Publications & Testimony

The death penal­ty adverse­ly affects both fam­i­lies of mur­der vic­tims and fam­i­lies of the accused, accord­ing to two recent jour­nal arti­cles. In his Psychology Today blog, Talking About Trauma, psy­chol­o­gist Dr. Robert T. Muller (pic­tured) reports that psy­cho­log­i­cal stud­ies have have found that the death penal­ty pro­duces neg­a­tive effects on fam­i­lies and friends of mur­der vic­tims (referred to as…

The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that death-row pris­on­ers who had unsuc­cess­ful­ly argued that they are inel­i­gi­ble for the death penal­ty because of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty must be pro­vid­ed a sec­ond chance to prove their claims. On October 20, the Court decid­ed in Walls v. State that Florida must retroac­tive­ly apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 deci­sion in Hall v. Florida, which declared Florida’s procedures for…

Harris County, Texas, the coun­ty that leads the nation in exe­cu­tions, has served as a bell­wether in recent years of the nation­wide decline of the death penal­ty. Although the 10 new death sen­tences imposed in Harris County since 2010 are more than were imposed in 99.5% of U.S. coun­ties, they are sig­nif­i­cant­ly few­er than the 53 new death sen­tences that were hand­ed down in Harris in 1998 – 2003 and the 16 from 2004 – 2009. The 2016 Kinder Institute…

Edwin Meese III (pic­tured), who served as U.S. Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan, and Robert Morgenthau, the long-time dis­trict attor­ney of Manhattan who served as a U.S. attor­ney under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, believe that Alabama death row pris­on­er William Kuenzel is inno­cent and are urg­ing the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case. Meese and Morgenthau belong to dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal par­ties and take oppos­ing views on capital punishment,…

Saying the death penal­ty is​“too fal­li­ble to endure,” the Lincoln Journal Star has called on Nebraska vot­ers to end cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the state. In two edi­to­ri­als pub­lished in con­nec­tion with the upcom­ing statewide death penal­ty bal­lot ref­er­en­dum on November 8, the paper urged Nebraskans to retain the leg­is­la­ture’s death penal­ty repeal bill. The pre­dom­i­nant­ly Republican leg­is­la­ture vot­ed to repeal the state’s death penal­ty in May…

After hav­ing​“solicit­ed thor­ough­ly for ven­dors,” the Nevada Department of Corrections announced that no phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny has offered to sell the state drugs for use in exe­cu­tions. James Dzurenda, direc­tor of the Nevada Department of Corrections issued a state­ment on October 7 say­ing that the Department had sent 247 requests for pro­pos­als to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sup­pli­ers on September 2 and, in response, had received no bids to sup­ply the state with…

The Florida Supreme Court has declared uncon­sti­tu­tion­al the state’s prac­tice of per­mit­ting judges to impose death sen­tences based upon a non-unan­i­­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tion for death. In two rul­ings issued October 14 the court held that juries must unan­i­mous­ly find all facts nec­es­sary to impose a death sen­tence, includ­ing the exis­tence of any aggra­vat­ing fac­tor relied upon as a rea­son to impose the death penal­ty, whether the aggra­vat­ing factors in…

Texas is poised to have the fewest num­ber of executions…

The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed a deci­sion of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals that affirmed the death sen­tence imposed on Shaun Michael Bosse. In a unan­i­mous per curi­am deci­sion issued October 11, the Court held that Oklahoma pros­e­cu­tors had improp­er­ly pre­sent­ed tes­ti­mo­ny from three mem­bers of the vic­tims’ fam­i­lies ask­ing the jury to sen­tence Bosse to death. The Court had ruled in 1987 in Booth v. Maryland that the…

Kern County, California—one of five Southern California coun­ties that have been described as the​“new Death Belt” — sent six peo­ple to death row between 2006 and 2015, more than 99.4% of U.S. coun­ties. Its death sen­­tence-to-homi­­cide rate dur­ing the 10-year-per­i­od from 2006 to 2015 also was 2.3 times high­er than in the rest of the state. In this same time frame, Kern had the high­est rate of civil­ians killed by police of any coun­ty in the country:…