Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

A new report issued by Amnesty International found that at least 10% of the first 1,000 peo­ple exe­cut­ed in the United States since 1977 were severe­ly men­tall ill. The report not­ed that the National Association of Mental Health esti­mates that between five and 10% of the 3,400 peo­ple on death row around the coun­try are men­tal­ly ill. Amnesty said that states are fail­ing to address seri­ous men­tal health issues before crimes…

A new report by the American Bar Association Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project found that Georgia’s death penal­ty fails to meet 43 ABA stan­dards for improv­ing the fair­ness and accu­ra­cy of the death penal­ty. The assess­ment team assem­bled in Georgia by the ABA was so trou­bled by its find­ings that it called for a mora­to­ri­um on not only exe­cu­tions but also the pros­e­cu­tion of death penal­ty cas­es, and urged the state to study prob­lems such as inad­e­quate fund­ing for defense counsel,…

Pennsylvania State Representative Michael McGeehan, a tough-on-crime law­mak­er from Philadelphia, who ear­li­er had pushed for expe­dit­ed exe­cu­tions, now regrets that stance. He is spon­sor­ing leg­is­la­tion that would com­pen­sate those who have been wrong­ly con­vict­ed. McGeehan’s bill, which would also imme­di­ate­ly expunge a wrong­ly con­vict­ed per­son­’s crim­i­nal record, was prompt­ed by his out­rage at the num­ber of peo­ple who have been wrong­ly con­vict­ed and released from…

More than two decades after Ventura County Superior Court Judge Charles R. McGrath con­demned Michael Morales to die, McGrath is ask­ing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemen­cy because the con­vic­tion was like­ly based on false tes­ti­mo­ny from a jail­house infor­mant. Morales is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on February 21. McGrath’s let­ter was includ­ed in a clemen­cy peti­tion filed by Morales’ attor­neys, David Senior and Kenneth W. Starr, dean of Pepperdine Law School and a former…

A new edi­tion of the Stanford Law Review con­tains an arti­cle enti­tled Uses and Abuses of Empirical Evidence in the Death Penalty Debate. The arti­cle exam­ines and per­forms com­par­i­son tests on recent stud­ies that have claimed a deter­rent effect to the death penal­ty. Authors John J. Donohue of Yale Law School and Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania state their goal and con­clu­sions: (O)ur aim in this Article is to pro­vide a thor­ough assess­ment of the sta­tis­ti­cal evidence on…

In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Felix G. Rohatyn (pic­tured), the U.S. Ambassador to France from 1997 to 2001, not­ed that dur­ing his tenure ​“no sin­gle issue was viewed with as much hos­til­i­ty as our sup­port for the death penal­ty.” Rohatyn urged the U.S. to con­sid­er the impact of main­tain­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment on our rela­tions with our allies, and he stat­ed that con­sid­er­a­tion of inter­na­tion­al trends is appro­pri­ate when cas­es are reviewed by the Supreme Court. Rohatyn…

The U.S. Supreme Court grant­ed a stay of exe­cu­tion to Clarence Hill in Florida just min­utes before his exe­cu­tion was to take place on January 24. The next day, the Court made the stay per­ma­nent until they could hear Hill’s chal­lenge to the lethal injec­tion pro­ce­dures in Florida. Hill raised a civ­il rights claim (sec­tion 1983) stat­ing that the chem­i­cals used in lethal injec­tion could inflict severe and unnec­es­sary pain. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit reject­ed his use of…

After more than two decades of work­ing to spare the life of Florida death row inmate James Floyd, the fam­i­ly of the woman he mur­dered has suc­ceed­ed in get­ting pros­e­cu­tors to reduce Floyd’s sen­tence to life in prison for the mur­der of Annie Bar Anderson. ​“I did not want him to die, and I did­n’t want his fam­i­ly to suf­fer the mur­der of their father or their broth­er or their son. What good is anger and hatred,” said Elizabeth Blair, who took up the fam­i­ly’s effort to spare Floyd’s life after…

Truth Be Told: Life Lessons From Death Row fea­tures cor­re­spon­dence between Agnes Vadas and Richard Nields, who is on death row in Ohio. The book con­tains let­ters exchanged between the two over six years. They dis­cuss a wide range of top­ics, includ­ing life on death row, how they have coped with chal­lenges in life, and the lessons they have learned from hard­ship. Agnes Vadas is a musi­cian and human rights activist from Washington. (AuthorHouse, 2005). See…

Philip Yam is the News Editor of Scientific American Magazine. He recent­ly post­ed an item on the mag­a­zine’s Web site about the death penal­ty. Some excerpts from the post­ing, entitled ​“Science ver­sus the Death Penalty,” are…