Publications & Testimony

The Ohio legislature is considering a bill that would prevent the public and the courts from knowing the name of compounding pharmacies that produce lethal injection drugs for the state and the identity of medical personnel participating in executions. Critics of the bill say such interference with the courts and the First Amendment right to free speech would be unconstitutional. At a committee hearing, Dennis Hetzel, executive director of the Ohio Newspaper Association, said, “This bill likely…

In a recent editorial, the Washington Post urged Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley to commute the sentences of the four men remaining on the state’s death row, saying, “To carry out executions post-repeal would be both cruel, because the legislation underpinning the sentence has been scrapped, and unusual, because doing so would be historically unprecedented.” Maryland is one of three states that have repealed the death penalty prospectively but still have inmates on death row. The others are…

In Part Two of its investigation into the federal review of state death penalty cases, Death by Deadline, The Marshall Project found that in almost every case where lawyers missed crtiical filing deadlines for federal appeals, the only person sanctioned was the death row prisoner. Often the inmate’s entire federal review was forfeited. The report highlighted the disparity between the 17 federal judicial districts where government-funded attorneys carefully monitor capital cases to ensure…

An investigation by The Marshall Project showed that since Congress put strict time restrictions on federal appeals in 1996, lawyers for death row inmates missed the deadline at least 80 times, including 16 in which the prisoners have since been executed. The most recent of such cases occurred on Nov. 13, when Chadwick Banks was put to death in Florida with no review in federal court. This final part of a death penalty appeal, also called habeas corpus, has been a lifesaver for inmates whose…

Three capital cases in one county have already cost Washington almost $10 million, and have barely begun. For the trial of Christopher Monfort, King County has already spent over $4 million, and it is still in the jury selection phase. Two other capital cases in the county have cost a combined $4.9 million, and the trials have not started. The capital case of serial killer Gary Ridgway, which is believed to be the most expensive case in Washington’s history, cost about $12 million and resulted…

In a recent interview, Judge Michael A. Ponsor, who presided over the first federal death penalty trial in Massachusetts in over 50 years, warned that the death penalty comes with a “heavy price” — the risk of executing innocent people: “A legal regime permitting capital punishment comes with a fairly heavy price….where there’s a death penalty innocent people will die. Sooner or later — we hope not too often — someone who didn’t commit the crime will be executed.” In 2001, Judge Ponsor oversaw the…

(Click to enlarge). On November 12, the American Psychiatric Association, Mental Health America, 30 former judges, prosecutors, and Attorneys General, 50 evangelical faith leaders, and the American Bar Association joined many others in calling on Texas Governor Rick Perry to commute the sentence of death row inmate Scott Panetti because of his severe mental illness. Despite his long history of hospitalization in mental institutions, Panetti is scheduled to be executed on December 3. Panetti is…

The U.S. military has its own laws and court system separate from those of the states and the federal government. Although the military justice system allows the death penalty, no executions have been carried out in over 50 years. The last execution was the hanging on April 13, 1961 of U.S. Army Private John Bennett for rape and attempted murder. The military death penalty law was struck down in 1983 but was reinstated in 1984 with new rules detailing the aggravating circumstances that make a…

On November 6, Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler (pictured) filed a brief with an appellate court, formally requesting that the death sentence of Jody Lee Miles be vacated. Gansler argued that Miles’s death sentence is no longer valid. Miles was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998. In 2006, Maryland’s Court of Appeals suspended executions because the state’s lethal injection procedures had not been lawfully implemented. In 2013, the state repealed the death penalty for future…