On July 31, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke about the death penalty review underway at the Department of Justice and the need for greater transparency in lethal injection methods. Holder said he was "greatly troubled" by the recent botched executions, adding that states should provide more information about the drugs they plan to use. He said, "[F]or the state to exercise that greatest of all powers, to end a human life, it seems to me... that transparency would be a good thing, and to share the information about what chemicals are being used, what drugs are being used. And it would seem to me that would be a better way to do this." He added, "[T]here is an obligation, it seems to me, on the part of the executive branch that’s charged with that responsibility to be forthcoming about the mechanisms, the means by which this most serious of executive branch actions can be carried out." On the progress of the death penalty review ordered by President Obama, Holder said, "We have people from our Civil Rights Division, our Criminal Division, various other components within the department looking at our protocol and taking into account what we have seen happen in the states recently, as we try to work our way through how the federal government is going to impose the death penalty."

Holder added that the federal government's review of past mistakes regarding FBI testimony in state trials should serve as an example for states, "[W]here we find mistakes, we admit those mistakes, we correct them. And I think we set an example for the states. They should make the same kind of inquiries. Where they have made mistakes, they should correct them as well."

(G. Ifill interview, "Holder: DOJ needs Congress’ support to reduce immigration backlog," PBS (transcript), July 31, 2014). See New Voices, Lethal Injection, and Federal Death Penalty.

A new study by Prof. Meredith Martin Rountree of Northwestern University Law School examined the characteristics of Texas death row inmates who waived all or part of their normal appeals, thus hastening their execution. Referring to these inmates as "volunteers," she compared them with similarly-situated inmates who did not waive their appeals. She found that more volunteers experienced depression or had attempted suicide than non-volunteers. She also examined the role of "self-blame" in prisoners' decisions to move towards execution. Inmates who waived appeals were more likely "to have been previously convicted of a crime, to have been convicted of a crime against another person, to have been incarcerated, to have committed their capital offenses alone, and to have committed the capital offense with a gun." Prof. Rountree criticized the legal changes begun in the mid-1990s that have allowed inmates to waive appeals earlier in the process "when prisoners may be most vulnerable to desires to die." She noted "the State’s interest in fair and constitutional death sentences, something only ensured through adversarial testing of the conviction and sentence," and called for further research in this area.

(M. Martin Rountree, "Volunteers for Execution: Directions for Further Research into Grief, Culpability, and Legal Structures," 82 University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review 295 (2014)). See Studies and Volunteers.