Articles

An edi­to­r­i­al in the Sunday edi­tion of the New York Times on January 8 looked at recent stud­ies point­ing to the arbi­trari­ness of the death penal­ty. The edi­to­r­i­al not­ed that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in 1972 because its arbi­trary imple­men­ta­tion ren­dered it uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. In par­tic­u­lar, the Times cit­ed a recent study of Connecticut’s death penal­ty indi­cat­ing the death penal­ty was not being imposed on the worst…

Over 400 media out­lets around the coun­try report­ed on DPIC’s recent 2011 Year-End Report. Coverage includ­ed sto­ries on the dra­mat­ic drop in death sen­tences, the decline in exe­cu­tions, and few­er states hav­ing the death penal­ty. Articles appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today, CNN, TIME, and many oth­er papers. National broad­cast out­lets such as NBC’s Nightly News, National Public…

An edi­to­r­i­al in the New York Times crit­i­cized a recent rul­ing by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, uphold­ing the heavy bur­den Georgia places on offend­ers with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties. In order to be exempt from the death penal­ty, defen­dants must prove ​“beyond a rea­son­able doubt” that they are men­tal­ly retard­ed. The U.S. Supreme Court held in 2002 that such defen­dants can­not receive the death penal­ty, but the Court…

The Orlando Sentinel in Florida recent­ly called on the state to change the unusu­al way in which it arrives at death sen­tences, rec­om­mend­ing instead unan­i­mous jury deci­sions for a death sen­tence, the pre­vail­ing prac­tice in the vast major­i­ty of states. In June, a fed­er­al judge declared Florida’s death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because it only requires a sim­ple major­i­ty to decide whether aggra­vat­ing fac­tors exist and to rec­om­mend a death sen­tence to the…

In a recent op-ed in the New York Daily News, for­mer New York Governor Mario Cuomo called the death penal­ty a ​“seri­ous moral prob­lem” that is ​“cor­ro­sive” to a demo­c­ra­t­ic cit­i­zen­ry. He said many of the prob­lems of the death penal­ty – inef­fec­tive­ness as a deter­rent, unfair­ness, and the risk of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent – are inevitable: ​“These imper­fec­tions — as well as the hor­ri­ble and irre­versible injus­tice they can pro­duce — are inevitable. In this…

The lead edi­to­r­i­al in the New York Times on September 26 called for an end to the death penal­ty because, the edi­tors said, it can­not be made to com­ply with the U.S. Constitution. The edi­toral reviewed the 35-year his­to­ry since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed in 1976 and con­clud­ed, ​“The death penal­ty is grotesque and immoral and should be repealed.” The paper point­ed to the recent case of Troy Davis, who was exe­cut­ed on September 21 in…

A soon-to-be-pub­lished study has found sig­nif­i­cant racial dis­par­i­ties in the U.S. mil­i­tary’s death penal­ty. The study, which will be pub­lished in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, found that minori­ties in the mil­i­tary are twice as like­ly to be sen­tenced to death as whites accused of sim­i­lar crimes. The study exam­ined all 105 poten­tial cap­i­tal cas­es since the mil­i­tary death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed in 1984. Of the 16 death sen­tences hand­ed down in that time,…