Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was a senator in Arizona, one of the people she asked to draft the state’s death penalty law was Rudolph Gerber. She requested that he “write a law we can live with.” Mr. Gerber went on to become a prosecutor, an Arizona trial judge, and eventually a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals for 13 years. He recently expressed his changing views on capital punishment as he experienced how the law was put into practice: “My experience, not atypical by any means…

Articles from a symposium entitled “Rethinking the Death Penalty: Can We Define Who Deserves Death?” can be found in the Fall 2003 edition of the Pace Law Review. The symposium, hosted by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in May 2002, featured speakers Robert Blecker, Jeffrey Kirchmeier, the Honorable William Erlbaum, David Von Drehle, and Jeffrey Fagan. The speakers addressed the question of whether it is possible to limit the death penalty to the “worst of the worst” and, if…

The American Correctional Association has recently published the proceedings of their 2003 Annual Conference in Nashville containing a presentation by DPIC Executive Director Richard Dieter on the death penalty. The text of the speech is available on DPIC’s site, click here. The full publication is available from the ACA, and also contains remarks on the death penalty by Prof. John McAdams of Marquette. (The State of Corrections: 2003 Proceedings, ACA Annual Conferences, American Correctional…

A new report by The Sentencing Project, “The Vanishing Black Electorate: Felony Disenfranchisement in Atlanta, Georgia,” examines the racial effects of depriving citizens of voting rights because of criminal convictions. The report reveals sharp disparities in voting eligibility by race and neighborhood. Among the report’s key findings are the following: One out of every seven African American males in Atlanta is disenfranchised as a result of a felony conviction; One-third of the black male…

Just one day after the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee passed the “Advancing Justice Through DNA Technology Act,” a measure that includes the Innocence Protection Act and that ensures access to post-conviction DNA testing for those in prison with claims of innocence, the bill has been incorporated into legislation introduced in the House Judiciary Committee. As part of the “Justice for All Act of 2004,” the DNA bill is anticipated to quickly advance to the House floor for a vote, after which…

An autopsy of the last man executed in Kentucky, Edward L. Harper, found only 3 to 6.5 milligrams per liter of barbiturate in Harper’s blood – a level leaving a high chance that Harper was conscious throughout the execution and that he felt pain when he was injected with subsequent drugs that paralyzed and suffocated him, and then stopped his heart. Dr. Mark Dershwitz, the prosecution expert who developed the standards that Kentucky relies upon, said the low level of barbiturate found in Mr.

A new report from the Washington Death Penalty Assistance Center reviews the efficiency of Washington State’s death penalty system. The report includes an overview of Washington’s statute and an explanation of the differences between capital and non-capital cases, demonstrating why capital cases require significantly greater resources. The authors report that: o Of death penalty cases that completed the appeals process, 81% were overturned after errors were found. When those cases were tried a…

In the latest National Crime Victimization Survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that the U.S. murder rate for 2003 was about 5.6 per 100,000 persons, unchanged from 2001 and 2002. Of the victims of murder, approximately 49% were white and 49% were black. (DPIC note: While the report found that the race of victims is evenly split nationally, victims in death penalty cases are mostly white (about 81%)). In murder cases, 76% of the offenders were known to the victim, and 24% of…

New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a long time supporter of capital punishment, called for New York’s legislature to step back and more thoroughly review the state’s death penalty system, which has not resulted in any executions and has cost the state more than $170 million in the last decade. Speaker Silver said that his chamber would not follow the lead of the state Senate, which passed an amendment to fix the state’s death penalty law without hearings. “After 10 years of having the…