Publications & Testimony

Some states are turn­ing to the wide­ly avail­able-drug pen­to­bar­bi­tal for use in their lethal injec­tions, instead of sodi­um thiopen­tal, which is in short sup­ply in the U.S. But some med­ical pro­fes­sion­als have not­ed that, although the new drug shares many sim­i­lar­i­ties with sodi­um thiopen­tal, pen­to­bar­bi­tal has rarely been used in humans. Dr. David Varlotta, who sits on the board of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, said that he has not used pen­to­bar­bi­tal since 1986. Dr.

A study recent­ly pub­lished in the jour­nal Criminology meau­red the effects of vic­tim impact evi­dence (VIE) on the like­li­hood of the jury return­ing a death sen­tence. The study was con­duct­ed by Professors Raymond Paternoster and Jerome Deise of the University of Maryland. It involved 135 par­tic­i­pants who watched a video record­ing of an actu­al cap­i­tal tri­al. Seventy-three par­tic­i­pants watched the full video, while the remaining…

A recent study by Professor Steven Shatz of the University of San Francisco Law School and Naomi Shatz of the New York Civil Liberties Union sug­gests that gen­der bias con­tin­ues to exist in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty, and that this bias has roots in the his­toric notion of chival­ry. In a review of 1,300 mur­der cas­es in California between 2003 and 2005, the authors found gen­der dis­par­i­ties with respect to both defen­dants and vic­tims in the underlying…

Slick, a new short dra­mat­ic film direct­ed and pro­duced by Michael Frediani, fol­lows the sto­ry of a fic­tion­al Texas death row inmate on the night of his exe­cu­tion. Garrett Lee Taylor, the film’s pro­tag­o­nist, faces exe­cu­tion for mur­der, despite strong claims of inno­cence. The film is com­prised of a series of flash­backs reveal­ing events on the night of the crime. The flash­backs show how evi­dence seemed to place Taylor at the scene of the crime and led inves­ti­ga­tors to wrongfully…

One death row inmate from Oregon and anoth­er from North Carolina recent­ly had their death sen­tences removed because of con­cerns about their men­tal com­pe­ten­cy. In Oregon, Robert James Acremant​’s sen­tence was reduced to life with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole. Since 2003, prison psy­chi­a­trists have diag­nosed him as men­tal­ly ill, and Acremant said he hears voic­es and has a trans­mit­ter in his head that allows oth­ers to con­trol him. He still has a…