Publications & Testimony

A recent poll spon­sored by the Boston Globe found that a sig­nif­i­cant major­i­ty of Boston res­i­dents favor life with­out parole over the death penal­ty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomb­ing sus­pect. Fifty-sev­en per­cent (57%) of respon­dents sup­port­ed a sen­tence of life with­out parole if Tsarnaev is con­vict­ed, com­pared with only 33% who favored the death penal­ty. Sixty-one (61) per­cent of Democrats and 49% of Republicans (a plu­ral­i­ty) sup­port­ed a sentence of…

On September 18, the American Bar Association​’s Death Penalty Due Process Review Project released its lat­est report, focus­ing on the fair­ness and accu­ra­cy of Texas​’s death penal­ty sys­tem. The report found: ​“In many areas, Texas appears out of step with bet­ter prac­tices imple­ment­ed in oth­er cap­i­tal juris­dic­tions, fails to rely upon sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly reli­able meth­ods and process­es in the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty, and pro­vides the pub­lic with inadequate…

Rob Warden, who is step­ping down as the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, recent­ly spoke about the work of find­ing and free­ing inno­cent defen­dants. Warden helped exon­er­ate almost 60 peo­ple, includ­ing many who had been sen­tenced to death. He not­ed that some of the suc­cess of the Center was the result of tim­ing: ​“Part of it was the for­tu­itous advent of DNA foren­sic tech­nol­o­gy, which sud­den­ly showed that many peo­ple had been wrongfully…

In a recent op-ed, the co-author of a key study on the via­bil­i­ty of California’s death penal­ty ana­lyzed the recent dra­mat­ic shift in pub­lic opin­ion on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the state. According to Paula Mitchell, adjunct pro­fes­sor at Loyola of Los Angeles Law School, decades of polling showed about two-thirds of Californians sup­port­ed the death penal­ty, but the 2012 ref­er­en­dum to repeal the law lost by just 4 per­cent­age points (52%-48%).

The lat­est edi­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row, USA shows a con­tin­u­a­tion of the down­ward trend in the over­all death row pop­u­la­tion, though California (731 inmates) – the state with the largest death row – record­ed an increase. The next lead­ing states were Florida (412), Texas (298), Pennsylvania (198), and Alabama (197), all of which reg­is­tered decreas­es on death row.

On September 11, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held (5 – 4) that a tri­al court ille­gal­ly ordered the forcible med­ica­tion of a men­tal­ly ill death row inmate for the pur­pose of ren­der­ing him com­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed. The case involves Steven Staley, whose men­tal health began to dete­ri­o­rate when he entered death row in 1991. He received an exe­cu­tion date in 2006, but was deemed too ill to be exe­cut­ed. A court ordered that his para­noid schizophrenia be…

Steve Monks is a ​“staunch con­ser­v­a­tive” and for­mer Chair of the Durham County, North Carolina, Republican Party. In an op-ed in the News & Observer, he recent­ly argued that the state would save mon­ey and make soci­ety safer by replac­ing the death penal­ty with life with­out parole. He not­ed that the homi­cide rate in the state dropped 3.8% from 2011 to 2012, a time when no one was exe­cut­ed and no one even sen­tenced to death. In…

UPDATE: Avila’s exe­cu­tion date has been stayed. Attorneys for Rigoberto Avila have request­ed an evi­den­tiary hear­ing under a new law passed in Texas that allows defen­dants to chal­lenge their con­vic­tions if they were gained through out­dat­ed foren­sic tech­niques. His case will be the first death penal­ty case in the state to be con­sid­ered by the courts under this new leg­is­la­tion. Avila, a Navy vet­ern, was con­vict­ed of mur­der in El Paso in 2001 for…

A recent arti­cle in the ABA Journal drew atten­tion to prob­lems in crime labs across the coun­try that have result­ed in wrong­ful con­vic­tions, includ­ing some in death penal­ty cas­es. Investigations in many states and of the nation­al FBI lab revealed a lack of writ­ten pro­ce­dures, improp­er mix­ing of sam­ples from dif­fer­ent cas­es, improp­er tes­ti­mo­ny, and even fal­si­fi­ca­tion of test results. An Oklahoma City chemist who tes­ti­fied in 23 death penal­ty cases was…

The for­tu­itous inves­ti­ga­tion of a case by per­sis­tent jour­nal­ists, rather than the work­ings of the lim­it­ed appel­late process, has led to the exon­er­a­tion of a num­ber of inno­cent indi­vid­u­als. Maurice Possley (l.), a for­mer reporter for the Chicago Tribune, recent­ly wrote how he and fel­low-jour­nal­ist Steve Mills (r.) helped free Daniel Taylor (c.) in Illinois, where he had spent more than 20 years in prison. In 2001, the reporters…