Publications & Testimony

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…

Leland Anderson served as a judge in Jefferson County, Colorado, sen­tenc­ing one man to death while spar­ing anoth­er. In a recent op-ed in The Denver Post, Anderson wrote how those cas­es affect­ed him: ​“Those cas­es con­tin­ue to haunt me even to this day, many years after hav­ing signed off on the deci­sions with a trem­bling heart.” He said his views on the death penal­ty have changed since he was on the bench: ​“I have had much time to reflect on the…

A new ani­mat­ed film, The Last 40 Miles, will fol­low a death row inmate on his final jour­ney from the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, to the death cham­ber in Huntsville. The film uses three forms of ani­ma­tion to tell the inmate’s sto­ry, from his trag­ic child­hood to the moment he is being escort­ed to the lethal injec­tion cham­ber. The script was writ­ten by free­lance jour­nal­ist Alex Hannaford and is based on inter­views he con­duct­ed with death row…

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On March 6, the Maryland Senate passed SB 276 by a vote of 27 – 20. The bill replaces the death penal­ty with a sen­tence of life with­out parole for future offens­es. The bill appears like­ly to pass the House of Delegates, and Governor Martin O’Malley has pledged to sign it. The bill would not affect the inmates cur­rent­ly on death row. If passed by the House and signed into law, Maryland would become the sixth state in six years, and the 18^th over­all to aban­don cap­i­tal punishment.

Missouri State Senator Gina Walsh recent­ly voiced her sup­port for Senate Bill 247, a bill to repeal the death penal­ty and replace it with life with­out parole. Sen. Walsh cit­ed the lack of deter­rence and unfair­ness as her pri­ma­ry con­cerns about cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. ​“It does­n’t deter crime. It dis­crim­i­nates against racial minori­ties and poor peo­ple who can’t afford attor­neys,” Walsh said. The bill was recent­ly heard in the Judiciary and Civil and Criminal Jurisprudence Committee…