The Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project had the privilege of working with Billy Sothern as a Resource Counsel colleague for over two years. Billy died in September of 2022; the loss to the death penalty defense community is tremendous, and Billy is missed by many.
Billy represented people facing the death penalty in state and federal court in Louisiana and the South for two decades, as a staff attorney at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, the deputy director of the Capital Appeals Project, as well as in private practice. He began working on death penalty cases as a law student NYU Law School, during which time he worked at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He was the co-founder of Reprieve (US), and a member of the Criminal Justice Act Panels for the Eastern District of Louisiana, the Middle District of Louisiana, and the Western District of Louisiana. He has argued numerous capital and complex cases at the Louisiana Supreme Court and the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. He was part of the legal team in Kennedy v. Louisiana, the United States Supreme Court case holding that the death penalty is unconstitutional in non-homicide child abuse cases. He wrote about criminal and social justice issues for publications including the New York Times, the Nation, and Salon, and was the author of Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City (UC Press, 2007).