Studies

A recent study of the military death penalty by Professor David Baldus revealed disparities depending on whether the victim in the underlying crime was also a member of the military or was a civilian.  The paper was co-authored by Professors Catherine Grosso and George Woodworth and was published by the Michigan State University College of Law.  The authors note that despite a 1984 executive order that "defined death eligible murder in the armed forces principally in terms of civilian murder modeled after state law systems," the military death penalty has been implemented in such a way that shows a large disparity between military murder and civilian murder. The study concluded that soldiers who are accused of civilian murder were less likely to face a capital court martial, to receive a capital conviction, and to be sentenced to death than soldiers who were accused of a military murder (murder of a commissioned or non-commissioned officer). "In this process," the report said, "the military death penalty has come to be used almost exclusively as a disciplinary vehicle to protect the authority and effectiveness of military command."

The Council of the American Law Institute (ALI) recently voted to withdraw a section of its Model Penal Code concerned with capital punishment because of the "current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment."  The Council based its decision on a study it commissioned to look into the practice of the death penalty since the recommendations were made in the Model Penal Code.  The recommendations for how to make the death penalty less arbitrary had been adopted in 1962 and were cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1976 opinion allowing a reformed death penalty to be reinstated.  Section §210.6  of the Code defines cases appropriate for capital punishment, aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and special sentencing procedures, and was intended to meet significant concerns regarding the practice.  This move essentially withdraws ALI from any attempt to fashion an acceptable death penalty because the system has proven to be unworkable.

The latest Gallup Poll on the death penalty shows 65% of Americans support the death penalty, significantly lower than the 80% support recorded in 1994 and near the lowest support of 64% in the past 25 years recorded last year.  Only 57% believe the death penalty is fairly applied, and 59% of Americans believe that an innocent person has been executed in the last five years.  Gallup reported that support for the death penalty is lower if Americans are offered an explicit alternative, such as life imprisonment with absolutely no possibility of parole.  The last time that Gallup offered such alternatives in 2006, only 47% preferred the death penalty, while 48% supported life imprisonment with no parole.

The Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Focus, recently featured an article entitled, “Death Penalty Lessons from Asia,” written by David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring. The article is based in part on the authors' book, The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia.  Johnson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii.  Zimring is the William G. Simon Professor of Law and Wolfen Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.  The article takes an in-depth look at the practice of the death penalty in Asian jurisdictions over the last few decades. Drawing parallels with the death penalty movement in Europe, Johnson and Zimring present economic development, political change and public opinion as influential to the practice of capital punishment in Asian countries. Their book is based on 5 major case studies of capital punishment in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and China, and 7 shorter case studies of capital punishment in North Korea, Hong Kong and Macao, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and India. 

A recent investigaton by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram uncovered a series of mistakes by medical examiners in Texas. “Medical examiners have goofed up eye color and gender. They’ve made mistakes on the locations of scars or tattoos, described gallbladders and appendixes that had long since been removed – even confused one body for another,” noted the story.  Webb County Chief Medical Examiner Corinne Stern was criticized for an autopsy she performed on an infant while she was working in Alabama. Her report indicated that the infant was suffocated, but other experts concluded “her finding was based on junk science and that the [baby] was stillborn.”  Following the experts' report, the capital murder charge against the baby’s mother was dropped.

In 2007, former Travis County medical examiner Roberto Bayardo recanted his original testimony that helped convict Austin baby-sitter Cathy Lynn Henderson of capital murder and placed her on death row for the death of a baby. Twelve years earlier, Dr. Bayardo had testified that the baby’s cause of death was from receiving intentional blows. His new testimony said it was unclear what had happened and Henderson may have accidentally dropped the child.  "The work of the medical examiner's office is just so slipshod," said Tommy Turner, the former special prosecutor who put a Lubbock medical examiner behind bars for falsifying autopsies.