Publications & Testimony

Four retired death-row prison offi­cials — two war­dens, a chap­lain, and an exe­cu­tion super­vi­sor — recent­ly described the effect that car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions has had on…

In a recent op-ed in The Hill, three lead­ing phar­ma­cists wrote in sup­port of the res­o­lu­tion by the American Pharmacists Association (APhA), dis­cour­ag­ing phar­ma­cist par­tic­i­pa­tion in exe­cu­tions. Leonard Edloe, for­mer CEO of Edloe’s Professional Pharmacies, William Fassett (pic­tured), pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of phar­ma­col­o­gy at Washington State University, and Philip Hantsen, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at the…

(Click image to enlarge) The Atlantic reports that death sen­tences are heav­i­ly con­cen­trat­ed in a small num­ber of heavy-use coun­ties. According to DePaul University law pro­fes­sor Robert J. Smith, ​“1 per­cent of coun­ties accounts for rough­ly 44 per­cent of all death sen­tences” since the rein­state­ment of the death penal­ty in 1976. Death-sen­tenc­ing rates in those coun­ties are not a prod­uct of their pop­u­la­tion or mur­der rates, Smith points out. For exam­ple, from 2004 to 2009, ​“Miami-Dade…

(Click here to enlarge image). According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, Pennsylvania is less like­ly to exe­cute a death row inmate than any oth­er state that has car­ried out any exe­cu­tions. A Reading Eagle analy­sis of BJS data from 1973 through 2013 shows that the Commonwealth has exe­cut­ed few­er than 1% of all death-sen­tenced defen­dants since 1973, with exe­cu­tion the least like­ly of 5 pos­si­ble out­comes for peo­ple sen­tenced to…

(Click on image to enlarge). The Federal Bureau of Investigation has for­mal­ly acknowl­edged that exam­in­ers from the FBI Laboratory’s micro­scop­ic hair com­par­i­son unit for decades pro­vid­ed flawed foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny pur­port­ed­ly match­ing crime scene hair evi­dence to the hair of defen­dants charged with those crimes. As part of an ongo­ing review of inac­cu­rate foren­sic evi­dence, the FBI admit­ted that, in the 268 tri­als exam­ined so far, its foren­sic experts sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly overstated…

(Click image to enlarge) Polls released this week by Pew Research Center and CBS News show that pub­lic sup­port for the death penal­ty has declined to near his­toric lows. Both polls report­ed that 56% of Americans sup­port the death penal­ty. That is the low­est lev­el of sup­port ever record­ed by the CBS News poll, and near the low­est lev­el report­ed by Pew in the last 40 years. The Pew poll exam­ined lev­els of sup­port by polit­i­cal par­ty and found that the decline in sup­port for the death…

On April 10, the Tennessee Supreme Court can­celed the exe­cu­tion dates for all four Tennessee death-row inmates cur­rent­ly under death war­rant, and returned their cas­es to the low­er courts to address the inmates’ chal­lenges to the state’s lethal injec­tion pro­ce­dures. The exe­cu­tions had been sched­uled for October 2015 through March 2016. Tennessee has not car­ried out an exe­cu­tion since 2009, but the state announced in 2013 that it would switch from a three-drug lethal injection…

UPDATE: ​“Family mem­bers of two Massachusetts mur­der vic­tims, includ­ing the police offi­cer who was killed by the Tsarnaevs, have spo­ken out con­cern­ing their views on the sen­tence they believe should be imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the Boston Marathon bomb­ing. Now Bill and Denise Richards, par­ents of 8‑year-old Martin Richards, the youngest vic­tim killed in the Boston Marathon bomb­ing, have added their voic­es and called on fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors to drop the…

In an edi­to­r­i­al on April 13, the New York Times described the death penal­ty as ​“cru­el, immoral, and inef­fec­tive at reduc­ing crime” and called it ​“so rid­dled with error that no civ­i­lized nation should tol­er­ate its use.” The Times described how pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct and an ​“all-too-com­mon mind-set to win at all costs” played a sub­stan­tial role in the con­vic­tions of many of the 152 inno­cent men and women who have been…

The lat­est edi­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row USA, which reports state-by-state infor­ma­tion on death rows across the coun­try, reflects a more than 12% decline in the size of death row nation­wide. The Winter 2015 edi­tion reports that 3,019 inmates were on America’s death rows as of December 31, 2014, down 12.6% from the 3,455 men and women report­ed ten years ear­li­er. The racial demo­graph­ics of death row are now 43% white, 42% black,…