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 up executions.” The report, California Votes 2016: An Analysis of the Competing Death Penalty Ballot Initiatives, predicts that Proposition 66 (The Death Penalty Reform and Savings Act of 2016)…

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 direct appeals and post-conviction appeals into a…

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 Williams. The court determined that Williams’ trial and appellate counsel had been ineffective by failing to investigate and present expert forensic testimony on blood flow and gunshot wounds that would have demonstrated that the version of the murders presented by the prosecution’s lead witness was incompatible with…

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 receiving the prosecution’s proposed order…

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 platforms, the new page now reflects changing…

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 execution dates before the U.S. Supreme Court acts on the…

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 Legislative Analysts Office says death penalty abolition would achieve…

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 people since 2010. The reasons for Louisiana’s reduction in…

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 grocery store clerk. His jury, which was composed of 11…