Publications & Testimony

An even­ly divid­ed Indiana Supreme Court has affirmed a tri­al court rul­ing that requires the Indiana Department of Correction (IDOC) to release records relat­ed to the lethal injec­tion drugs Indiana has used in car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions, includ­ing the iden­ti­ties of the drug sup­pli­ers. The doc­u­ments were the sub­ject of a pub­lic records suit filed by Washington, D.C. lawyer A. Katherine Toomey under the Indiana Access to Public Records Act…

In an over­whelm­ing bipar­ti­san vote, the Kentucky House of Representatives has approved a bill that would pro­hib­it the death penal­ty for peo­ple with severe men­tal ill­ness. On March 1, 2021, the House vot­ed by a mar­gin of 75 – 16 to pass HB 148. The bill received the sup­port of 56 Republicans and 19 Democrats in Kentucky’s Republican-dominated…

As sup­port­ers of Oklahoma death-row pris­on­er Julius Jones sub­mit­ted more than six mil­lion sig­na­tures sup­port­ing his peti­tion for clemen­cy, new evi­dence emerged that anoth­er man had com­mit­ted the killing that sent Jones to death…

Frustrated by the inabil­i­ty to put pris­on­ers to death, leg­is­la­tors in two states are seek­ing to jump­start the exe­cu­tion process by chang­ing the laws that gov­ern how exe­cu­tions may be con­duct­ed. After gain­ing lit­tle trac­tion in pri­or leg­isla­tive ses­sions, a bill to make elec­tro­cu­tion the default method of exe­cu­tion is mov­ing for­ward in South Carolina, which is approach­ing ten years since its last exe­cu­tion. In Montana, after a court ruled in 2015 that the…

Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) offi­cials repeat­ed­ly mis­rep­re­sent­ed accounts of the exe­cu­tions they car­ried out in 2020 and 2021, pro­vid­ing san­i­tized descrip­tions of the exe­cu­tions that omit­ted all ref­er­ences to dra­mat­ic body move­ments and signs of dis­tress observed by media wit­ness­es, accord­ing to an Associated Press report. The sworn accounts by exe­cu­tion­ers, which fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors pro­vid­ed to an expert wit­ness and to a fed­er­al dis­trict court judge to…

Expressing con­cerns about wrong­ful con­vic­tions, racial­ly dis­parate impact, and arbi­trari­ness, Attorney General nom­i­nee Merrick Garland (pic­tured) told the Senate Judiciary Committee dur­ing his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing on February 22, 2021 that the death penal­ty has giv­en him ​“great pause.” Garland said that he ​“expect[s] that the President will be giv­ing direc­tion” on the fed­er­al death-penal­ty pol­i­cy, and that it was ​“not at all unlike­ly” that the Department of Justice would…

Death-penal­ty repeal leg­is­la­tion in Virginia will move to Governor Ralph Northam’s desk, after both hous­es approved the bill passed ear­li­er in the ses­sion in the oppo­site cham­ber. Virginia’s leg­isla­tive rules required the House of Delegates to pass the Senate bill or vice ver­sa, even though the bill text was iden­ti­cal. Governor Northam has pledged to sign the bill, which will make Virginia the 23^rd state, and the first in the South, to abol­ish capital…

NEWS (2/​16/​21) — Pennsylvania: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has rein­stat­ed death-row exoneree Roderick Johnson’s law­suit seek­ing dam­ages for his place­ment in soli­tary con­fine­ment for almost twen­ty years. Johnson was sen­tenced to death in 1998 in Berks County, Pennsylvania. He was not released from soli­tary con­fine­ment on death row even…

A bipar­ti­san group of leg­is­la­tors has announced the intro­duc­tion of a bill to repeal Ohio’s death penal­ty. In a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on February 18, 2021, four Republican and four Democratic leg­is­la­tors spoke about the lat­est effort to end cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the Buckeye…