Publications & Testimony

On October 27, a group of for­mer Texas judges, pros­e­cu­tors and law enforce­ment offi­cers deliv­ered a let­ter to Governor Rick Perry, Attorney General Greg Abbott and District Attorney Lynn Switzer request­ing DNA tests for death row inmate Hank Skinner. Signatories to the let­ter include: Mark White, for­mer Governor of Texas (pic­tured); Morris L. Overstreet, for­mer Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals; Sam Millsap, former…

A broad range of cit­i­zens in California launched a sig­na­ture cam­paign on October 25 to replace the death penal­ty with life in prison and no parole through a bal­lot ini­tia­tive in November 2012. The sig­na­ture dri­ve was announced at the city hall in San Francisco and was attend­ed by mur­der vic­tims’ fam­i­lies and law enforce­ment offi­cials, such as San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey (pic­tured), who sup­port the mea­sure. Hennessey cited…

The Death Penalty Information Center is pleased to announce a great­ly expand­ed ver­sion of its col­lege-lev­­el cur­ricu­lum, Capital Punishment in Context (CPIC). The cur­ricu­lum is free to pro­fes­sors and stu­dents and is avail­able online. The cur­ricu­lum uses a case-study approach, pro­vid­ing detailed fac­tu­al accounts of actu­al death penal­ty cas­es, along with a rich vari­ety of sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als. Probing ques­tions for addi­tion­al research are…

A recent CNN per­spec­tive exam­ined the views of those they called​“the most unlike­ly oppo­nents of the death penal­ty, peo­ple who lost loved ones to unspeak­able vio­lence yet believe exe­cut­ing the killer will do noth­ing for fam­i­ly mem­bers or soci­ety.” For exam­ple, Ross Byrd, the son of James Byrd, Jr., who was dragged to his death behind a truck in Texas by Lawrence Brewer, nev­er­the­less object­ed to Brewer’s exe­cu­tion, saying…

A recent report from the Pennsylvania Advisory Committee on Wrongful Convictions called for seri­ous reforms in the state’s crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. The com­mit­tee, which was instruct­ed to iden­ti­fy the most com­mon caus­es of wrong­ful con­vic­tions (some of which were cap­i­tal cas­es) and any cur­rent laws and pro­ce­dures impli­cat­ed in each type of cau­sa­tion, found that,​“under [the cur­rent] insti­tu­tion­al struc­ture, defen­dants have been punished for…

DPIC is pleased to announce the addi­tion of five more states to our State Information Pages. Information is now avail­able for 25 states, includ­ing the lat­est entries: Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Massachusetts and New York. These pages pro­vide his­tor­i­cal and cur­rent infor­ma­tion on the death penal­ty for each state (regard­less of whether it cur­rent­ly has the death penalty),…

On October 19, five African Americans filed a fed­er­al civ­il rights law­suit charg­ing that Alabama has ille­gal­ly exclud­ed blacks from serv­ing on death penal­ty juries in Houston and Henry Counties. The plain­tiffs in this class action suit were all pre­vi­ous­ly barred from serv­ing on juries in cap­i­tal or oth­er seri­ous felony cas­es. In each case, state courts found blacks were ille­gal­ly exclud­ed from jury ser­vice because of their race. Bryan…

A new study by Professor Robert J. Smith of the DePaul University College of Law exam­ines the impo­si­tion of death sen­tences by coun­ties in the U.S. The author, who is also part of The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard, found that only a rel­a­tive­ly few coun­ties impose a large per­cent­age of death sen­tences, while a large major­i­ty of juris­dic­tions have aban­doned the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Prof. Smith’s study found that…

An upcom­ing death penal­ty tri­al in Ohio will cost three to four times more than the cost of a life-with­­out-parole tri­al, accord­ing to the tri­al judge, Michael Sage (pic­tured). The death penal­ty tri­al for Hector Alvarenga Retana, sched­uled to begin on October 31, is expect­ed to cost Butler County an esti­mat­ed $250,000, accord­ing to the judge, not count­ing the cost of appeals. He said, “[The cost] is so great we can’t afford to pay for that…

Recent polls con­duct­ed by Gallup and CNN indi­cate Americans’ sup­port for the death penal­ty is con­tin­u­ing to decline. According to Gallup’s 2011 poll, the per­cent­age of Americans approv­ing the death penal­ty as a pun­ish­ment for mur­der dropped to its low­est lev­el in 39 years. Only 61% sup­port­ed cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the­o­ry, down from 64% last year and from 80% sup­port in 1994. This is the low­est lev­el of sup­port since 1972, when the…