Articles
Latest
Aug 10, 2021
NEW RESOURCES: Capital Punishment and the State of Criminal Justice 2021
The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released its annual report, The State of Criminal Justice 2021, examining major issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system.
Read MoreFeb 19, 2021
National Geographic Publishes Feature Story on Innocence and the Death Penalty
For the first time in its history, National Geographic magazine has tackled the subject of capital punishment. Sentenced to death, but innocent, a feature story in the March 2021 issue of the magazine, chronicles the stories of fifteen death-row exonerees and illuminates the pervasive issue of innocence and the death penalty in the United States. The article, released on the same day as the Death Penalty Information Center’s new report The Innocence Epidemic, uses DPIC data and compelling narrative storytelling to show how the U.S. legal system fails innocent people,…
Read MoreAug 12, 2020
New Resources: Capital Punishment and the State of Criminal Justice 2020
The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released The State of Criminal Justice 2020, its annual report on issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. The ABA book includes a chapter on significant capital punishment developments over the past year, authored by Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice. Tabak’s analysis highlights the continuing long-term downward trend in death sentences and executions; geographic, racial, and economic factors that, he says, contribute to its arbitrary…
Read MoreFeb 04, 2020
New Scholarship: Born in the Legacy of Discrimination, What Comes After Capital Punishment Goes?
As the death penalty continues to wilt across the country, whatever penological justification it once purportedly served is dying as well, say capital punishment scholars Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker (pictured). In their new article The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of the Death Penalty in the United States in the January 2020 Annual Review of Criminology, the Steikers examine four central issues in the rise and fall of the death penalty in the United States and explore what an American criminal justice system might look like after the punishment’s demise.
Read MoreJan 23, 2019
Bill to Abolish Wyoming’s Death Penalty Introduced with Bipartisan Support
A bipartisan coalition of Wyoming legislators has introduced a bill to abolish the state’s death penalty. On January 15, 2019, Cheyenne Republican State Representative Jared Olsen (pictured, left) and Republican State Senator Brian Boner (pictured, right), introduced HB145, which would repeal the death penalty and replace it with a judicially imposed sentence of life without parole or life imprisonment. The bill, co-sponsored by sixteen other representatives and senators, has the backing of several legislative leaders, including Speaker of the House Steve Harshman, R‑Casper, and Senate Minority Leader Chris Rothfuss, D‑Laramie.…
Read MoreJan 14, 2019
With Backing of New Governor, Florida Clemency Board Posthumously Pardons the “Groveland Four”
On January 11, 2019, the Florida Clemency Board unanimously granted posthumous pardons to the “Groveland Four,” four young African-American men falsely accused of raping a young white woman in Lake County, Florida in 1949. During the racist hysteria following the accusation, white mobs burned down black residences, a massive white posse lynched a black suspect, all-white juries condemned two innocent men to death and an innocent teen to a life sentence, and a racist sheriff murdered one of the men and attempted to kill another. Gov. Ron DeSantis, convening the…
Read MoreJun 01, 2018
ANALYSIS: Research Supports Assertion that U.S. Death Penalty “Devalues Black Lives”
The Movement for Black Lives has called for abolishing the death penalty in the United States, asserting that capital punishment is a racist legacy of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow that “devalues Black lives.” A Spring 2018 article in the University of Chicago’s philosophy journal Ethics, co-authored by Michael Cholbi, Professor of Philosophy at California State Polytechnic University and Alex Madva, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona, examines the philosophical underpinnings of those assertions and concludes that they are correct.
Read MoreMay 15, 2018
Illinois Governor Uses Gun-Control Veto to Attempt to Re-Enact Death Penalty
lllinois Governor Bruce Rauner has conditionally vetoed a gun-control initiative unless the legislature agrees to reinstate capital punishment in the state. Exercising an amendatory veto — a power some governors are granted that permits them to amend legislation in lieu of an outright veto — Rauner called for making the killing of a police officer or any murder in which more than one person was killed a new crime of “death penalty murder.” In a May 14, 2018 news conference at the Illinois State Police forensic laboratory in Chicago, Rauner said “individuals who commit…
Read MoreMay 01, 2018
Los Angeles Times Editorial: Exoneration Shows Why Death Penalty Needs to End
The April 2018 exoneration of Vicente Benavides Figueroa, wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death on charges of raping, sodomizing, and murdering his girlfriend’s 21-month-old daughter, illustrates why the death penalty should be abolished, the Los Angeles Times said in an April 27, 2018 editorial. Benavides — an intellectually disabled Mexican national who was working as a seasonal farm worker — was sentenced to death after medical witnesses had been provided incomplete hospital records and erroneously testified that the child had been sexually assaulted. His conviction, the paper wrote, “was an…
Read MoreAug 24, 2017
Florida Death-Penalty Practices, Mark Asay Execution Draw Criticism From Human Rights Groups, Johnson & Johnson
As Florida prepared to execute Mark Asay (pictured) on August 24, the state’s death-penalty practices came under fire from human rights groups, criminal justice reformers, and one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Asay was executed despite the Florida Supreme Court’s recognition that his death sentence — imposed by a judge after three jurors had voted for life — was unconstitutionally imposed and that the court mistakenly believed both of Asay’s victims were black when it upheld his death sentence for what it believed to have been two racially motivated killings. Asay’s execution also…
Read More