Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

According to a study by the Independent Weekly, North Carolina con­ser­v­a­tive­ly spent at least $36 mil­lion dol­lars by seek­ing the death penal­ty instead of life in prison with­out parole over the past 7 years, just on defense costs. The state’s Indigent Defense Services orga­ni­za­tion said the aver­age cost of a death penal­ty defense was $63,700, and the state sought the death penal­ty 733 times between 2001 and 2008. The aver­age cost of the 1,785 poten­tial­ly capital cases…

Washington’s for­mer med­ical direc­tor for the Department of Corrections, Dr. Marc Stern, recent­ly resigned from his post because of an ethichal con­flict with his role in super­vis­ing those who car­ried out exe­cu­tions. For exam­ple, the pris­on’s med­ical direc­tor, a nurse, attend­ed at least 8 prac­tice ses­sions with the four-mem­ber lethal-injec­­tion team, includ­ing some held on the kitchen coun­ter­top at a team mem­ber’s home. As he left his posi­tion on the eve of a…

A prosecutor’s mis­con­duct relat­ed to a Kentucky cap­i­tal mur­der case led the state to accept a plea bar­gain with the defen­dant in which he now faces a sen­tence of 10 years with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of imme­di­ate parole. Officials say Assistant Commonweath Attorney Ruth Lerner com­pro­mised the death penal­ty pros­e­cu­tion against Cory Gibson by cut­ting a deal with a wit­ness against Gibson. Lerner had not dis­closed a deal made with the wit­ness in a sep­a­rate rob­bery case in exchange for…

In a 5 – 4 rul­ing on June 18, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a low­er fed­er­al court rul­ing hold­ing that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guar­an­tees a con­vict­ed inmate the right to a DNA test on evi­dence that might prove his inno­cence. The defen­dant, William Osborne, had been con­vict­ed in 1994 of sex­u­al assault in Alaska and sen­tenced to 26 years in prison. Alaska is one of only 4 states in the coun­try that does not have a law providing for…

Indiana is sen­tenc­ing few­er peo­ple to death and exe­cut­ing at its slow­est pace in 15 years. It has gone two years with­out an exe­cu­tion for the first time since the mid-1990​’s. ​“We’re run­ning out of death row inmates,” said Clark County Prosecutor Steven Stewart, who main­tains a pro-death penal­ty Web site. Prosecutors attribute the decline to time and mon­ey issues, part of a nation­al trend that has prompt­ed sev­er­al states to move towards abol­ish­ing the death…

Eighty-eight per­cent of the country’s top crim­i­nol­o­gists do not believe the death penal­ty acts as a deter­rent to homi­cide, accord­ing to a new study pub­lished on June 16 in the Northwestern University School of Law’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. The study was authored by Professor Michael Radelet, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and grad­u­ate stu­dent Traci Lacock. Their article, ​“Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates? The Views…

The rel­a­tives of a six-year-old child who was mur­dered in Georgia expressed their wish­es that the death penal­ty not be sought against his killer and said they wanted ​“peo­ple to know the true sto­ry” of what hap­pened to the child. ​“Me and the father and the moth­er, none of us want the death sen­tence,” said Thomas Murphy, the boy’s uncle. ​“We want him to live know­ing what he [has] done. We want him to live every day of his life know­ing what he [has] done to this child.