Law Reviews

To rein in the social and economic costs caused by the overly aggressive use of the death penalty by prosecutors, a California legal scholar is proposing a plan he believes will reduce miscarriages of justice and increase prosecutorial accountability. In Shrinking the Accountability Deficit in Capital Charging, a new chapter in the 2020 Oxford Handbook of Prosecutors and Prosecution, UCLA law professor Sherod Thaxton (pictured) argues that to temper the unfettered discretion local prosecutors…

“States still operating a capital punishment system are incapable of administering the death penalty free from racial discrimination and arbitrariness.” So argues Alexis Hoag (pictured), Practitioner in Residence at the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University, in an article in the Spring 2020 issue of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Hoag’s article, Valuing Black Lives: A Case for Ending the Death Penalty was published in connection with the…

Judicial enforcement of constitutional rights in Texas death penalty cases has become increasingly rare and is virtually non-existent in the state’s federal courts, a new University of Houston Law Center study has found. The study, Reversal Rates in Capital Cases in Texas, 2000 – 2020, published online on April 27, 2020 in the UCLA Law Review, reports that reversal rates in cases in which Texas capital defendants were sentenced to death in the first two decades of the 21^st century have plummeted…

At least 99 men and one woman are on death row in eight U.S. states, condemned to death by judges without the prior authorization of a jury, according to a 2019 study by researchers Michael Radelet and Ben Cohen (pictured) published in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Another 18 prisoners sentenced to death since the resumption of capital punishment in the U.S. in the 1970s, the study shows, have been executed after judges disregarded or overrode jury votes in favor of life.

At least 166 wrongfully convicted death-row prisoners have been exonerated since the death penalty was reinstituted in the United States in 1973. That number, however, may only scratch the surface in assessing the degree to which innocent men and women are being sent to U.S. death rows. In the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC, Rob Warden (pictured, left) and John Seasly (pictured, right) speak with DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger about a body of death-penalty cases in which…

A landmark article in the Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy provides a “compilation of milestones in the American experience with capital punishment,” tracking more than 400 years of the “inglorious experience with capital punishment” in what is now the United States. Authors Rob Warden (pictured, left), Executive Director Emeritus at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Daniel Lennard (pictured, right), a lawyer at…

Multiple factors — from declining murder rates to the abandonment of capital punishment by many rural counties and substantially reduced usage in outlier counties that had aggressively imposed it in the past — have collectively led to an “astonishing plunge” in death sentences over the last twenty years, according to a new study, Lethal Rejection, published in the 2017/2018 Albany Law Review. Using data on death-eligible cases from 1994, 2004, and 2014, Drake University law professor David McCord…

A new study of more than two decades of murders in Oklahoma has found that defendants charged with killing a white woman have odds of being sentenced to death in the Sooner State that are nearly ten times greater than if they had been charged with killing a man who is a racial minority. The study, published in the Fall 2017 issue of the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, examined more than 4,600 Oklahoma homicide cases over a 23-year…

Two professors of sociology and criminology who reviewed more than 1500 cases in which convicted prisoners were later exonerated have found a direct relationship between the seriousness of the crime and miscarriages of justice: “the ‘worst of the worst crimes,’” they say, “produce the ‘worst of the worst evidence.’” In their research — reported in the law review article, The Worst of the Worst: Heinous Crimes and Erroneous Evidence — University of Denver professors Scott Phillips (pictured) and…

In a new article for the Lewis & Clark Law Review, author Carla Edmondson argues that the future dangerousness inquiry that is implicit in capital setencing determinations “is a fundamentally flawed question that leads to arbitrary and capricious death sentences” and because of the “persistent influence of future dangerousness … renders the death penalty incompatible with the prohibitions of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments on cruel and unusual punishment.” Edmonson’s article, Nothing is…