Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

Richard Pompelio (pic­tured) estab­lished the New Jersey Crime Victims Law Center (VLC) in 1992 after his 17-year-old son Tony was mur­dered. VLC pro­vides pro bono legal assis­tance to vic­tims of vio­lent crime. He recent­ly wrote in the New Jersey Lawyer’s The Law & More col­umn about the dis­ser­vice that the death penal­ty rep­re­sents to vic­tims and their…

Rob Warden, Executive Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, has writ­ten a book about one of the first accounts of a death penal­ty exon­er­a­tion in the U.S. Wilkie Collins, a British author, had writ­ten a novel entitled ​“The Dead Alive” about the con­vic­tions and death sen­tences of Jesse and Stephen Boorn for a mur­der com­mit­ted in 1819. They were lat­er exon­er­at­ed. Warden’s book is entitled ​“Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Alive: The Novel, the Case,…

Professor Ray Paternoster of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland was the senior author of a 2003 state-com­mis­­sioned review of the role that race and geog­ra­phy play in Maryland’s death penal­ty prac­tice. He recent­ly wrote about the study’s find­ings in the Baltimore…

The Death Penalty Information Center has released its annu­al report on the sta­tus of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the U.S. at the end of 2005. The report notes a dra­mat­ic drop in death sen­tences to the low­est lev­el in 30 years. The year showed an increas­ing reliance on the sen­tence of life-with­­out-parole as an alter­na­tive to the death penal­ty. New York’s leg­is­la­ture refused to restore the death penal­ty after its statute was declared uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, leav­ing life with­out parole as the punishment…

A new book by Professor Austin Sarat (pic­tured) focus­es on clemen­cy’s role in the U.S. crim­i­nal justice system: ​“Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution.” According to U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, ​“This thought­ful book should be read by every cit­i­zen who cares about the issue, and by every gov­er­nor and pres­i­dent entrust­ed with the pow­er to pun­ish or par­don.” In ​“Mercy on Trial,” Sarat reviews the com­plex­i­ties of clemen­cy and exam­ines issues such as reha­bil­i­ta­tion. (Princeton…

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is expand­ing its Capital Punishment Project to include lit­i­ga­tion in addi­tion to its already estab­lished pub­lic edu­ca­tion efforts. The expand­ed pro­gram will be led by John Holdridge, who has been named the Capital Punishment Project’s new director. ​“John Holdridge is one of the nation’s pre­mier death penal­ty lit­i­ga­tors. He has fought the death penal­ty in court­rooms around the coun­try for more than a decade and now brings that expertise and…

Though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit assumes that Texas death row inmate Marvin Lee Wilson is men­tal­ly retard­ed, it ruled that he can­not raise the issue in fed­er­al court because his defense attor­ney missed a fil­ing dead­line. The U.S. Supreme Court has banned the exe­cu­tion of those with men­tal retar­da­tion, but the Fifth Circuit stated that ​“how­ev­er harsh the result may be” their hands are tied by dead­lines estab­lished in the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

In a recent op-ed, for­mer Maryland Governor Parris Glendening criticized the ​“trou­bling” racial and geo­graph­ic dis­par­i­ties that plague the state’s death penal­ty. Glendening, who served as Governor from 1995 to 2003, com­mis­sioned a study of Maryland’s death penal­ty dur­ing his time in office and imple­ment­ed a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions dur­ing his sec­ond term to allow time for action to be tak­en to pre­vent these on-going prob­lems. He…

Members of the New Jersey Senate have over­whelm­ing­ly passed a bill that would sus­pend exe­cu­tions in the state and cre­ate a new death penal­ty study com­mis­sion to exam­ine New Jersey’s death penal­ty. The bill, S‑709, passed by a vote of 30 – 6 and now moves to the New Jersey Assembly for con­sid­er­a­tion in January. Should the bill become law, New Jersey would become the first state in the coun­try to leg­isla­tive­ly impose a mora­to­ri­um on the death penal­ty. The bill would require the for­ma­tion of a…

The lat­est edi­tion of Death Row USA from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is now avail­able. The report reveals that the num­ber of peo­ple on death rows across the coun­try dropped by almost 90 inmates from one year ago. There were 3,471 inmates on death row as of October 1, 2004. In 2005, the death row pop­u­la­tion had shrunk to 3,383. California’s death row remains the largest in the coun­try with 648 peo­ple, fol­lowed by Texas (414), Florida (388), and Pennsylvania (233). The…