Publications & Testimony

On June 1, a unan­i­mous jury in a fed­er­al death penal­ty pros­e­cu­tion in New York vot­ed to impose a life sen­tence on Vincent Basciano, an orga­nized-crime leader who had ear­li­er been con­vict­ed of mur­der, rack­e­teer­ing, and con­spir­a­cy. The pros­e­cu­tors’ lead wit­ness against Basciano was Joseph Massino, a for­mer crime boss who agreed to coop­er­ate with the gov­ern­ment in order to escape a death sen­tence for his own crimes. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment sought the death…

A new nov­el by Dax-Devlon Ross, Make Me Believe: A Crime Novel Based on Real Events, fol­lows the dis­cov­er­ies and dan­ger­ous encoun­ters of a fic­tion­al author inves­ti­gat­ing the case of Toronto Patterson, the last juve­nile defen­dant exe­cut­ed in Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down this prac­tice in 2005. Employing actu­al inter­views with Patterson, court doc­u­ments, news arti­cles and court­room tes­ti­mo­ny, Ross’s book blends fact and fic­tion to con­front some of the…

In a clear nation­al trend, sev­en states (Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and South Carolina) have used pen­to­bar­bi­tal instead of sodi­um thiopen­tal in their exe­cu­tions in 2011. The most recent such exe­cu­tion was that of Donald Beaty in Arizona on May 25, fol­low­ing a tem­po­rary stay as the state made a sud­den switch to the new drug. Ohio is the only one of the sev­en states to use…

The Arizona Supreme Court stayed the exe­cu­tion of Donald Beaty that was sched­uled for May 25 after the state Department of Corrections tried to make last-minute changes to the exe­cu­tion pro­to­col. On May 24 the U.S. Department of Justice told Arizona not to use its sup­ply of sodi­um thiopen­tal because it had been obtained ille­gal­ly from a com­pa­ny in Great Britain. Arizona’s Attorney General filed notice with the Arizona Supreme Court stat­ing that, to ​“avoid…

A recent edi­to­r­i­al in the Philadelphia Inquirer con­cludes the pub­lic is ready to scrap the death penal­ty in Pennsylvania, even if the leg­is­la­ture is not. According to the edi­to­r­i­al, juries opt­ed for the death penal­ty in just 3% of first-degree mur­der cas­es over the past four years: ​“Pennsylvania juries clear­ly are more com­fort­able with the alter­na­tive sen­tence of life with­out parole, which assures that first-degree mur­der con­victs will waste away…

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has deter­mined that the intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abiled (men­tal­ly retard­ed) are barred from the death penal­ty, the deci­sion of whether a defen­dant meets this dis­abil­i­ty stan­dard is not made by men­tal health experts but by jurors and judges. A recent study pub­lished in Law & Psychology Review found that jurors expect a much low­er lev­el of intel­lec­tu­al func­tion­ing than men­tal health experts to arrive at a find­ing of dis­abil­i­ty. Moreover,…