Publications & Testimony

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the human rights body charged with over­see­ing Western Hemisphere nations’ com­pli­ance with human rights oblig­a­tions, has called on the United States to halt the sched­uled January 12, 2021 exe­cu­tion of Lisa…

A for­mer Pennsylvania death-row pris­on­er has been freed, one month after the tri­al court barred his retri­al because of ​“egre­gious” pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct by the coun­ty district…

Death sen­tences reached their low­est lev­el in the mod­ern era and exe­cu­tions hit a gen­er­a­tional low despite an his­tor­i­cal­ly anom­alous fed­er­al exe­cu­tion spree, accord­ing to the 2020 Year End Report from the Death Penalty Information Center. As the nation grap­pled with a dead­ly pan­dem­ic and expe­ri­enced a reawak­en­ing on racial jus­tice, most states put tri­als and exe­cu­tions on hold. At the same time, ignor­ing pub­lic health warn­ings and buck­ing nation­al trends, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment car­ried out…

Saying that “[l]ethal injec­tion appears to us to be impos­si­ble from a prac­ti­cal point of view today,” Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (pic­tured) told reporters it is ​“pret­ty clear” that the state will not exe­cute any­one in…

Just hours after tak­ing office, new­ly elect­ed Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón issued a series of sweep­ing changes that end­ed new death-penal­ty pros­e­cu­tions and moved towards recon­sid­er­ing exist­ing death sen­tences in the coun­ty with the nation’s largest death row. The pol­i­cy changes sig­naled the poten­tial nation­wide impact of local pros­e­cu­tor elec­tions in 2020, as new reform pros­e­cu­tors pre­pare to take the helm in coun­ties that con­sti­tute more than…

The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment car­ried out back-to-back exe­cu­tions of Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois on December 10 and 11, 2020, cap­ping the dead­liest run of fed­er­al exe­cu­tions in the United States in the 20^th and 21^st cen­turies. According to the Espy file, a data­base of exe­cu­tions in the U.S. and its colonies between 1608 and 2002, the ten exe­cu­tions since July 14 con­sti­tute the most fed­er­al civil­ian exe­cu­tions in a cal­en­dar year since the fed­er­al government…

Eight mem­bers of the fed­er­al Bureau of Prisons (BOP) exe­cu­tion team and a reli­gious advi­sor have test­ed pos­i­tive for the coro­n­avirus after par­tic­i­pat­ing in the November 19 exe­cu­tion of Orlando Hall (pic­tured). The COVID-19 infec­tions, which fed­er­al author­i­ties had not pre­vi­ous­ly revealed, came to light in doc­u­ments pro­duced in a law­suit two pris­on­ers have filed to halt the remain­ing federal…