Publications & Testimony

An ini­tia­tive on the California bal­lot this November billed by its sup­port­ers as a reform alter­na­tive to abol­ish­ing the state’s death penal­ty will cost the state tens of mil­lions of dol­lars to imple­ment, accord­ing to an analy­sis by the Alarcón Advocacy Center at Loyola Law School, and​“will not speed…

Twenty years ago, frus­trat­ed by what they per­ceived to be the slow pace of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, Colorado leg­is­la­tors adopt­ed a law to​“fix” their death penal­ty by speed­ing up appeals. Proponents and oppo­nents of the state’s death penal­ty agree on one thing: the law has­n’t worked. As The Denver Post reports, the state law intend­ed to stream­line the death penal­ty appeals process by impos­ing a two-year dead­line for deci­sion and consolidating…

On July 19, the new­ly con­sti­tut­ed Pennsylvania Supreme Court unan­i­mous­ly vot­ed to uphold a tri­al court’s order grant­i­ng a new tri­al to Philadelphia death row pris­on­er, Christopher…

Doyle Lee Hamm (pic­tured), an Alabama death row pris­on­er, has asked the United States Supreme Court to con­sid­er his case after Alabama’s state and fed­er­al appel­late courts upheld an order in which the tri­al court reject­ed his appeal by adopt­ing word-for-word an 89-page order writ­ten by the state attor­ney gen­er­al’s office. In a process The Marshall Project’s Andrew Cohen described as​“a sham,” the court dis­missed Hamm’s appeal one busi­ness day after…

As sup­port for the death penal­ty has waxed and waned over the years, the views of the major U.S. polit­i­cal par­ties, as reflect­ed in their nation­al con­ven­tion plat­forms, has changed. To track those changes, DPIC has cre­at­ed a new resource pre­sent­ing the Democratic and Republican par­ty plat­form posi­tions on crime and the death penal­ty from 1960 to 2016. With the most recent views of both the Republican and Democratic par­ties expressed in their 2016…

On July 21, a divid­ed Arkansas Supreme Court vot­ed 4 – 3 to deny a request by state death row pris­on­ers to recon­sid­er its recent deci­sion uphold­ing Arkansas’ lethal injec­tion pro­to­col and secre­cy law, but in anoth­er 4 – 3 vote, the court issued an order stay­ing the man­date, delay­ing the deci­sion from tak­ing effect until the U.S. Supreme Court has an oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­sid­er an appeal. The stay order pre­vents the state from setting new…

Weighing in on California’s com­pet­ing death penal­ty bal­lot ini­tia­tives, the San Jose Mercury News edi­to­r­i­al board urged vot­ers to sup­port repeal of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and reject a pro­pos­al to speed up exe­cu­tions. The edi­to­r­i­al called California’s death penal­ty sys­tem,​“a fail­ure on every lev­el,” not­ing that the state has spent $4 bil­lion to car­ry out just 13 exe­cu­tions and the $150 mil­lion annu­al sav­ings the independent…

A recent arti­cle in The Economist exam­ines the state of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Louisiana and the state’s strik­ing decline in the use of the death penal­ty. In 1987, its peak year for exe­cu­tions, Louisiana exe­cut­ed eight pris­on­ers. Since 2002, the state has had just one exe­cu­tion. This decline​“is far more pre­cip­i­tous than in neigh­bor­ing states like Mississippi and Alabama,” which the arti­cle says have each exe­cut­ed more than 10…

James Willie​“Bo” Cochran, who spent 19 years on Alabama​’s death row for a killing he did not com­mit, has died at age 73. His lawyer, Richard Jaffe, said that Mr. Cochran and his case​“are rea­sons why the death penal­ty does not work. He did not kill any­one, was wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and found inno­cent because he had lawyers that took up his cause.” Mr. Cochran, who is black, was found guilty and sen­tenced to death for the mur­der of a white…

The exe­cu­tion of John Conner on July 15 end­ed a two-month peri­od with­out exe­cu­tions in the United States, the longest such peri­od in the coun­try since 2007 – 2008. A range of state-spe­­cif­ic issues have con­tributed to this stop­page, includ­ing ques­tions about the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of state death penal­ty prac­tices, prob­lems relat­ing to lethal injec­tion drugs and state exe­cu­tion pro­to­cols, and the fallout from…