In-Depth Reports

The results of two new stud­ies which under­score the con­tin­u­ing injus­tice of racism in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty are being released through this report. The first study doc­u­ments the infec­tious pres­ence of racism in the death penal­ty, and demon­strates that this prob­lem has not slack­ened with time, nor is it restrict­ed to a sin­gle region of the coun­try. The oth­er study iden­ti­fies one of the poten­tial caus­es for this con­tin­u­ing cri­sis: those who are mak­ing the crit­i­cal death penalty…

The dan­ger that inno­cent peo­ple will be exe­cut­ed because of errors in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem is get­ting worse. A total of 69 peo­ple have been released from death row since 1973 after evi­dence of their inno­cence emerged. Twenty-one con­demned inmates have been released since 1993, includ­ing sev­en from the state of Illinois alone. Many of these cas­es were dis­cov­ered not because of the nor­mal appeals process, but rather as a result of new sci­en­tif­ic tech­niques, inves­ti­ga­tions by journalists,…

The infu­sion of the death penal­ty into polit­i­cal races is reach­ing new extremes and dis­tort­ing the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Although the use of death sen­tences to gain polit­i­cal lever­age is cer­tain­ly not new, the dem­a­goguery aimed at esca­lat­ing exe­cu­tions has become more per­va­sive. Not only are can­di­dates for leg­isla­tive office cam­paign­ing loud­ly on the death penal­ty, even judges and local pros­e­cu­tors are cit­ing the num­bers of peo­ple they have sent to death row in their cam­paigns for office.

–William J. Brennan, Jr., retired Supreme Court Justice, 1996…

As exe­cu­tions reach record num­bers in the U.S., the sys­tem of rep­re­sen­ta­tion for those fac­ing the death penal­ty is in a state of cri­sis. Far from the legal ​“dream team” assem­bled in the O.J. Simpson case, cap­i­tal defen­dants are giv­en attor­neys who fail to inves­ti­gate, who fall asleep dur­ing tri­al or come into court drunk, attor­neys bare­ly out of law school, or attor­neys who say noth­ing when their clien­t’s life is on the line. Too many states encour­age this mal­prac­tice by offering totally…