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.

Will the Supreme Court Stop Georgia from Executing an Intellectually Disabled Man?

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 12:24pm

When Georgia death-row prisoner Warren Hill was young, his sister remembers their mother and grandfather calling him "stupid retard,"...

The Importance of the Sixth Amendment Right to Counsel in Capital Cases

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 5:09pm

A person does not need to go any farther than a Law & Order episode to understand the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We hear the officers on TV tell suspects that if they cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for them. The Framers of the Constitution made the statement more artfully when they wrote that the accused in every criminal prosecution “shall enjoy the right to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

In Gideon v. Wainright, the Supreme Court explained the importance of this right, stating, “[I]n our adversary system of criminal justice, any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” The right to counsel protects all of us from being subjected to criminal prosecution in an unfair trial. But nowhere is this right more important than when the accused faces the death penalty.

"Without continuing affirmative action in higher education, I worry that Kabir will not have the same enriching college experience that I enjoyed."

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 10:20am

At age four, my family moved for "better" schools from Detroit to a suburb just north of 18 Mile Road. Remember the movie 8 Mile, the story of Eminem's emergence from Detroit's suburban borderline? 18 mile road is 10 miles north, but 100 times whiter. With very few nonwhites, school was not a model of diversity or mutual respect. Here was Jeanette, the only Black girl, who squirmed in her seat during the lesson on slavery, not due to the topic but (I believe) because she felt like a spectacle. There was Frank, from a Vietnamese background, whom cruel (and ignorant) children occasionally called "Chink." I remember Rupert, valedictorian, a terrific athlete, and a wit, but known often as the "Indian kid" (if not by a Middle Eastern epithet). We white children lived blind to our own privilege.

Court Rejects Attempts to Devalue Life of the Accused in South Texas Capital Case

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 11:58am

"A life in Cameron County [Texas] is worth just the same as a life in other parts of the United States."

This pointed sentence came in Judge Elia Corenjo Lopez's 63-page order this week, in which she recommended that former death-row prisoner and ACLU client Manuel Velez be given a whole new trial.

How Do I Explain to my Six Year-Old Son What Kind of a Society Plans to Execute an Intellectually Disabled Man? [UPDATED]

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 12:09pm

Breaking Update, 2:30pm, February 14th: State doctors reversed an earlier finding and officially declared today that Warren Hill has mild mental retardation, placing Mr. Hill in the category of citizens protected from capital punishment by the 2002 United States Supreme Court decision Atkins v. Virginia. Mr. Hill's execution, scheduled for February 19th, must be stayed.

Texas Court Upholds Death Sentence of Innocent Man Although "There is Something Very Wrong" with Case Against Him

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 10:06am

With an opinion yesterday from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, ACLU client Max Soffar moves a step closer to an unjust execution.  And, little more than one year after the execution of Troy Davis, our system moves closer to another miscarriage of justice. 

Soffar is an innocent man on Texas’s death row, who falsely confessed to crimes he didn’t commit.  He’s been there most of the last 32 years after being convicted of killing three people in a 1980 Houston bowling alley robbery. His conviction was based entirely on false words from his own mouth. 

March Madness Takes on New Meaning When a Person's Skin Color is Cause For His Execution

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 10:44am

Welcome to March Madness at the ACLU! We know you usually turn to other sources for this kind of coverage, but we've got something important to add. As you're filling out winning brackets, imagine this scenario: the tournament selection committee decides that squads who fly blue as a team color are three times more likely to be invited to the tournament than non-blue teams. Duke, Kansas, and Michigan are likely in, but say goodbye to most of these powerhouses: Louisville (red & black), Indiana (red & white), Miami (green & orange), and Michigan State (green & white).

Could Manuel Velez be the 13th Prisoner Exonerated from Texas’s Death Row?

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 2:31pm

Imagine you are caring for a toddler and suddenly he stops breathing.  You quickly get him medical aid, but it’s too late: the child dies at the hospital where medical personnel were unable to revive him.  That would be a horrific nightmare for anyone, but things got even worse for Manuel Velez when this happened to him in Brownsville, Texas, on Halloween in 2005.

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.

Junk Fire Science: Too Scary to be Believed

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 6:07pm

It's Halloween. So what could be scarier than a state throwing a person in prison for arson when the fire was accidental?

Executing him.

That's the lesson of a report released Friday by the Texas Forensic Science Commission. The report is the latest twist in an ongoing legal saga following Texas's 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. In 2004, before Texas executed Willingham for the alleged arson murder of his three children, the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole had received a report by a renowned fire scientist named Dr. Gerald Hurst. Dr. Hurst's report showed that the "fire-science" testimony accusing Willingham of arson at his trial was farcical and anything but scientific. Governor Rick Perry received the report too. Willingham's execution went forward despite that the debunked "fire science" had been the centerpiece of the state's case against him.

Statistics image