Publications & Testimony

A recent poll of 1,600 Russians found that only 52% support the death penalty, a sharp decline from 2002, when 73% said they supported it. Two years ago, 61% were in favor of capital punishment. Russia currently has a moratorium on the death penalty that was put in place in 1996 by President Yeltsin, shortly before Russia signed a relevant protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights. Russia’s high court has ruled that even death sentences cannot be handed down. Hundreds of those on…

On July 9, just one day before he was scheduled to be executed, Tommy Lee Waldrip was granted clemency by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. Waldrip will now serve a sentence of life without parole. Although the Board did not give a reason for its decision, one of the issues raised in the case was the disproportionality of Waldrip’s sentence compared to that of his co-defendants. Three men were involved in the murder that sent Waldrip to death row, but the other two were given life…

According to a recent op-ed about China in the New York Times, the world leader in executions is having second thoughts about the death penalty. Liu Renwen, a legal scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the annual number of executions in China dropped by half from 2007 to 2011, as more offenders were given “suspended death sentences,” which are generally reduced to life sentences. According to a 2008 poll in three provinces, public support for the death penalty is about the…

Questioning Capital Punishment, a new book by James R. Acker, a professor of criminal justice at the University at Albany, provides a comprehensive overview of the death penalty in America. With a basis in court decisions and research studies, the book covers all the key issues and the arguments for and against capital punishment. Chapters are devoted to deterrence, sentencing criteria, racial discrimination, and innocence, among other topics. In reviewing the book, Carol Steiker, a professor…

The State Bar of Texas has found “just cause” to pursue disciplinary action against prosecutor Charles J. Sebesta, whose conduct in the trial of Anthony Graves (pictured) resulted in a wrongful conviction and death sentence. Sebesta, the District Attorney of Burleson County, did not inform Graves’ attorneys that the main witness against Graves had confessed to the crime. Graves spent over 18 years in prison, 12 of them on death row, before being exonerated in 2010. Kathryn Kase, Executive…

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row USA showed a continuing decline in the number of people on death rows across the country. As of January 1, 2014, there were 3,070 inmates on death row, a decrease of 55 from one year earlier. California continued to have the largest death row, with 742 inmates. Since 2000, the national death row population has decreased by 16%. Texas, which had the second largest death row in 2000, has seen a 39% drop, from 455 to 278. California…

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recently called on all nations to take concrete steps toward ending the death penalty. In his opening remarks at an event co-sponsored by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mr. Ban said, “Together, we can finally end this cruel and inhumane practice everywhere around the world.” He noted that “more than four out of five countries — an estimated 160 Member States — have either abolished the death penalty or do not practice it.” He encouraged…

The theory of the modern death penalty is that it is to be reserved for the “worst of the worst” offenders. In 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court determined (Roper v. Simmons) that those under age 18 at the time of their crime were less culpable than older defendants and should be excluded from the possibility of execution. However, a recent paper by Hollis Whitson (l.) argued that scientific research on older adolescents implied that the Court’s analysis should also apply to those under 21. Whitson…

Justice Barbara Pariente of the Florida Supreme Court recently commented on the danger of mistake in eyewitness testimony and the importance of warning juries about the possibility of error. Her comments came in a death penalty case where she said that widely accepted scientific research, “‘convincingly demonstrates the fallibility of eyewitness identification testimony and pinpoints an array of variables that are most likely to lead to a mistaken identification.’” (citation omitted). She also…

On June 26, the Florida Supreme Court overturned the capital murder conviction of Paul Hildwin and ordered a new trial because new DNA evidence completely contradicted the state’s evidence presented at trial. Hildwin was convicted of a 1985 murder and sexual assault. At trial, an FBI forensics expert wrongly claimed that bodily fluids found at the crime scene matched Hildwin and could not have come from the victim’s boyfriend. However, more recent DNA testing excluded Hildwin and found that the…