Publications & Testimony

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…

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…