Defending a person charged in a serious criminal case, under the best of circumstances, is a difficult task and an extraordinary professional responsibility. Defending a death penalty case under any circumstance is much more arduous and requires years of commitment…
Category: Death Penalty
2020
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
Twenty-two condemned men were put to death in the U.S. in 2019. All but two of the executions were carried out in former Confederate States of America.
Southern states, especially those with historical ties to the Confederacy, have always…
2020
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
Since the U.S. Supreme Court gave its constitutional blessing to the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, the state of Arkansas has executed 30 males and 1 female. Thirty of those 31 executions were carried out by lethal injections…
2019
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
There are roughly 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S. prison system.
In 2018, the Chicago Tribune reported that anywhere from 2 to 10 percent of those people are innocent. This estimate means that between 46,000 and 230,000 innocent…
2019
Category: Death Penalty
The Death Penalty Information Center reports that since 1973, 166 people who had been wrongly convicted in American courtrooms and sentenced to death have been exonerated.
The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty informs that of the 565…
2019
Texas executed its first prisoner with a single dose of pentobarbital on July 18, 2012. His name was Yokamon Hearn. He was 19 years old when he and three co-defendants kidnapped and killed a man in Dallas, Texas. He was…
2019
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty | Uncategorized
In a July 25, 2019 press release, the U.S. Justice Department (“DOJ”) announced that Attorney General William P. Barr has directed the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to adopt a Proposed Addendum Federal Execution Protocol—a protocol that mirrors the protocols followed…
2019
Category: Criminal Justice Reform | Death Penalty
Texas is a death penalty state; in fact, it has executed more people than any other state since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. Many of the 561 people put to death by the state since the 1982…
2019
Category: Death Penalty
Pentobarbital: Texas’s drug of choice in carrying out its lethal injection executions.
Texas was the first state in 1982 to use a lethal three-drug protocol to execute people. The three-drug protocol, which was eventually adopted by most other states,…
2019
Mental Health America estimates that 5 to 10 percent of the nation’s 2700 death row inmates suffer from some form mental illness.
In August 2006, the American Bar Association through Resolution 122A said that an individual on death row…