Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Bud Welch, father of Julie Welch who was killed in the Oklahoma City Bombing, recently appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, just a few days before the 15^th anniversary of the bombing in Oklahoma. Welch, who is the president of Murder Victims’ Familes for Human Rights, has been a long-time opponent of the death penalty and has said that executions are more often “staged political events” instead of a part of the healing process for victims. When asked how he came to oppose the death pealty for…

A recent editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune calls for Utahns and their elected leaders to consider abandoning the death penalty citing that “state-sponsored killing of a human being, no matter how heinous the crime, is permitted by a system that has been proven beyond doubt to be inherently capricious, unfair and shockingly fallible.” The editorial also pointed to the declining use of the death penalty nationwide, with an all-time high of 328 death sentences in 1994 compared to 106 death…

Scott Phillips, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Denver, published a study last month in the Law & Society Review focusing on the imposition of death sentences in relation to the victim’s social status. Phillips studied capital cases in Harris County (Houston), Texas, between 1992 and 1999 and found that the social status of the victim in the underlying murder had a significant influence on whether the death penalty would be sought and imposed on the defendant. In…

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund recently released its Fall 2009 edition of Death Row USA, a report detailing death row populations across the United States. According to the report, California, Florida and Texas continue to lead the nation in the number of death row inmates, with California (694) having a death row population almost twice as large as either Florida (395) or Texas (339). In addition, while Florida’s and Texas’ death row populations have declined in the last decade…

In California, a state that is spending $137 million per year on the death penalty, many homicide investigations have been put on hold due to a budget crisis in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is forcing officers to suspend work on their cases and take days or weeks off because of new overtime limits. One of the LAPD’s most productive investigators sat idle for 6 weeks, unable to follow old leads or to pick up on new ones because he had accumulated overtime on cases.

Master Sgt. Timothy Hennis was convicted in 1986 of murdering three people in North Carolina. He was tried in state court. However, his conviction was overturned because of weak evidence and improper statements by the prosecution. He was re-tried, and the jury voted unanimously for his acquittal in 1989. The evidence from the crime scene was preserved and, when DNA testing became available, a re-evaluation of the evidence pointed to the possibility that Hennis was indeed guilty of the murders.

David Kofoed, CSI Director of Douglas County, Nebraska was convicted last month of planting evidence during a murder investigation, casting doubts on the legitimacy of other cases on which he worked. Kofoed’s work came into question after a 2006 investigation into the murder of Wayne and Sharmon Stock. The victims’ nephew was one of the leading suspects in the murder, despite the lack of physical evidence tying him and an accomplice to the killing. The victims’ nephew confessed to the police…

Innocence groups from around the country, along with a group of eyewitness testimony experts, recently filed amicus briefs asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case of Kevin Keith, an Ohio man who is on death row for fatally shooting three people in 1994. The innocence groups stated that Keith’s conviction was based on faulty eyewitness testimony that was improperly influenced by the police. In addition, Keith’s counsel uncovered another possible suspect, a man with a violent criminal…

James Abbott, Chief of Police of West Orange, New Jersey, recently spoke at an international forum regarding his experience as a member of the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission. Chief Abbott, who was Governor Codey’s Republican appointee to the Commission, said he did not anticipate changing his mind regarding capital punishment, but was greatly influenced by the stories of murder victims’ famlies who testified during the commission’s hearings. “I had no idea how much families suffer…