Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

A for­mer state court admin­is­tra­tor in Montana recent­ly wrote that the death penal­ty is too expen­sive for a​“court sys­tem that was under­fund­ed, under­staffed, and had more work to do than was human­ly pos­si­ble.” Jim Oppedahl, who worked with the Montana courts for ten years, offered his views in the Helena Independent Record:​“The real­i­ty is that the death penal­ty pumps mil­lions of dol­lars of very scarce pub­lic resources into a hand­ful of executions and…

Before his retire­ment from the court, Judge Ronald Reagan had sen­tenced a defen­dant to death and kept his views on the death penal­ty to him­self. However, as Nebraska is con­sid­er­ing a bill to abol­ish cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, he spoke in favor of its repeal.​“I’m a cit­i­zen here. I’d just as soon not have a death penal­ty,” Judge Reagan testified. ​“It just seems to me that peo­ple are rec­og­niz­ing that the death penalty…

Life and Death Matters: Seeking the Truth About Capital Punishment is a new book that doc­u­ments author Robert Baldwin’s per­son­al jour­ney in con­fronting racism and the death penal­ty in the Deep South. Baldwin shares his evo­lu­tion in a con­ver­sa­tion­al, first-per­­­son style with a declared faith per­spec­tive. Written for peo­ple of all beliefs and back­grounds, he focus­es on the myths and mis­con­cep­tions about pris­ons and the death penalty…

A bill is being intro­duced in Colorado to end the state’s death penal­ty and to use the resul­tant sav­ings to inves­ti­gate the state’s more than 1,300 unsolved crimes. More than 500 res­i­dents who have lost friends and fam­i­ly to unsolved mur­ders are push­ing for the bill, which is expect­ed to be intro­duced by House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann. The pro­po­nents esti­mate that 3 in 10 killers in the state walk free, and catch­ing more killers would be a more…

Five peo­ple in Nebraska were recent­ly par­doned for a 1985 mur­der after new DNA evi­dence exclud­ed their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the crime. The group was also known as the​“Beatrice Six.” The sixth man, the only one who had insist­ed on a jury tri­al, was exon­er­at­ed in October 2008 when pros­e­cu­tors declined to seek…

The Future of America’s Death Penalty, edit­ed by Charles S. Lanier, William J. Bowers, James R. Acker, is a new book com­prised of orig­i­nal chap­ters authored by nation­al­ly dis­tin­guished schol­ars. It is an ambi­tious effort to iden­ti­fy the most crit­i­cal issues con­fronting the future of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States and the steps that must be tak­en to gath­er and ana­lyze the infor­ma­tion that will be nec­es­sary for informed policy…