Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Christopher Slobogin of the University of Florida’s Law School has writ­ten a new book about the state’s legal author­i­ty to deprive peo­ple with men­tal dis­abil­i­ties of life or lib­er­ty. The book dis­cuss­es a num­ber of well known cas­es such as that of John Hinckley and Andrea Yates. It also includes dis­cus­sion of laws deal­ing with the insan­i­ty defense, the death penal­ty, com­mit­ment of sex­u­al preda­tors, and hos­pi­tal­iza­tion of peo­ple con­sid­ered unable to make…

One attor­ney’s appeal brief on behalf of a Texas death row inmate was so poor­ly writ­ten that State District Judge Noe Gonzalez of Edinburg wrote that​“Applicant total­ly mis­in­ter­prets what actu­al­ly occurred in this case.” A com­mit­tee of cit­i­zens and attor­neys filed a com­plaint about the appel­late lawyer with the State Bar of Texas, but noth­ing was done: the lawyer remains on the state’s list of approved death penal­ty attor­neys, and the client remains on death row. The…

The Charlotte School of Law is spon­sor­ing a symposium on ​“Mental Illness and the Death Penalty: Seeking a​‘Reasoned Moral Response’ to an Unavoidable Condition” on October 20, 2006 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The con­fer­ence will bring togeth­er med­ical experts, judges, defense attor­neys, pros­e­cu­tors, and oth­er experts to dis­cuss whether cur­rent law ade­quate­ly accounts for the role of men­tal ill­ness in cap­i­tal cas­es. Among those sched­uled to speak are…

The for­mer Director of the FBI, William Sessions (pic­tured), along with Timothy Lewis, a for­mer judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, called on mem­bers of Congress to refrain from bar­ring death row inmates and oth­er defen­dants from the full access to the fed­er­al courts in their appeals. Some leg­is­la­tors have pro­posed elim­i­nat­ing fed­er­al habeas cor­pus review in many cas­es, and bar­ring access to the fed­er­al courts to many of those raising…

The lat­est edi­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s​“Death Row USA” shows that the num­ber of peo­ple on the death row in the United States is con­tin­u­ing to decline, falling to 3,366 as of July 1, 2006. The size of death row increased every year between 1976 and 2000, but since then it has been in…

The FBI recent­ly released the lat­est ver­sion of its Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States 2005. The report showed that the mur­der rate in 2005 (5.6 mur­ders per 100,000 peo­ple) was the same as in 2001, with lit­tle change in the inter­ven­ing years. Death sen­tences, exe­cu­tions and the size of death row all declined dur­ing this peri­od. As in pre­vi­ous years, the South had the high­erst mur­der rate, 6.6, among the 4 geo­graph­i­cal regions. Over 80% of the…

State Assemblyman Nelson T. Albano of Cape May, New Jersey, announced at a forum on the death penal­ty that he has changed his mind and now oppos­es cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Albano said that his change of heart came after read­ing a book about Kirk Bloodsworth, the 1^st death-row inmate in the United States to be exon­er­at­ed by DNA evi­dence. The book led him to the insight into that the cap­i­­­tal-pun­ish­­­ment sys­tem is flawed and should be…

In an arti­cle enti­tled The Death Penalty: No Evidence for Deterrence, John Donnohue and Justin Wolfers exam­ined recent sta­tis­ti­cal stud­ies that claimed to show a deter­rent effect from the death penal­ty. The authors con­clude that the esti­mates claim­ing that the death penal­ty saves numer­ous lives​“are sim­ply not cred­i­ble.” In fact, the authors state that using the same data and prop­er method­ol­o­gy could lead to the exact oppo­site con­clu­sion: that is, that the…

At a hear­ing in fed­er­al District Court in Maryland, Dr. Mark Heath, an anes­the­si­ol­o­gist and assis­tant pro­fes­sor at Columbia University, tes­ti­fied that those des­ig­nat­ed to car­ry out lethal injec­tions in the state were unpre­pared and unqual­i­fied for the task.​“The total­i­ty of all their knowl­edge is gross­ly inad­e­quate,” Heath stat­ed. Sworn tes­ti­mo­ny from mem­bers of the exe­cu­tion team was shown at the hear­ing. In one video­taped seg­ment, the doc­tor who was…

DPIC​’s Lethal Injection Page ABA Report Finds Serious Problems in Florida’s Capital Punishment System A new report issued by the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project found that Florida’s appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty fails to com­ply with ABA stan­dards to ensure fair­ness and accu­ra­cy. This report was com­piled by an eight-mem­ber team com­posed of crim­i­nal jus­tice experts from Florida. The report cites prob­lems in numerous…