tured) signed his­toric leg­is­la­tion mak­ing Virginia the 23^rd U.S. state and the first in the South to abol­ish capital…