Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

According to a new report released by the Tennessee Justice Project, indi­gent defense attor­neys in the state receive far few­er dollars and ​“in-kind” resources than pros­e­cu­tors. This dis­crep­an­cy cre­ates an uneven play­ing field that under­mines the pub­lic’s con­fi­dence in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. The report, Resources of the Prosecution and Indigent Defense Functions in Tennessee, is based on find­ings from a study con­duct­ed by The Spangenberg Group, one of the nation’s lead­ing experts on…

Eleven years after super­vis­ing his first exe­cu­tion as at the Florida State Prison at Starke, for­mer war­den Ron McAndrew is urg­ing an end to the death penal­ty. McAndrew is call­ing on states to aban­don cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and replace it with life with­out parole, a pun­ish­ment he notes is worse than the death penal­ty and pro­tects states from exe­cut­ing an inno­cent per­son. He observes, “(T)he most severe pun­ish­ment you could ever give any­one would be to lock them in a lit­tle cage made out of…

The July 2007 issue of Scientific American mag­a­zine con­tains both an arti­cle dis­cussing the med­ical impli­ca­tions of lethal injec­tion and an edi­to­r­i­al dis­cussing the humane­ness of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment gen­er­al­ly. The edi­to­r­i­al sug­gests that capital punishment ​“can nev­er be any­thing but inhu­mane,” and offers the opin­ion that it is ​“wrong” and an ​“out­rage.” But it fur­ther states that even those who believe the death penal­ty is accept­able, should agree that it not be car­ried out cru­el­ly. The…

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 28, 2007, that Scott Panetti, a man with severe men­tal ill­ness on Texas’s death row, deserves a rehear­ing on his claim of men­tal incom­pe­tence. The Court’s 5 – 4 rul­ing over­turned a deci­sion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that had used an over­ly restric­tive def­i­n­i­tion of what con­sti­tutes insan­i­ty. The low­er court had held that mere knowl­edge of one’s crime, with­out a ratio­nal under­stand­ing, was suf­fi­cient to allow an exe­cu­tion to go…

The fed­er­al death penal­ty impacts racial minori­ties dif­fer­ent­ly than it does whites accord­ing to a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union. The report, The Persistent Problem of Racial Disparities in the Federal Death Penalty, notes that defen­dants of col­or make up the major­i­ty of the fed­er­al death row. And the risk of a case being autho­rized for the death penal­ty is 84% high­er in cas­es where the vic­tim is white, regard­less of the race of the defen­dant. The report pointed to…

On June 25, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a cap­i­tal case from Louisiana in which an all-white jury sen­tenced a defen­dant to death after the pros­e­cu­tor urged a death sen­tence so that the defen­dant would not ​“get away with it” like O.J. Simpson. All five qual­i­fied African-Americans had been struck from the jury pool by the pros­e­cu­tion using peremp­to­ry chal­lenges. The defense has chal­lenged the selec­tion of the jury as a vio­la­tion of equal pro­tec­tion. The…

Dissenting from a U.S. Court of Appeals deci­sion deny­ing relief to Gary Cone, Judge Merritt sharply crit­i­cized the Tennessee Attorney General for ​“fal­si­fi­ca­tion” of the record, and he referred to the state’s judi­cial system as ​“bro­ken” and ​“inat­ten­tive.” Cone had been grant­ed relief on two oth­er occa­sions by the same Sixth Circuit, but those deci­sions were reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the present case, Cone claimed that sig­nif­i­cant mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence had been with­held by the state…

In the third edi­tion of what some have called ​“the first true text­book on the death penal­ty,” author Robert Bohm, a cor­rec­tion­al offi­cer turned col­lege pro­fes­sor, engages the read­er with a full account of the argu­ments and issues sur­round­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. His book, ​“DeathQuest III: An Introduction to the Theory & Practice of Capital Punishment in the United States,” begins with the his­to­ry of the death penal­ty from colo­nial to mod­ern times, and then exam­ines the moral and…