Publications & Testimony

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…

A new doc­u­men­tary released by the Constitution Project and the New Media Advocacy Project com­mem­o­rates the 50^th anniver­sary of the Supreme Court’s land­mark 1963 deci­sion in Gideon v. Wainwright, requir­ing states to appoint lawyers for indi­gent defen­dants in crim­i­nal cas­es. Prior to this deci­sion, some states only pro­vid­ed attor­neys in cas­es with spe­cial cir­cum­stances, like death penal­ty cas­es. Defending Gideon is…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Testimony of Richard C. Dieter, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center, before the Nebraska Judiciary Committee on the Costs of the Death Penalty (Lincoln, March…