Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

A recent New York Times edi­to­r­i­al encour­aged the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to reduce the sen­tence of death row inmate Warren Hill to life. Hill is fac­ing exe­cu­tion on July 18. The edi­to­r­i­al not­ed that Mr. Hill’s intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties, includ­ing an IQ of 70, led the tri­al judge to find him men­tal­ly retard­ed. Georgia’s Supreme Court, how­ev­er, over­turned the judge’s rul­ing because men­tal retar­da­tion had not…

A recent arti­cle in the Michigan State Law Review exam­ined the prob­lem of racial bias in cap­i­tal cas­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly with respect to jurors’ deci­sion mak­ing. Authors Mona Lynch and Craig Haney (pic­tured), both pro­fes­sors at the University of California, sum­ma­rize past sta­tis­ti­cal stud­ies on race and the death penal­ty and present new exper­i­men­tal research on juror deci­­­sion-mak­ing in a sim­u­lat­ed cap­i­tal tri­al. Research par­tic­i­pants were shown one of…

Warren Hill (pic­tured) is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on July 18 in Georgia despite being pre­vi­ous­ly found intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled. The U.S. Supreme Court in Atkins v. Virgnia (2002) banned the exe­cu­tion of indi­vid­u­als with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties (men­tal retar­da­tion), but allowed each state to set guide­lines for deter­min­ing whether an inmate has such a con­di­tion. In Georgia, cap­i­tal defen­dants are required to prove…

On July 3, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on UN Member States that use the death penal­ty to abol­ish the prac­tice, stress­ing that the right to life lies at the heart of inter­na­tion­al human rights law. During a pan­el orga­nized by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mr. Ban said,​“The tak­ing of life is too absolute, too irre­versible, for one human being to inflict on anoth­er, even when backed by legal process… Where the…

In the first half of 2012, eight states car­ried out 23 exe­cu­tions. In the same peri­od last year, there were 25 exe­cu­tions in 9 states. The annu­al num­ber of exe­cu­tions has declined sig­nif­i­cant­ly from its peak in 1999, when 98 peo­ple were exe­cut­ed. There were 43 exe­cu­tions in 2011. Sixteen of this year’s exe­cu­tions (70%) have been in the South, with near­ly half in just two states — Texas and Mississippi. Seventy-eight per­cent (78%) of…

In June, the National Institute of Justice released the results of a study to deter­mine how often mod­ern DNA test­ing of evi­dence from old­er cas­es con­firms the orig­i­nal con­vic­tion. The study, con­duct­ed by the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C, test­ed DNA evi­dence that had been retained in homi­cide and sex­u­al assault con­vic­tions that occurred between 1973 and 1987 in Virginia. Among the homi­cides, there were not enough cas­es in which DNA…

On June 28, North Carolina’s Governor, Beverly Perdue, vetoed leg­is­la­tion that would have essen­tial­ly repealed the state’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), a law allow­ing death row inmates to chal­lenge their death sen­tence based on statewide pat­terns of racial bias. The law Gov. Perdue vetoed would have removed the pos­si­bil­i­ty of show­ing bias based on these sophis­ti­cat­ed stud­ies. The gov­er­nor said,​“As long as I am governor,…

John J. Donohue (pic­tured), a research asso­ciate for the National Bureau of Economic Research and a pro­fes­sor at Stanford Law School, recent­ly high­light­ed con­tin­u­ing prob­lems with the death penal­ty sys­tem, forty years after it was struck down for being applied in an arbi­trary man­ner. Professor Donohue wrote that despite​“new and improved” statutes accept­ed by the Court when it rein­stat­ed the death penal­ty in 1976,​“four…

June 29, 2012 (Friday) is the 40^th anniver­sary of the U.S. Supreme Court​’s deci­sion in Furman v. Georgia, in which the Court found that the lack of stan­dards for impos­ing the death penal­ty enabled the penal­ty to be applied arbi­trar­i­ly, thus vio­lat­ing the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ments. In nine sep­a­rate opin­ions, and by a vote of 5 to 4, the Court void­ed every state’s exist­ing death penalty statute,…