Entries by Death Penalty Information Center
News
Jul 15, 2009
Racial Justice Act Passed In North Carolina House and Senate
On July 15, the House of Representatives of North Carolina voted 61 – 53 to pass the Racial Justice Act. A similar bill already passed the state senate, though that bill contained an amendment to bypass some objections to the state’s execution process. The new law, if finally approved, would allow judges to consider whether racial bias played a role in the decision to seek or impose the death penalty. “This is a fairness bill,” said Rep. Larry Womble, the Forsyth Democrat who…
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Jul 14, 2009
Death Sentences Decline in Key Louisiana Jurisdiction
Jefferson Parish near New Orleans has sent 28 people to death row since the death penalty was reinstated in 1975, many of them under the current District Attorney, Paul Connick Jr., who took office in 1997. But no one has been sentenced to death in that parish in the past 5 years and prosecutors haven’t even tried a capital case in the past 4 years, despite a number of high-profile murders. This decrease in death sentencing is not unique to Louisiana. “The trend in these numbers, as across…
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Jul 13, 2009
NEW VOICES: Experts Find Little Benefit to Justify California’s Expensive Death Penalty
Two experts in criminology challenged the rationale for California’s high spending on the death penalty in a recent op-ed in the Contra Costa Times. Michael Radelet, chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Werner Einstadter, professor emeritus of criminology and sociology at Eastern Michigan University, contrasted California’s multi-million dollar spending on capital punishment with the lack of any deterrent effect. Especially in…
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Jul 12, 2009
STUDIES: Death Penalty for Female Offenders
The latest issue of the report, “Death Penalty for Female Offenders,” has been released by Professor Victor Streib of the Ohio Northern University School of Law. The report includes national trends regarding women and the death penalty and case details about individual female death row inmates from 1973 through June 30, 2009. The report notes that while women account for one in ten murder arrests (10%), only one in forty-nine death sentences imposed at trial are for women…
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Jul 11, 2009
LAW REVIEWS: Physician Participation in Lethal Injection Executions
Professor Ty Alper of the Boalt School of Law at Berkeley has written an article for the forthcoming edition of the North Carolina Law Review entitled “The Truth About Physician Participation in Lethal Injection Executions.” Prof. Alper, a noted death penalty expert, reviews the available research and recent litigation on the most widely used method of execution in the U.S., focusing especially on the potential role of doctors in executions. As states are challenged to ensure…
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Jul 10, 2009
STUDIES: “Double Tragedies”: Mental Illness and the Death Penalty
A new report, “Double Tragedies,” addresses the question of whether people with severe mental illness should face the death penalty. The report was authored by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (MVFHR) and called for treatment and prevention instead of execution for such offenders. The report, based on extensive interviews with 21 family members in 10 different states, calls the death penalty…
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Jul 06, 2009
New Evidence Throws Doubt on Ohio Death Row Inmate’s Conviction
Attorneys for Ohio death row inmate Kevin Keith have presented new evidence casting doubt on his original conviction in briefs filed with the Ohio State Supreme Court. The Ohio Innocence Project has also asked for a new trial for Keith, supporting the claim that suppressed evidence points to another suspect who said he was paid to $15,000 to “cripple” the drug informant who was the victim of the shootings for which Keith was condemned to death. Additionally,…
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Jul 02, 2009
NEW VOICES: Prominent Conservative Calls for Death Penalty Moratorium
Richard A. Viguerie, who has been called “one of the creators of the modern conservative movement” by The Nation magazine, recently wrote an op-ed in which he discusses how his conservative ideology led him to oppose the death penalty and calls for a national moratorium on the death penalty. “The fact is, I don’t understand why more conservatives don’t oppose the death penalty,” writes Viguerie. He argues the standard conservative position of…
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Jun 30, 2009
NEW RESOURCES: DPIC’s 2008 Article Index is Available
Each year, DPIC collects relevant death penalty articles that have appeared in print and on media Web sites. Our collection certainly does not contain all such articles, nor do we claim that it represents the “best” articles. It is only a representative sample of the extensive coverage given to capital punishment in print in a particular year. For those interested in examining this coverage, we have prepared an index of the articles from 2008 in Excel format. Note that we are…
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Jun 29, 2009
DNA Evidence Leads to Release of Texas Man Who Spent Four Years on Death Row
A man originally sentenced to death for four murders in Texas has been released on his own recognizance after new DNA evidence was discovered. Robert Springsteen and co-defendant Michael Scott were released by State District Judge Mike Lynch after prosecutors said they were not prepared to go to trial as scheduled, leaving Judge Lynch to follow through on his promise to the defendants that another delay would mean freedom for the defendants. Lynch said he not only had to consider the charges…
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