Publications & Testimony

Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning said executions in the state are unlikely to resume for at least another year because of the scarcity of lethal injection drugs. “Death row is sort of in limbo today,” he said, adding that efforts to find alternative drugs have been diverted due to other state concerns. Nebraska’s last execution was in 1997, by electrocution. The state’s execution protocol calls for use of sodium thiopental, which is no longer being manufactured for the U.S. Earlier, the…

In a recent op-ed in the National Law Journal, historian John Bessler described the ambivalence among American founders toward the death penalty. He noted, “Although early U.S. laws authorized executions, the founders greatly admired a now little-known Italian writer, Cesare Beccaria, who fervently opposed capital punishment. They also were fascinated by the penitentiary system’s potential to eliminate cruel punishments.” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Beccaria and other writers on crimes and…

A group of 15 former state and federal judges, including a former Chief Justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in support of a stay of execution for Mark Christeson in Missouri. Christeson is scheduled to be executed on October 29, but the judges said he has not received “any meaningful federal review of his death sentence.” In their brief, organized by the Constitution Project, the judges stated: “[O]ur system…

Pope Francis called for an end to capital punishment in an address on October 23 to the International Association on Penal Law. “It is impossible to imagine that states today cannot make use of another means than capital punishment to defend peoples’ lives from an unjust aggressor,” the Catholic leader said. He cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which says that the death penalty can be used only if it is the “only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust…

In a Gallup poll released on October 23, support for the death penalty was 63%, remaining within the margin of error of a 40-year low of 60% last year. These results represent a dramatic shift in Americans’ views on the death penalty since the 1990’s, when support for the death penalty peaked at 80%. Opposition to the death penalty has grown significantly among Democrats, more than doubling over the last 20 years, from 22% in 1994 to 46% today. When offered the alternative punishment of life…

On September 2, 2014, Leon Brown (above) and Henry McCollum (below) were exonerated and released from prison in North Carolina. The two men, who are half brothers, had been convicted of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to death in 1984. Brown was 15 at the time of the crime and McCollum was 19. Both men have intellectual disabilities and were interrogated under duress until they confessed to the crime. In 2010, Brown turned to the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry…

Two recent international gatherings emphasized concerns about the death penalty in the U.S. and around the world. On October 14, the Organization of American States hosted an address by the President of the International Institute of Human Rights, Jean-Paul Costa, focusing on the relatively few countries still practicing capital punishment in North and South America. On October 21, the Delegation of the European Union to the U.S. presented a panel discussion featuring DPIC’s Executive Director…

On October 20, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Chappell v. Ayala (No. 13 – 1428), a death penalty case from California in which all the black and Hispanic potential jurors were struck from the defendant’s trial. Hector Ayala was convicted in 1989 of three murders in San Diego. At his trial, Ayala’s attorneys argued that the prosecutor was improperly striking jurors on the basis of race. The judge reviewed the prosecutor’s explanation for the strikes without defense attorneys present, saying…

The same Commission that freed former death row inmates Henry McCollum and Leon Brown in September exonerated another man who had been convicted of murder, Willie Womble (l.). The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission freed Womble on October 17, dismissing his 1976 first-degree murder conviction and life sentence. Womble had been convicted of acting as a lookout while another man, Joseph Perry, robbed a convenience store and killed the cashier. Both Perry and Womble received life…

A recent retrospective in the Fort Myers Florida Weekly on the state’s death penalty traced some of the problems that have arisen since Florida resumed executions in 1979. During the execution of Jesse Tafero in 1990, six-inch flames shot from the prisoner’s head, and three separate jolts of electricity were required to kill him. Prison officials attributed it to “inadvertent human error.” In the execution of Pedro Medina in 1997, flames and smoke again spewed out from under the head gear. Ron…