Publications & Testimony

(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 Gansler argued that Miles’s death sentence is no longer valid.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 In 2013, the state repealed the death penalty for future…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, vacated the conviction and death sentence of Alfred Brown, who has been on death row for murder since 2005. Brown has maintained his innocence and has said that a landline phone call he made from his girlfriend’s apartment the morning of the murder would prove it. At his trial, Brown’s attorneys presented no evidence of his alibi, and his girlfriend changed her testimony after she was threatened with prosecution. In 2013…

(Click left image to enlarge). A new study by researchers at Cornell University examined the effects of Delaware’s decision to transfer capital sentencing authority from the jury to the judge at trial. The study used data from capital cases between 1977 and 2007, during which time Delaware made the shift to judge sentencing — one of very few states to employ that procedure. According to the study, “Judges were significantly more likely to give a defendant the death sentence than were juries.”

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row, USA showed a continuing decline in the size of the death row population. The new total of 3,035 represented a 13% drop from 10 years earlier, when the death row population was 3,471. The racial demographics of death row have been steady, with white inmates making up 43% of death row, black inmates composing 42%, and Latino inmates 13%. California continued to have the largest death row, with 745 inmates, followed by Florida (404)…

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Sylvie Kauffmann, of the French magazine Le Monde, described the interaction between Europe and the U.S. on the death penalty. She noted that Felix Rohatyn said the most controversial subject he faced as the American ambassador to France was the enormous opposition to the U.S. death penalty. She also noted the broad European refusal to have their drugs used in lethal injections. In a recent development, a German investmunt fund sold off its stock in an…

Texas has set an execution date of December 3, 2014 for Scott Panetti, a death row inmate with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Panetti represented himself at trial dressed in a cowboy outfit, and attempted to subpoena Jesus Christ and the pope, among many others. Inmates who are ruled insane are ineligible for execution, but Texas officials argue Panetti can be put to death because he sees some connection between his crime and his execution. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked…

Carl Dausch, a former death row inmate in Florida, has been added to DPIC’s list of exonerations from death row, bringing the national total to 147 and Florida’s total to 25, the most of any state in the country. On June 12, 2014, the Florida Supreme Court directed the acquittal of Dausch because there was insufficient evidence of his guilt. The Court stated, “We do not take lightly the result that will flow from our decision today. We have reviewed the entire record in this case with the…