Publications & Testimony

The percentage of Americans who find the death penalty morally acceptable remains near a record low, according to a new poll released by the Gallup organization on June 9, 2022. 55% of respondents to Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs Survey told Gallup that they consider the death penalty morally acceptable, fractionally above the record low of 54% in the organization’s 2020 survey. The number matches the 55% level of acceptability reported in the 2021 Values and Beliefs survey. The poll…

At his June 8, 2022 execution in Arizona, Frank Atwood helped prison officials find a suitable vein for the IV line that would administer the lethal-injection drugs to end his life. Jimmy Jenkins, a reporter at the Arizona Republic who witnessed the execution, called the experience of watching Atwood direct the state to his vein “surreal.” He wrote in his account of the execution that “I have witnessed life. And I have witnessed death. But nothing could have prepared me for the surreal…

The United States Supreme Court has declined to review a case in which the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) flouted a previous Supreme Court ruling by denying relief to a death-row prisoner a second time after the Court had returned the case with directions to further consider defense counsel’s failure to investigate and present a “tidal wave” of available mitigating evidence in the penalty phase of his capital trial. The Court’s liberal justices dissented from the conservative…

Oklahoma state prosecutors are pushing to schedule 25 executions over approximately two years, after a federal judge denied death-row prisoners’ challenge to the state’s controversial lethal-injection protocol. On June 10, 2022, Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to set execution dates for 25 of the 28 prisoners who were parties to the execution-protocol challenge. The request came just four days after Judge Stephen Friot’s ruling that the…

The cabinet of the government of Malaysia announced on June 10, 2022 that it had reached agreement to abolish the nation’s mandatory death penalty laws and submit legislation to parliament to provide judges discretion to impose other penalties for capital crimes. Law Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said the cabinet also agreed to study proposals to substitute sentences for those currently on death row for offences carrying the death penalty. Amnesty International reports that as of February…

Louisiana’s death penalty is disproportionately imposed in cases involving white female victims, especially if the defendant in the case is a Black man, a new study by three leading death-penalty researchers has confirmed. Louisiana prosecutors were more than five times as likely to seek the death penalty, and juries more than five times as likely to impose it, in cases involving a Black male offender and a white female victim than in crimes in which both the alleged offender and the victim…

Judge Stephen Friot (pictured) of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma has ruled that Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol is constitutional. After holding a week-long hearing on the state’s three-drug protocol in February and March 2022, Judge Friot credited the testimony of state experts over the prisoners’ expert testimony on the likelihood that the protocol would result in severe pain. While attorneys for the 28 prisoners who brought the suit can appeal the ruling…

A Tennessee death-row prisoner who county prosecutors agree is intellectually disabled is appealing a trial judge’s refusal to vacate his death sentence under a law designed to provide condemned prisoners a mechanism to enforce the constitutional prohibition against executing individuals with intellectual disability. On June 1, 2022, lawyers for Byron Black (pictured) filed an appeal with the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals challenging Senior Judge Walter Kurtz’s ruling that Black could…

Federal courts denied relief in two lawsuits brought by Arizona death-row prisoner Frank Atwood, clearing the path for his execution on June 8, 2022. Atwood had sought an opportunity to present new evidence of his innocence, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected that petition. The appellate court also affirmed the Arizona federal district court’s denial of Atwood’s challenge to the state’s lethal-injection procedure, which Atwood said would cause him excruciating pain due…

More countries abandoned the death penalty and a record low number carried it out, but extreme practices in a few outlier nations caused global executions to rise in 2021, according to the human rights group Amnesty International. Amnesty found mixed trends in its annual report on death sentences and executions, as the global geographic erosion of capital punishment continued, but a surge in executions in Iran and Saudi Arabia as pandemic restrictions eased led to a global increase of 20% in…