Publications & Testimony

King County (Washington) Prosecutor Dan Satterberg (pic­tured) announced that his office will no longer seek the death penal­ty against Michele Anderson after a jury returned a life sen­tence for her co-defen­dant, Joseph McEnroe. McEnroe and Anderson were charged with killing six mem­bers of Anderson’s fam­i­ly in 2007 in what Satterberg called ​“one of the worse crimes we’ve ever had in King County.” Satterberg explained his deci­sion in a news con­fer­ence on July 29, say­ing, ​“To…

The Supreme Court of Delaware vot­ed unan­i­mous­ly on July 27 to sus­pend for­mer Deputy Attorney General R. David Favata as a result of his mis­con­duct dur­ing a recent cap­i­tal tri­al. With a sin­gle dis­sent as to the length of the sus­pen­sion, the Court banned Favata from the prac­tice of law for six months and one day for inten­tion­al mis­con­duct dur­ing the cap­i­tal tri­al of Isaiah…

A recent arti­cle in the The New York Times Magazine exam­ines the effects of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which was intend­ed to stream­line and short­en cap­i­tal appeals. Its title sum­ma­rizes the statute as ​“The Law That Keeps People on Death Row Despite Flawed…

Citing the high cost of death penal­ty appeals and dif­fi­cul­ty obtain­ing cus­tody of an out-of-state pris­on­er, the Kern County, California District Attorney’s office has agreed to reduce the 1989 death sen­tence imposed upon Clarence Ray (pic­tured) to a sen­tence of life with­out parole. Ray’s lawyers had filed a peti­tion chal­leng­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of his California con­vic­tion and death sen­tence. The par­ties reached agree­ment that Ray’s death sen­tence would be reversed in…

Philip Holloway, a CNN legal ana­lyst who has been both a pros­e­cu­tor and crim­i­nal defense attor­ney, says in a recent op-ed that ​“it is hard not to ques­tion the ratio­nal­i­ty — indeed the san­i­ty” of the death penal­ty. Holloway says ​“there are sev­er­al prac­ti­cal rea­sons why the death penal­ty just does­n’t make sense any longer, if it ever real­ly did in the first place,” and out­lines five rea­sons why he believes the United States should recon­sid­er cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. First, he says…

On July 23, 2014, Arizona’s exe­cu­tion of Joseph Wood was botched, tak­ing near­ly two hours from the time the state began inject­ing him with lethal drugs until he was final­ly pro­nounced dead. Witnesses report­ed that Wood gasped more than 640 times dur­ing the course of the exe­cu­tion, and an offi­cial report lat­er revealed that he was inject­ed with 15 dos­es of the exe­cu­tion drugs. Michael Kiefer, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, who wit­nessed Wood’s exe­cu­tion, described it,…

In a recent arti­cle for the Georgetown Law Journal, Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit calls for sweep­ing reforms in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. The for­mer Chief Judge, who was appoint­ed by President Reagan in 1985, out­lined a num­ber of ​“myths” about the legal sys­tem, rais­ing ques­tions about the reli­a­bil­i­ty of eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny, fin­ger­print evi­dence, and even DNA evi­dence, which can eas­i­ly be…

According to Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., a Harvard law pro­fes­sor who taught President Obama and the First Lady when they were law stu­dents, the President may be chang­ing his views on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Obama has said that he sup­ports exe­cu­tions for ​“espe­cial­ly hor­rif­ic” mur­ders, but has also raised con­cerns about the death penal­ty. Ogletree said that Obama’s recent focus on racial bias in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, as well as declin­ing pub­lic sup­port for the death penalty,…

A new study by Professor Frank Baumgartner of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill finds stark racial and geo­graph­ic dis­par­i­ties in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty in…

According to a study by the Women Donors Network, 95% of elect­ed pros­e­cu­tors in the U.S. are white and 79% are white men. An analy­sis by DPIC of the study’s data fur­ther shows that, in states that have the death penal­ty, 94.5% of elect­ed pros­e­cu­tors are white. In 9 death penal­ty states (Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington, and Wyoming), 100% of elect­ed pros­e­cu­tors are white. These num­bers reveal that there has been lit­tle change…