Blog of Rights
Brian
Stull

Brian Stull is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project. He has served as trial and appellate counsel in capital cases in North Carolina and Texas. Before joining the ACLU, Stull worked for five years at the Office of the Appellate Defender (OAD) in New York City, where he represented indigent criminal defendants convicted of serious felonies on direct appeal and in post-conviction and federal habeas corpus proceedings. Stull holds a B.A. and a M.S.W. from the University of Michigan and graduated cum laude from New York University School of Law.

12/13/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

Day 2 of Velez Hearing: State’s Witness Dismantles State’s Timeline Theory

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 11:22am

We’re in day 2 of the Manuel Velez innocence hearing in Brownsville, Texas.  As we’ve previously explained, this case posed a dilemma because two adults were in a Brownsville home on Halloween 2005 when 11-month- old Angel Moreno was taken to the hospital unable to breathe. Both adults, Manuel Velez and Acela Moreno, the boy’s mother, pointed the finger at one another as the perpetrator.  But no witness, physical, forensic, or other evidence suggests Manuel ever hurt this or any other child.

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07/17/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

A Tale of Three States: Executing the Mentally Disabled

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 3:54pm

Georgia: On Monday, the State of Georgia stands ready to strap Warren Hill to a gurney, place IV lines in his arms, and pump his body with poison until he dies.  Warren Hill has an IQ of 70, and is intellectually disabled (mentally retarded).  That was the finding of a Georgia trial judge who held a hearing and looked at the relevant evidence – applying United States Supreme Court precedent barring execution of the intellectually disabled under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the court ruled that Hill could not be executed.

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05/15/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

Rhode Island's Rightful Stand Against the Federal Government

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 2:44pm

Last week, the Rhode Island ACLU announced its disappointment with a federal circuit court's decision overturning Gov. Lincoln Chafee's efforts to prevent the institution of federal death penalty charges against Jason Wayne Pleau, whom Rhode Island was already prosecuting in state court. We join that sentiment here.

Pleau has been charged with the robbery and murder of a gas station manager who was making a bank deposit. Rhode Island, like every other state, has laws designating these crimes as murder and robbery, courts in which to prosecute the crimes and prosecutors and defense attorneys ready to work the case. But because the victim was making a bank deposit, and bank robberies violate federal criminal statutes, the crime could also theoretically be prosecuted in federal court.

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10/13/2011
Georgia

Fewer Americans Supporting the Death Penalty

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 12:55pm

Is it that the State of Georgia executed an innocent man last month? Is it the dawning realization that the risk of executing an innocent person exists in many cases beyond Troy Davis? Is it that race cannot help but to seep into the consideration of who gets executed and who gets to live? Is it that the quality of the lawyering and not the seriousness of the crime determines who gets executed? Is it that many family members of murder victims have said not to execute in their names? Or is it the simple realization that the state killing people does not teach its citizens not to kill?

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09/08/2011

Prosecutors Delay Historic Racial Justice Act Hearing

By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project & Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 3:17pm

More than two years after the North Carolina Legislature enacted an historic law barring race discrimination in death penalty cases, Marcus Robinson and his lawyers were in Cumberland County Superior Court earlier this week to argue his claim under the Racial Justice Act (RJA). They came prepared to present statistics showing that prosecutors across North Carolina discriminated against African-Americans who had come to court willing and able to serve on juries. A courtroom of concerned citizens came to hear this evidence. Prosecutors, however, were not ready to confront it. In fact, the entire hearing centered on why the prosecutors claimed not to be ready.

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12/08/2010

Texas Puts Head in Sand at Prospect of Executing Innocent People

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 4:45pm

The highest criminal court in Texas yesterday halted an historic hearing in which lawyers for a man accused of murder and facing the death penalty argued that capital punishment is unconstitutional because it carries high risks that innocent people could be executed.

Lawyers for John Green this week presented in a Houston trial court evidence showing that Texas risks executing innocent people by relying on junk science, faulty eyewitness identification, unreliable informants, false confessions and other shoddy evidence. They cited two high-profile cases — those of Claude Jones and Cameron Todd Willingham — in which evidence has recently surfaced suggesting that both men executed by the state of Texas might well have been innocent of the crimes they were accused of committing.

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10/22/2010

Texas Court’s Bar on Unreliable Forensic Testimony Comes Too Late for Many

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 3:25pm

Under Texas law, a jury must unanimously find an inmate will pose a threat of future danger before it can sentence him to death. Many juries rely upon the testimony of psychiatrists and other doctors to make their determination.

Dr. Richard Coons, a Texas forensic psychiatrist, is one such doctor. Dr. Coons has testified in dozens of capital cases that the defendant would pose a threat of future danger if not executed.

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06/28/2010

Saluting Justice Stevens' Principled Decisions in Capital Cases

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 2:00pm

(Originally posted on ACS Blog.)

"Society changes. Knowledge accumulates. We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes. Punishments that did not seem cruel and unusual at one time may, in the light of reason and experience, be found cruel and unusual at a later time." These were the eloquent words of retiring Justice John Paul Stevens in Graham v. Florida, in which the Supreme Court this term decided that the punishment of life without parole for minors who did not kill is cruel and unusual punishment. But Justice Stevens' words apply with equal force to his approach to the death penalty during his nearly 35-year tenure on the Court, which regrettably ends today.

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05/06/2010

Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and Habeas

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 1:03pm

Imagine you or someone you loved were accused of a crime and tried in state court. Our federal constitutional rights give us certain protections in these state trials, but imagine your trial was an unfair one. Imagine the state court did not uphold your constitutional rights, for whatever reason: maybe your trial judge faced a tough election and wanted to look tough on crime; maybe the judge was lazy; maybe he or she simply did not understand the law. And imagine you were then convicted in this unconstitutional trial and sent to prison, or worse, sentenced to death.

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03/10/2010

Good and Bad Lawyers Determine Who Lives and Who Dies

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 12:46pm

In a separate post yesterday, I addressed how a person on death row's life can be decided on a technicality, an issue to be decided by the Supreme Court in Holland v. Florida. Today's post addresses another issue the Holland case raises — the role of attorney competence in deciding who gets executed in the United States.

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