Publications & Testimony

The Dallas Morning News used the recent repeal of the death penal­ty in Maryland as an occa­sion to advo­cate for death-penal­ty reform in Texas. The edi­tors com­ment­ed on the over­all impro­pri­ety of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment: ​“At best, the death penal­ty is selec­tive­ly used state-sup­port­ed ret­ri­bu­tion, which has no place in a civ­i­lized soci­ety.” The edi­to­r­i­al sup­port­ed six pend­ing bills aimed at improv­ing the fair­ness of the death penal­ty. One bill would bar the…

On March 12, Delaware State Senator Karen Peterson intro­duced a bill to repeal the state’s death penal­ty and replace it with life with­out parole. ​“I don’t think the state should be in the busi­ness of killing peo­ple,” Peterson said. ​“It just is so bizarre to me that we would say to some­body that what you did was so hor­ri­ble, that now we’re going to do it.” Senate Minority Leader Gary Simpson, a Republican, is also back­ing the bill. The bill is retroac­tive, mean­ing that it…

Former Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau has joined two oth­er for­mer pros­e­cu­tors in fil­ing an ami­cus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of William Kuenzel, an Alabama death row inmate sen­tenced to death in 1988. New evi­dence emerged in 2010 rais­ing doubts about his guilt. According to Morgenthau’s brief, two wit­ness­es who tes­ti­fied against Kuenzel gave entire­ly dif­fer­ent accounts that did not iden­ti­fy him when they first…

Christopher Price is on death row in Alabama for the mur­der of a church min­is­ter in 1991. His cur­rent attor­neys have asked the courts to enforce the rul­ing of Gideon v. Wainwright, the land­mark 1963 deci­sion guar­an­tee­ing the right to coun­sel for all defen­dants. According to Price’s appeal, his tri­al attor­ney failed to pro­vide even a rudi­men­ta­ry defense dur­ing a penal­ty tri­al that last­ed only 30 min­utes. The attor­ney neglect­ed to ​“inves­ti­gate his…

On March 15, the Maryland House of Delegates passed (82 – 56) a bill to abol­ish the death penal­ty for future crimes. The same bill passed the Maryland Senate on March 6. Governor Martin O’Malley has pledged to sign the bill, which will make Maryland the 18^th state to abol­ish the death penal­ty, and the sixth to do so in the last six years. O’Malley said, ​“I’ve felt com­pelled to do every­thing I could to change our law, repeal the death penal­ty, so that we could focus on doing the…

A new study regard­ing the use of the death penal­ty in Harris County, Texas, was released in con­junc­tion with the fil­ing of an appeal by Harris County death row inmate, Duane Buck. The research was con­duct­ed by Professor Raymond Paternoster of the University of Maryland, who exam­ined over 500 mur­der cas­es in the coun­ty. The study found that, in cas­es with cir­cum­stances sim­i­lar to Buck’s and dur­ing the time in which he was tried, the Harris County District…

Virginia​’s death row pop­u­la­tion has sig­nif­i­cant­ly decreased from a peak of 57 inmates in 1995 to 8 present­ly. Only two inmates have been added to death row in near­ly five years. David Bruck (pic­tured), direc­tor of the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse at Washington and Lee University School of Law, remarked, ​“The process has large­ly ground to a halt. That is a huge devel­op­ment.” He sug­gest­ed the decline in death sen­tences is due to a greater accep­tance of…

The Michigan Committee Against Capital Punishment has pub­lished a col­lec­tion of over 40 years of tes­ti­mo­ny, brochures, and oth­er infor­ma­tion by attor­ney and death-penal­ty expert Eugene Wanger. The col­lec­tion begins with the res­o­lu­tion from Michigan​’s 1962 con­sti­tu­tion­al con­ven­tion ban­ning cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the state. It includes Wanger’s tes­ti­mo­ny at numer­ous hear­ings oppos­ing bills attempt­ing to rein­state the death penal­ty, as well as brochures and short…