Publications & Testimony

On March 27, a court in Japan suspended the death sentence and ordered the release and retrial of Iwao Hakamada, who had been imprisoned for 48 years, mostly on death row. The 78-year-old man is the world’s longest-serving death row inmate. Presiding judge Hiroaki Murayama said, “It is unbearably unjust to prolong detention of the defendant any further. The possibility of his innocence has become clear to a respectable degree.” Hakamada was convicted of the 1966 murder of the family for whom he…

In a case in which the state’s Attorney General had asked for an execution date of March 27, the Mississippi Supreme Court instead threw out Michelle Byrom’s murder conviction and death sentence and ordered a new trial just four days later. The case was plagued with numerous problems, including inadequate representation, critical evidence not presented to the jury, confessions by another defendant, and the prosecution’s lack of confidence in its own story of what actually happened. In its order…

Click to enlarge Further analysis of a recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that support for the death penalty was significantly lower among some racial and ethnic minorities than for the general population. More Hispanics oppose the death penalty (50%) than support it (40%), and the same is true of African Americans, with only about a third (36%) favoring capital punishment and a majority (55%) opposing it. Democrats are about evenly split, with 45% in favor and 47% opposed, while 71%…

Click to enlarge Amnesty International recently released its annual report on capital punishment around the world, noting, “Developments in the worldwide use of the death penalty in 2013 confirmed that its application is confined to a small minority of countries.” As illustrated in the chart at left, over the past decade there has been an increase in the number of countries abolishing the death penalty and a decrease in countries carrying out executions. Because executions in China remain a…

Two former justices of the New Hampshire Supreme Court recently voiced their support for repealing the death penalty. In an op-ed, Joseph Nadeau (l.) and John Broderick (r.) emphasized the death penalty’s lack of deterrent effect, saying, “New Hampshire has not executed anyone for three quarters of a century. Yet, it registered the second lowest murder rate in the nation every year of this century.” Murder rates were higher in heavy-use death penalty states, they noted. The former justices said…

On March 26, Oklahoma County District Judge Patricia Parrish held that the state’s lethal injection secrecy law violates the constitutional right to due process of inmates slated for execution. “I think that the secrecy statute is a violation of due process because access to the courts has been denied,” she said, saying the case was not “even a close call.” Death row inmates Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner challenged the law, which bans anyone from disclosing the source of the state’s…

On March 24, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in Jennings v. Stephens (No. 13 – 7211), a Texas death penalty case involving ineffectiveness of counsel. In his request for federal relief from his death sentence, Robert Jennings cited three instances in which his trial lawyers failed to adequately represent him. A U.S. District Court granted him relief on two of those claims (including failure to present evidence of his mental problems), while denying the third (his own lawyers told…

In his book, “Quest for Justice: Defending the Damned,” Richard Jaffe explores the problems of the American death penalty system through his experience as a capital defense attorney in Alabama. During the past twenty years, Jaffe has helped secure the release of three death row inmates: Randall Padgett and Gary Drinkard, who were fully exonerated, and James Cochran, who was cleared of murder charges, but pleaded guilty to a related robbery charge. In his book, Jaffe wrote, “I always keep in…

A recent editorial in the Jackson Free Press in Mississippi called for a halt to the scheduled execution of Michelle Byrom, saying she is “clearly not guilty of the crime for which the state plans to execute her next week.” The editorial noted that Byrom’s son had confessed to the crime four times.” He said the story he originally told sheriffs implicating his mother was made up because he was “scared, confused and high” when he was interrogated. The paper pointed to mitigating evidence about…

Michelle Byrom is scheduled to be executed in Mississippi on March 27 for conspiring to murder her husband, Edward Byrom, Sr. Her son, Edward Byrom, Jr., known as Junior, confessed to the crime on multiple occasions, and wrote that he lied when he told police his mother and a friend were involved. “I was so scared, confused, and high, I just started spitting the first thought out, which turned in to this big conspiracy thing, for money, which was all BS, that’s why I had so many different…