Publications & Testimony

Court records from a lawsuit brought by Tennessee death-row prisoners have revealed widespread irregularities in the state’s execution practices. A series of four articles published in the Nashville newspaper, The Tennessean, on May 25, 2022 documented a rash of non-compliance with Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol by corrections officials and execution contractors. Examining thousands of pages of records filed in federal civil rights lawsuits by death-row prisoners Terry Lynn King and…

Arizona violated state law, state corrections policies, and a court order by denying a reporter from the state’s largest daily circulation newspaper access to view the May 11 execution of Clarence Dixon and by blocking witnesses’ views of a portion of the execution process, a lawyer for the newspaper has charged. In a May 20, 2022 letter to Arizona Department of Corrections (ADOC) Director David Shinn and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, David Bodney, attorney for Phoenix Newspapers, Inc. (PNI)…

Autopsies of the four men executed by Oklahoma between October 2021 and February 2022 show that all four prisoners had excess fluid in their lungs, giving additional credence to death-row prisoners’ claims that Oklahoma’s lethal-injection process will subject them to an unconstitutionally torturous death. The autopsy report for Gilbert Postelle, obtained by Oklahoma Watch through a public records request and published May 25, 2022, found that Postelle experienced pulmonary edema with “frothy…

Two more African nations have taken major steps towards abolishing the death penalty. On May 25, 2022, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema (pictured) announced that, in commemoration of Africa Freedom Day, he was commuting the sentences of 30 death-row prisoners and submitting a bill to parliament to end capital punishment in the southern African nation. Two days later, the National Assembly of the Central African Republic voted by acclamation to pass a law abolishing that nation’s death…

The fates of two men subject to potentially imminent execution in Texas hang in the balance, as the state’s attorney general and one local prosecutor challenge the discretion of other key officials not to move forward with executions. The controversy over the execution dates highlights emerging tensions between prosecutors about enforcement of death sentences and the provision of fair process before a prisoner is executed. In Harris County, prosecutors are challenging Houston Judge Natalia…

A Missouri judge has rejected the state’s first jury recommendation for a death sentence in nine years, and has instead re-sentenced former death-row prisoner Marvin D. Rice (pictured) to life without parole. Missouri law authorizes trial judges “to reduce the punishment [recommended by the jury] within the statutory limits prescribed for the offense if it finds that the punishment is excessive.” At a resentencing hearing on May 23, 2022, St. Charles County Judge Daniel Pelikan exercised that…

In an opinion legal experts have blasted as “nightmarish” and “an abomination,” the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in two Arizona death penalty cases that 1990s amendments to the federal habeas corpus law permit state prisoners who were provided ineffective representation at trial and in post-conviction proceedings to argue that their counsel were ineffective but bar them from presenting evidence of their ineffectiveness that competent lawyers had discovered once the case had reached federal…

Florida has joined the growing number of states that have ended automatic permanent solitary confinement for prisoners sentenced to death. The Florida Department of Corrections agreed to the action as part of a settlement of a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by eight prisoners who alleged that the state’s death-row conditions were “extreme, debilitating, and inhumane, violate[d] contemporary standards of decency, and pose[d] an unreasonable risk of serious harm to the health and safety.”

The U.S. State Department and the European Union have joined human rights and pro-democracy advocates in condemning the expansion of the death penalty in Belarus to include non-lethal “attempted acts of terrorism,” calling the measure an act of repression against opponents of the nation’s autocratic regime and its assistance to the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Belarus, a former Soviet satellite nation whose President, Alexander Lukashenko, has permitted Russia to use its territory…

After 37 years of silence, a South Carolina prison doctor who was in the execution chamber when eight prisoners it was his duty to treat were put to death has for the first time publicly discussed his conflicting roles. In an interview with Chiara Eisner of the Columbia newspaper, The State, shortly after South Carolina Department of Corrections announced plans to carry out executions by firing squad, Dr. Green Neal stepped forward to share his experiences. “Death is death, no matter whether…