Publications & Testimony

On April 17, the New Hampshire Senate vot­ed 12 – 12 on a bill to repeal the death penal­ty. The Senate then vot­ed to table the bill, mean­ing it could be brought up for recon­sid­er­a­tion lat­er in the leg­isla­tive ses­sion. New Hampshire has not had an exe­cu­tion since 1939 and has only 1 per­son on death row, whose sta­tus would not have been affect­ed by the bill. The bill had over­whelm­ing­ly passed the House ear­li­er, and Gov. Maggie Hassan indi­cat­ed she would have…

A new study pub­lished by Professors Jon Gould (l.) of American University and Richard Leo of the University of San Francisco, along with oth­er researchers, exam­ined fac­tors that have con­tributed to wrong­ful con­vic­tions in crim­i­nal cas­es. The study com­pared cas­es in which ​“guilty” defen­dants were even­tu­al­ly exon­er­at­ed to those in which defen­dants were not con­vict­ed in the first place. The researchers found a num­ber of vari­ables that sep­a­rat­ed wrong­ful con­vic­tions from so-called ​“near misses,”…

In advance of a New Hampshire Senate vote expect­ed on April 17, the Boston Globe pub­lished an edi­to­r­i­al call­ing on their neigh­bor­ing state’s leg­is­la­tors to sup­port repeal of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The edi­to­r­i­al high­light­ed the bipar­ti­san sup­port for abo­li­tion in the New Hampshire House, and Gov. Maggie Hassan’s pledge to sign the repeal bill if it pass­es the Senate. Among their rea­sons for endors­ing the mea­sure, the Globe said,…

DPIC recent­ly pub­lished a new page that presents exe­cu­tion data for each state and each year since 1976. This allows users to more eas­i­ly see exe­cu­tion trends in states over time. We have also recent­ly post­ed updat­ed state data from ​“Death Row, USA.” As of October 1, 2013, there were 3,088 inmates on death row, con­tin­u­ing the decline in death row pop­u­la­tion since 2000. As devel­op­ments sur­round­ing lethal injec­tion con­tin­ue to emerge, users can find current…

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, attor­neys Megan McCracken and Jennifer Moreno argued that the veil of secre­cy that many states have placed over their exe­cu­tion process vio­lates defen­dants’ con­sti­tu­tion­al rights and ​“deprives the pub­lic of informed debate.” The authors pro­vid­ed numer­ous exam­ples where inmates exe­cut­ed with drugs from com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies or with nov­el mix­es of new drugs exhib­it­ed signs of con­scious­ness and suf­fer­ing. However, inmates whose…

On April 14, the North Carolina Supreme Court will hear appeals in the cas­es of the four inmates whose death sen­tences were reduced to life with­out parole under the state’s Racial Justice Act. North Carolina passed the Act in 2009, allow­ing death row inmates to use sta­tis­ti­cal stud­ies to show that racial bias affect­ed their tri­als. The first four cas­es were heard in 2012. The evi­dence pre­sent­ed at hear­ings for defen­dants Marcus Robinson (l.), Tilmon Golphin,…

In 2011, the Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court appoint­ed a blue-rib­bon Commission to review the state’s death penal­ty and to make rec­om­men­da­tions for reform. On April 10, the Commission pre­pared to announce 56 rec­om­men­da­tions for chang­ing the death penal­ty,…

A recent study by researchers at Cornell Law School found that the gen­der of the mur­der vic­tim may influ­ence whether a defen­dant receives the death penal­ty. Using data from 1976 to 2007 in Delaware, the study found that in cas­es with female vic­tims, 47.1% result­ed in death sen­tences, while in those involv­ing male vic­tims, only 32.3% were sen­tenced to death. The researchers looked at a num­ber of fac­tors oth­er than the vic­tim’s gen­der that might have affect­ed sen­tenc­ing deci­sions, including the…

In Ford v. Wainwright (1986), the U.S. Supreme Court banned the exe­cu­tion of inmates who were insane. In a dis­sent­ing opin­ion, Justice Rehnquist and Chief Justice Burger warned that the major­i­ty deci­sion ​“offers an invi­ta­tion to those who have noth­ing to lose…to advance entire­ly spu­ri­ous claims of insan­i­ty.” A new study has exam­ined cas­es since 1986 in which death row inmates filed claims of men­tal incom­pe­tence and found that the del­uge of spurious…

Defending a death penal­ty case costs about four times as much as defend­ing a case where the death penal­ty is not sought, accord­ing to a new study by the Kansas Judicial Council. Examining 34 poten­tial death-penal­ty cas­es from 2004 – 2011, the study found that defense costs for death penal­ty tri­als aver­aged $395,762 per case, com­pared to $98,963 per case when the death penal­ty was not sought. Costs incurred by the tri­al court showed a sim­i­lar dis­par­i­ty: $72,530 for cases with…