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The Sacramento Bee announced in an edi­to­r­i­al that it is revers­ing its his­toric 150-year sup­port of the death penal­ty and endors­ing the repeal of California​’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment law. The edi­to­r­i­al called the state’s death penal­ty an ​“illu­sion,” which is rarely car­ried out, despite the large num­ber of death sen­tences. It cit­ed the high cost of the death penal­ty as one of the rea­sons for sup­port­ing repeal, not­ing, ​“California has already spent bil­lions of dol­lars – one recent study pegged the fig­ure at $4 bil­lion – admin­is­ter­ing the death penal­ty since…

A recent New York Times edi­to­r­i­al encour­aged the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to reduce the sen­tence of death row inmate Warren Hill to life. Hill is fac­ing exe­cu­tion on July 18. The edi­to­r­i­al not­ed that Mr. Hill’s intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties, includ­ing an IQ of 70, led the tri­al judge to find him men­tal­ly retard­ed. Georgia’s Supreme Court, how­ev­er, over­turned the judge’s rul­ing because men­tal retar­da­tion had not been proven ​“beyond a rea­son­able doubt.” The Times not­ed that Georgia ​“is the only state with a statute requir­ing a defen­dant to…

John J. Donohue (pic­tured), a research asso­ciate for the National Bureau of Economic Research and a pro­fes­sor at Stanford Law School, recent­ly high­light­ed con­tin­u­ing prob­lems with the death penal­ty sys­tem, forty years after it was struck down for being applied in an arbi­trary man­ner. Professor Donohue wrote that despite ​“new and improved” statutes accept­ed by the Court when it rein­stat­ed the death penal­ty in 1976, ​“four decades lat­er, there is plen­ty of evi­dence that the death penal­ty con­tin­ues to be applied in an unfair man­ner and not a shred of…

A recent edi­to­r­i­al in the New York Times called for greater atten­tion to be paid by courts to inmates on death row with severe men­tal ill­ness: ​“The death penal­ty sys­tem fails to take ade­quate account of severe men­tal ill­ness, whether at tri­al, at sen­tenc­ing or in post­con­vic­tion pro­ceed­ings,” the paper wrote. The edi­to­r­i­al praised Governor John Kasich of Ohio for grant­i­ng a two-week reprieve to Abdul Awkal on June 5 just pri­or to his sched­uled exe­cu­tion. However, the Times said the the Ohio courts should have assumed the respon­si­bil­i­ty to…

A recent arti­cle in the Justice Quarterly by Professor James Acker (pic­tured) and Rose Bellandi of the University at Albany, New York, exam­ined whether there is an irrec­on­cil­able con­flict between recent reforms to pre­vent the exe­cu­tion of the inno­cent and the tra­di­tion­al goals of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The authors stud­ied recent changes to Maryland’s death penal­ty statute that were designed to reduce the risk of wrong­ful exe­cu­tions while try­ing to main­tain the death penal­ty for the most heinous crimes. Maryland’s law requires either bio­log­i­cal evi­dence of guilt, a video­taped con­fes­sion, or…