Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

On February 22, Virginia’s leg­is­la­ture blocked a bill that would have allowed the death penal­ty for accom­plices to mur­der who did not actu­al­ly car­ry out the killing. The bill would have revised the state’s ​“trig­ger­man rule,” which allows the death penal­ty only for the per­son direct­ly respon­si­ble for the actu­al mur­der. Two weeks ago, the Senate ver­sion of the bill was reject­ed by the Courts of Justice Committee on a 7 – 7 vote. The House then passed its own ver­sion of the bill,…

A study ordered by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has found pay for court-appoint­ed defense lawyers in death penal­ty cas­es in Philadelphia to be ​“gross­ly inad­e­quate.” The study, which was authored by Common Pleas Court Judge Benjamin Lerner, was ini­ti­at­ed after defense lawyers peti­tioned the Court to increase the fees or halt death-penal­­ty cas­es. The study not­ed there are few­er than 30 lawyers in Philadelphia will­ing to take cap­i­­tal-case appoint­ments for indi­gent clients who…

A recent op-ed in the Miami Herald by Raoul Cantero (pic­tured), for­mer Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, called for state leg­is­la­tors to require una­nim­i­ty in the penal­ty phase of death penal­ty tri­als. Five years ago, a study con­duct­ed by the American Bar Association found that Florida was an out­lier in allow­ing cap­i­tal juries to find aggra­vat­ing cir­cum­stances and rec­om­mend death sen­tences by a sim­ple major­i­ty. The op-ed, co-writ­ten by Mark Schlakman, a member of…

A recent study pub­lished in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology about the U.S. Military death penal­ty sys­tem found that racial dis­par­i­ties among those sen­tenced to death are worse in the mil­i­tary than in oth­er crim­i­nal courts. The study, con­duct­ed by Catherine Grosso of Michigan State’s College of Law, the late David Baldus of the University of Iowa College of Law, and oth­ers, reviewed all poten­tial­ly death-eli­gi­ble mil­i­tary prosecutions from…

In 2009, Maryland changed its cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment law, sharply lim­it­ing when the death penal­ty could be sought. Prosecutors can only pur­sue the death penal­ty in cas­es of first degree mur­der when there is DNA or oth­er bio­log­i­cal evi­dence link­ing the defen­dant to a mur­der, a video-taped con­fes­sion by the defen­dant, or a video link­ing the defen­dant to the mur­der. As the first case test­ing this statute nears com­ple­tion, DPIC​’s Executive Director, Richard Dieter (pic­tured), was…

On February 15, Florida is sched­uled to exe­cute Robert Waterhouse, a 65-year-old inmate who was sen­tenced to death for a 1980 mur­der in St. Petersburg. Waterhouse has been on Florida’s death row for over three decades, longer than any inmate pre­vi­ous­ly exe­cut­ed by the state. His orig­i­nal death sen­tence was over­turned in 1988 after his appel­late attor­ney argued that Waterhouse’s tri­al lawyer erred by not pre­sent­ing the court with important mitigating…

Ron Briggs, spon­sor of the ini­tia­tive which expand­ed California​’s death penal­ty law in 1978, recent­ly announced his sup­port for repeal of the law. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Ron Briggs explained that the 1978 Briggs Initiative was meant to ​“give pros­e­cu­tors bet­ter tools for met­ing out just pun­ish­ments, and that a broad­ened statute would serve as a warn­ing to all California evil­do­ers that the state would deliv­er swift and final jus­tice” and ​“creat[e] a national…

Raymond Bonner’s new book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, is about to be pub­lished and was not­ed ear­li­er by DPIC. An excerpt from the book appeared recent­ly in The Atlantic. Andrew Cohen, also writ­ing in The Atlantic, called it ​“the book of the cen­tu­ry about the death penal­ty.” Cohen commented that ​“Bonner’s book comes at a cru­cial time in the mod­ern his­to­ry of the death penal­ty. It comes at a time when views are…

The first hear­ing under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act con­vened at the begin­ning of February for death row inmate Marcus Robinson. The Racial Justice Act was passed in 2009, allow­ing death row inmates to use empir­i­cal and sta­tis­ti­cal data to demon­strate racial bias in their con­vic­tion or sen­tenc­ing. Following changes in North Carolina’s leg­is­la­ture in the 2010 elec­tions, there were efforts to repeal the Act. Governor Perdue vetoed a repeal bill and the…