Publications & Testimony

This Fall the Culture Project is host­ing a lim­it­ed engage­ment of its award-win­ning pro­duc­tion, The Exonerated. The play is a ground­break­ing drama­ti­za­tion of the real-life sto­ries of six death row inmates who were freed after being cleared of their cap­i­tal charge. The pro­duc­tion, which pre­miered a decade ago and trav­eled the coun­try, is culled from inter­views, let­ters, tran­scripts, case files, and court records. Former U.S. Attorney General…

A recent arti­cle by Professors Brian D. Shannon (pic­tured) of Texas Tech and Victor R. Scarano of the University of Houston exam­ines the eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of forcibly med­icat­ing men­tal­ly incom­pe­tent death-row inmates in order to pre­pare them for exe­cu­tion. According to the authors, this issue, par­tic­u­lary in Texas, pits ​“the eth­i­cal duties of the med­ical and legal pro­fes­sions in oppo­si­tion and casts a shad­ow over the legit­i­mate and appro­pri­ate inten­tions and professional…

A new report by Rob Warden (pic­tured), Executive Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, explores the con­di­tions that led to the end of Illinois​’s death penal­ty in 2011. Warden says abo­li­tion came about because of a series of for­tu­itous cir­cum­stances, but also because of the work of count­less attor­neys, aca­d­e­mics, jour­nal­ists and activists who took advan­tage of these devel­op­ments. The cav­al­cade of exon­er­a­tions from death row, includ­ing the high-profile…

Several cas­es in California illus­trate the inher­ent risk with the death penal­ty that an inno­cent per­son could be exe­cut­ed. Lee Farmer was freed from death row in 1999 after win­ning a new tri­al based on new­ly dis­cov­ered evi­dence that an accom­plice admit­ted to the crime for which he faced exe­cu­tion. Farmer was acquit­ted of mur­der at his retri­al. Troy Lee Jones (pic­tured) was sen­tenced to death even though there were no eye­wit­ness­es to the…

In Montana, a con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal group is call­ing for an end to the death penal­ty after a recent court rul­ing held the state’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Former Republican state Senator Roy Brown said, ​“Conservatives dis­like waste and inef­fi­cien­cy. That is why we should cast a crit­i­cal eye when the state is involved with the busi­ness of exe­cut­ing peo­ple…. When it takes over 20 years and hun­dreds of thou­sands of tax pay­er dol­lars for extra legal…

When Vicki Schieber’s (pic­tured) daugh­ter, Shannon, was mur­dered in Philadelphia in 1998, she and her fam­i­ly felt enor­mous grief. ​“Losing a loved one to mur­der,” she recent­ly wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, ​“is a tragedy of unimag­in­able pro­por­tions. At first, my hus­band and I did­n’t know how we could go on with our lives.” Nevertheless, because of their beliefs, ​“we did not want the man who mur­dered our daugh­ter to be put to death.” Now she is speak­ing out in…

A fed­er­al appeals court upheld the death sen­tence of Georgia inmate Robert Holsey (pic­tured), despite the fact that Holsey’s lead lawyer drank a quart of vod­ka every day dur­ing the tri­al and was about to be sued for steal­ing client funds. The attor­ney him­self tes­ti­fied that he ​“prob­a­bly shouldn’t have been allowed to rep­re­sent any­body.” The court assumed the attor­ney’s incom­pe­tence, but gave great def­er­ence to the Georgia Supreme Court’s opin­ion that his poor per­for­mance did…

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A recent study by Sherod Thaxton (pic­tured) of the University of Chicago Law School exam­ined the effect of the threat of the death penal­ty on plea bar­gain­ing. Using sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of charg­ing and sen­tenc­ing data in Georgia between 1993 and 2000, Thaxton found that the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a death sen­tence increased the like­li­hood of a plea bar­gain: ​“deter­ring two out of every ten death noticed defen­dants from pur­su­ing a tri­al.” However, the low­er num­ber of tri­als does not off­set the high…

In his week­ly col­umn, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia voiced the Catholic Church’s ongo­ing oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty in the U.S. and called for clemen­cy for Pennsylvania death row inmate Terrance Williams. ​“We don’t need to kill peo­ple to pro­tect soci­ety or pun­ish the guilty. And we should nev­er be eager to take anyone’s life,” the Archbishop said. He addressed the needs of mur­der vic­tims’ fam­i­lies, say­ing ​“Turning away from…