Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

After hours of debate and tes­ti­mo­ny, the New Jersey Senate today approved bill S‑171 which will replace the state’s death penal­ty with a sen­tence of life with­out parole. The mea­sure was approved by a vote of 21 – 16 and now moves to the State Assembly, where approval is also expect­ed in a vote on Thursday. The gov­er­nor has indi­cat­ed he will sign the bill into law, mak­ing New Jersey the first state to leg­isla­tive­ly abol­ish the death penal­ty in over 40 years. Around the…

Today, December 10, 2007, the New Jersey Senate will vote on a bill (Senate Bill 171) to replace the death penal­ty with the sen­tence of life with­out parole. Earlier, the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission held exten­sive pub­lic hear­ings that cul­mi­nat­ed in a report call­ing for an end to the death penal­ty. The Commission con­sist­ed of a wide range of per­spec­tives, includ­ing law enforce­ment, vic­tims, and attor­neys. Some of the key find­ings of the…

On December 5, a Tennessee jury acquit­ted Michael Lee McCormick of the 1985 mur­der of Donna Jean Nichols, a crime for which McCormick spent 16 years on death row. In his first tri­al, the pros­e­cu­tion intro­duced hair evi­dence from Nichols’ car that the FBI said matched McCormick. DNA test­ing lat­er found that the hair did not match McCormick and this evi­dence was not per­mit­ted in the new tri­al. McCormick’s attor­ney, Karla Gothard said after the tri­al,​“We have been living with…

In a recent edi­to­r­i­al enti­tled​“The Myth of Deterrence,” the Dallas Morning News point­ed to the many rea­sons why the death penal­ty does not deter mur­ders: a major­i­ty of mur­ders can be clas­si­fied as irra­tional acts, and the per­pe­tra­tors are unlike­ly to have con­sid­ered the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a death sen­tences before and dur­ing the crime; those who com­mit pre­med­i­tat­ed mur­der are also unlike­ly to con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment because it is…

By an 8 – 4 vote on Dec. 3, the New Jersey Senate Budget Committee vot­ed to advance a bill to replace the death penal­ty with a sen­tence of life in prison with­out parole. The bill would make New Jersey the first state to leg­isla­tive­ly abol­ish the death penal­ty since the U.S. Supreme Court rein­stat­ed the death penal­ty in 1976. Senator Raymond Lesniak, the bil­l’s spon­sor, cit­ed a recent case of wrong­ful con­vic­tion in New Jersey when explain­ing his sup­port for abolishing the…

On Tuesday, Dec. 4, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear argu­ments in Snyder v. Louisiana, a case involv­ing a black defen­dant sen­tenced to death by an all-white jury after the pros­e­cu­tion used its peremp­to­ry strikes to exclude all of the qual­i­fied black jurors. During Allen Snyder’s 1996 tri­al for the mur­der of a man his estranged wife was dat­ing, pros­e­cu­tor James Williams of Jefferson Parish urged the all-white jury to sen­tence the defen­dant to death so that Snyder would not…

In a recent op-ed in the New Jersey Daily Record, Jim O’Brien detailed his expe­ri­ences with the legal sys­tem as the father of a mur­der vic­tim. His daugh­ter Deidre was mur­dered in 1982, and the cap­i­tal tri­als and appeals for the man con­vict­ed of the crime last­ed anoth­er 8 years. O’Brien stat­ed,​“I’ve lived through the state’s process of try­ing to kill [a mur­der­er], and I can say with­out hes­i­ta­tion that it is not worth the anguish that it puts survivors through….”…

If cur­rent trends con­tin­ue, New York City will like­ly have few­er than 500 homi­cides this year, the low­est num­ber in a 12-month peri­od since reli­able NYC Police Department sta­tis­tics became avail­able in 1963. As of November 18, 2007, the police depart­ment logged 428 killings, the major­i­ty of which were com­mit­ted by friends or acquain­tances or were drug or gang-relat­ed. In fact, only 35 homi­cides this year were com­mit­ted by strangers to the vic­tims, a number described…

The New York Times inves­ti­gat­ed the post-exon­er­a­­­tion lives of the 206 for­mer inmates who were wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and released through DNA evi­dence. Fifty-three of the cas­es involved mur­der con­vic­tions, and more than 25% of those wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed had giv­en a false con­fes­sion or incrim­i­nat­ing state­ment. Working from a list pro­vid­ed by the Innocence Project, the Times gath­ered infor­ma­tion on 137 of the 206 exonerees and were able to inter­view 115 of those.

In a recent arti­cle in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Dr. Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University describes numer­ous seri­ous errors in recent deter­rence stud­ies, includ­ing improp­er sta­tis­ti­cal analy­ses and miss­ing data and vari­ables that are nec­es­sary to give a full pic­ture of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Fagan writes,​“There is no reli­able, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly sound evi­dence that [shows that exe­cu­tions] can exert a deter­rent effect…. These flaws and omissions…