Publications & Testimony

The Supreme Court of Kenya has declared the nation’s mandatory death sentencing procedures unconstitutional. In a December 14, 2017 ruling that could affect 7,000 death-row prisoners, the high court overturned Section 204 of Kenya’s Penal Code, which required that judges impose death sentences upon conviction of murder or armed robbery. The decision resolves conflicting rulings by the country’s lower courts of appeal, and grants new sentencing hearings to those currently sentenced to death.

On December 17, 2007, New Jersey abolished the death penalty. On the tenth anniversary of abolition, the editorial board of the New Jersey Law Journal writes, “On the Death Penalty, New Jersey Got it Right.” The editorial board wrote, “Abolition has proven its worth, in that there has been no surge of murders, a significant decline of prosecution and appeal expenses, and the elimination of unremediable judicial mistakes. [Abolition] was and remains both the right thing and the sensible thing to…

Nearly one-third (31%) of the 39 new death sentences imposed in the United States in 2017 came from just three counties, Riverside, California; Clark, Nevada; and Maricopa, Arizona, according to statistics compiled for DPIC’s annual year end report. In a press release accompanying the annual report, DPIC said that the year’s sentences reflect “the increasing geographic isolation and arbitrary nature of the death penalty.” Riverside imposed five death sentences in 2017, Clark four, and Maricopa…

Executions and new death sentences remained near historic lows in 2017, and public support for the death penalty polled at its lowest level in 45 years, according to DPIC’s annual report, “The Death Penalty in 2017: Year End Report,” released December 14. Both the 23 executions and the 39 projected new death sentences in 2017 were the second lowest totals in more than a quarter-century. Four more people were exonerated from death row in 2017, bringing the total to 160 death-row exonerations…

As U.S. pharmaceutical companies have strengthened distribution controls on their medicines to prevent their use in executions, states have been changing their execution protocols in search of new or more readily available drugs. That search has led Nebraska and Nevada to build their execution protocols around fentanyl — the drug known for its role in the current opioid crisis in America — and the paralytic cisatracurium, which have never been used in executions before. According to a report in…

The certainty of apprehension, not the severity of punishment, is more effective as a deterrent. So argues Daniel S. Nagin (pictured), one of the nation’s foremost scholars on deterrence and criminal justice policy, in his chapter on Deterrence in the recently released Academy for Justice four-volume study, Reforming Criminal Justice. Reviewing deterrence scholarship since the 1960s and five leading studies from the past two decades, Dr. Nagin concludes that evidence supporting a deterrent…

There will be no death penalty in the first capital prosecution authorized under the administration of Orange and Osceola County, Florida, State Attorney Aramis Ayala. In a case that rekindled the political confrontation between State Attorney Ayala and Governor Rick Scott over the use of the death penalty, Emerita Mapp (pictured) pleaded no contest on December 8 to one count of murder and a second count of attempted murder in exchange for a sentence of life without parole. The plea deal came…

The Texas prosecutor who sought and obtained the death penalty almost 20 years ago against Jeffery Wood (pictured), a man who never killed anyone, has now asked that his sentence be reduced to life in prison. In a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole, sent in August and obtained December 7 by the Texas Tribune, Kerr County District Attorney Lucy Wilke asked the board to recommend that Governor Greg Abbott grant Wood clemency and commute his sentence to life in prison. In 1998…

Two of the co-chairs of the bipartisan Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission have praised organizations in the state for taking “essential steps” towards implementing some of the Commission’s recommendations to reform Oklahoma’s death-penalty system. In an article published December 7 in the Tulsa World, former Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry (pictured, left) and Andy Lester (pictured, right), a prominent Oklahoma litigator, spotlighted actions by the Oklahoma Bar Association (OBA) and the…

The Academy for Justice has recently released a new four-volume study, Reforming Criminal Justice, featuring research and analysis by leading academics and a wide range of proposals for criminal justice reform. The project, funded with a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation and produced with the support of Arizona State University and ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, contains more than fifty chapters covering a wide range of subjects within the areas of criminalization, policing…