Publications & Testimony

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…

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…

Click to…