Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

The White House has ordered state courts to con­sid­er the com­plaints of 51 Mexican for­eign nation­als on death row in the United States. This Executive Order is an abrupt inter­na­tion­al pol­i­cy shift for the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and comes just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court is sched­uled to con­sid­er what effect U.S. courts should give to a rul­ing in favor of the 51 for­eign nation­als by the United Nations’ high­est tri­bunal, the International Court of Justice at the Hague. The World Court found…

Dr. Jeffrey Fagan, a pro­fes­sor at Columbia University Law School and a lead­ing nation­al expert on deter­rence, tes­tifed that recent stud­ies claim­ing to show a deter­rent effect to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment are fraught with tech­ni­cal and con­cep­tu­al errors. Fagan not­ed that a string of recent stud­ies pur­port­ing to show that the death penal­ty can pre­vent mur­ders use inap­pro­pri­ate meth­ods of sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis, fail to con­sid­er all the rel­e­vant fac­tors that dri­ve mur­der rates, and do not consider…

In his new book, Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), the Times-Picayune city edi­tor Jed Horne exam­ines the exon­er­a­tion of Louisiana death row inmate Curtis Kyles and how his case has impact­ed the New Orleans crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. The book inves­ti­gates the mur­der of Delores Dye, a 60-year-old house­wife who was gunned down in full view of six eye­wit­ness­es. Kyles was arrest­ed and tried twice for the crime. After an initial…

Members of New Mexico’s House of Representatives have passed a bill to abol­ish the death penal­ty, mark­ing the first time that either cham­ber of the state’s leg­is­la­ture has passed such a mea­sure. Representative Gail Beam, who has spon­sored the abo­li­tion bill every two years since she was elect­ed in 1996, not­ed that the vote was ​“a his­toric oppor­tu­ni­ty for New Mexico to take a step that’s both thought­ful and prac­ti­cal and to join oth­er indus­tri­al­ized democ­ra­cies in replac­ing the death penalty…

Former FBI Chief and fed­er­al judge William Sessions recent­ly joined two oth­er for­mer fed­er­al judges and a pros­e­cu­tor urg­ing the U.S. Supreme Court to con­sid­er an appeal from Ohio death row inmate John Spirko. In their brief, Sessions and his col­leagues assert that the pros­e­cu­tion argued a the­o­ry at Spirko’s tri­al that it had to know was at least partly suspect. ​“When the ulti­mate penal­ty is at issue, jus­tice demands scrupu­lous con­duct from pros­e­cu­tors. It is not enough for a prosecutor to…

The Chair of the Judiciary Committee of the New York Assembly recent­ly voiced her strong con­cerns about the state’s death penal­ty. Although she sup­port­ed cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment ear­li­er, Assemblywoman Helene E. Weinstein spoke about the evo­lu­tion in her think­ing and her par­tic­u­lar con­cerns about the risk of exe­cut­ing the innocent: ​“It was an evo­lu­tion­ary process. But clear­ly the advent of DNA evi­dence and the dra­mat­ic num­ber of indi­vid­u­als who have been exon­er­at­ed and freed from death row in…

Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories is a new book by Rachel King of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. The book focus­es on the impact that the death penal­ty has on the fam­i­lies of those who have been con­demned to die. King, who also wrote ​“Don’t Kill in Our Names: Families of Murder Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty,” describes these indi­vid­u­als as the unseen vic­tims of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and high­lights the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing loved ones on…

Texas should over­haul its exec­u­tive clemen­cy process to ensure a fair and equi­table jus­tice sys­tem, accord­ing to a new report by Texas Appleseed and the Texas Innocence Network. The report, ​“The Quality of Mercy — Safeguarding Justice in Texas Through Clemency Reform,” offers a series of rec­om­men­da­tions intend­ed to improve the process, includ­ing hold­ing pub­lic hear­ings in clemen­cy cas­es, estab­lish­ing stan­dards and objec­tive cri­te­ria that can be used to guide clemen­cy deci­sions, granting…

LATEST DATA FROM ​“DEATH ROW USA” SHOW CONTINUING DECLINE The January 1, 2005 figures from ​“Death Row USA,” a pub­li­ca­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Capital Punishment Project, show anoth­er decline in the num­ber of inmates on death rows across the U.S. A com­par­i­son with pre­vi­ous issues of this pub­li­ca­tion show the trend: Date Size of Death Row Jan. 1, 2003 3,692 Jan. 1, 2004 3,503 Oct. 1, 2004 3,471 Jan. 1, 2005 3,455 Other Recent Data: Largest Death Rows: California — 639 Texas -…

New York’s dor­mant death penal­ty law fails to meet the min­i­mum stan­dards rec­om­mend­ed to ensure accu­ra­cy and fair­ness, accord­ing to a new report issued by the Committee on Capital Punishment of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Based on a com­par­i­son of New York’s exist­ing statute to stan­dards estab­lished by expert com­mit­tees in Illinois and Massachusetts, the Committee urged New York law­mak­ers to thor­ough­ly ana­lyze the state’s statute in light of emerg­ing information about…