Publications & Testimony

On March 26, Delaware​’s Senate passed (11 – 10) a bill to repeal the death penal­ty, after amend­ing it to exclude cur­rent death row inmates. Those who tes­ti­fied in sup­port of the repeal cit­ed racial dis­par­i­ties, a lack of deter­rent effect, and the high costs asso­ci­at­ed with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The bill will now move on to the House of Representatives, which is expect­ed to con­sid­er the mea­sure in April. On the same day, Colorado​’s House Judiciary…

Controversies sur­round­ing lethal injec­tions con­tin­ue in many parts of the coun­try. In Georgia, the leg­is­la­ture passed a bill to clas­si­fy the names of those involved in exe­cu­tions as ​“state secrets.” The bill requires the iden­ti­ty of any enti­ty that ​“man­u­fac­tures, sup­plies, com­pounds or pre­scribes” lethal injec­tion drugs to be kept secret. In Arkansas, a state judge ruled that death row inmates can­not use the state’s Freedom of Information Act to obtain…

A new orga­ni­za­tion–Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty–made its debut at the recent 2013 Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) con­fer­ence near Washington, D.C. The group ques­tions whether cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment aligns with con­ser­v­a­tive prin­ci­ples and includes promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers from across the coun­try, includ­ing Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, Roy Brown, for­mer Montana House Majority Leader, and Richard…

The Dallas Morning News used the recent repeal of the death penal­ty in Maryland as an occa­sion to advo­cate for death-penal­ty reform in Texas. The edi­tors com­ment­ed on the over­all impro­pri­ety of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment: ​“At best, the death penal­ty is selec­tive­ly used state-sup­port­ed ret­ri­bu­tion, which has no place in a civ­i­lized soci­ety.” The edi­to­r­i­al sup­port­ed six pend­ing bills aimed at improv­ing the fair­ness of the death penal­ty. One bill would bar the…

On March 12, Delaware State Senator Karen Peterson intro­duced a bill to repeal the state’s death penal­ty and replace it with life with­out parole. ​“I don’t think the state should be in the busi­ness of killing peo­ple,” Peterson said. ​“It just is so bizarre to me that we would say to some­body that what you did was so hor­ri­ble, that now we’re going to do it.” Senate Minority Leader Gary Simpson, a Republican, is also back­ing the bill. The bill is retroac­tive, mean­ing that it…

Former Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau has joined two oth­er for­mer pros­e­cu­tors in fil­ing an ami­cus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of William Kuenzel, an Alabama death row inmate sen­tenced to death in 1988. New evi­dence emerged in 2010 rais­ing doubts about his guilt. According to Morgenthau’s brief, two wit­ness­es who tes­ti­fied against Kuenzel gave entire­ly dif­fer­ent accounts that did not iden­ti­fy him when they first…

Christopher Price is on death row in Alabama for the mur­der of a church min­is­ter in 1991. His cur­rent attor­neys have asked the courts to enforce the rul­ing of Gideon v. Wainwright, the land­mark 1963 deci­sion guar­an­tee­ing the right to coun­sel for all defen­dants. According to Price’s appeal, his tri­al attor­ney failed to pro­vide even a rudi­men­ta­ry defense dur­ing a penal­ty tri­al that last­ed only 30 min­utes. The attor­ney neglect­ed to ​“inves­ti­gate his…

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…