Publications & Testimony

On February 26, the House Judiciary Committee in Oregon held a hearing on repealing the death penalty. Among those testifying was Frank Thompson, a former superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary, who oversaw the state’s last two executions. Thompson told the committee the death penalty does not deter crime, fails to make the public safer, and places prison workers in an untenable position: “Asking decent men and women to participate in the name of a failed public policy that takes human…

The Texas Tribune recently published a six-part series examining the plight of mentally ill defendants in the Texas criminal justice system. The series focused particularly on death penalty cases, including that of Andre Thomas, a man with a long history of mental illness. He pulled his own eye out in 2004, and later explained that he did it because he kept seeing his wife, whom he killed along with his children just days before. Thomas is among thousands of mentally ill inmates in the Texas…

On February 25, the U.S Supreme Court agreed to review a decision by the Kansas Supreme Court overturning the conviction and death sentence of Scott Cheever, who killed a sheriff during a drug investigation. Cheever argued that his own drug use made it impossible for him to have killed with premeditation, a factor necessary for a capital murder conviction. The case had been previously charged in federal court. In that case, the trial judge had ordered a mental health evaluation because Cheever…

A recent study of Colorado’s death penalty concluded that the punishment is applied so rarely and without clear statutory standards as to render it constitutionally unfair. Professors Justin Marceau (left) and Sam Kamin (center) from the University of Denver College of Law, and Professor Wanda Foglia (right) of Rowan University examined murder convictions in the state from 1999 to 2010. The authors discovered that, while the death penalty was an option in approximately 92% of first degree…

On February 21, the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee of Maryland approved (6 – 5) a bill to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole. In prior years, the effort to end capital punishment was often blocked in this committee. Senator Robert Zerkin was one legislator who changed his mind this year, “As heinous and awful as these individuals [on death row] are, I think it’s time for our state not to be involved in the apparatus of executions,” he said. The bill outlaws…

A recent column in The Economist examined the growing number of governors and other political leaders in the U.S. who are challenging the death penalty. In Arkansas, Governor Mike Beebe (pictured) announced in January that he would sign a death penalty abolition bill if the legislature sent him one. In Maryland, Governor Martin O’Malley has led a push to repeal the death penalty. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper said he is reconsidering his support for the death penalty as that state…

Officials in Indiana recently discussed how rarely the death penalty is applied in the state and the issues that raises regarding its purpose. Professor Joel Schuum of the McKinney School of Law in Indiana chaired a study by the American Bar Association that found “only a few of Indiana’s murder cases result in a prosecutor seeking a death sentence, fewer still result in the imposition of a death sentence by a jury or judges, and only a handful over the past 3 decades have resulted in the…

Texas death-row inmate Andre Thomas has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and auditory hallucinations drove him to gouge out both of his eyes. Nevertheless, prosecutors still believe he should be executed. In a revealing recent essay in Mother Jones magazine, author Marc Bookman described in vivid detail Thomas’s family history of mental illness, substance abuse, and domestic violence going back at least two generations. A brief excerpt from the article epitomized Thomas’s…

Two new reports on the death penalty are available from the international community. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States recently released a report containing excerpts from the most important death-penalty decisions issued by the IACHR in the past fifteen years, including cases from Barbados, Cuba, Guatemala, Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. The International Commission against the Death…