Publications & Testimony

On September 26, Florida Governor Rick Scott (pictured) agreed to temporarily stay the pending execution of John Errol Ferguson in order to allow time for a panel of psychiatrists to determine whether Ferguson is mentally competent. The day before, evangelical leaders, including Dr. Joel C. Hunter, Senior Pastor of the 15,000-member Northland Church in Central Florida, sent a letter to the governor urging that Ferguson be allowed to live. They wrote, “The State’s psychiatrists have consistently…

On September 24, a jury in Alabama found that Amy Bishop was indeed guilty of capital murder, a crime for which she had already pled guilty on September 11. Because of this finding and plea, she will be spared the death penalty for killing three members and wounding three others of the University of Alabama’s biology faculty in 2010 after some of them voted against granting her tenure. Madison County District Attorney Rob Broussard agreed to the life without parole sentence after learning that…

This Fall the Culture Project is hosting a limited engagement of its award-winning production, The Exonerated. The play is a groundbreaking dramatization of the real-life stories of six death row inmates who were freed after being cleared of their capital charge. The production, which premiered a decade ago and traveled the country, is culled from interviews, letters, transcripts, case files, and court records. Former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno described The Exonerated as follows: “What…

A recent article by Professors Brian D. Shannon (pictured) of Texas Tech and Victor R. Scarano of the University of Houston examines the ethical implications of forcibly medicating mentally incompetent death-row inmates in order to prepare them for execution. According to the authors, this issue, particulary in Texas, pits “the ethical duties of the medical and legal professions in opposition and casts a shadow over the legitimate and appropriate intentions and professional responsibilities of…

A new report by Rob Warden (pictured), Executive Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, explores the conditions that led to the end of Illinois’s death penalty in 2011. Warden says abolition came about because of a series of fortuitous circumstances, but also because of the work of countless attorneys, academics, journalists and activists who took advantage of these developments. The cavalcade of exonerations from death row, including the high-profile release of Anthony Porter, who was…

Several cases in California illustrate the inherent risk with the death penalty that an innocent person could be executed. Lee Farmer was freed from death row in 1999 after winning a new trial based on newly discovered evidence that an accomplice admitted to the crime for which he faced execution. Farmer was acquitted of murder at his retrial. Troy Lee Jones (pictured) was sentenced to death even though there were no eyewitnesses to the murder of which he was accused. Jones’s conviction and…

In Montana, a conservative political group is calling for an end to the death penalty after a recent court ruling held the state’s execution protocol unconstitutional. Former Republican state Senator Roy Brown said, “Conservatives dislike waste and inefficiency. That is why we should cast a critical eye when the state is involved with the business of executing people…. When it takes over 20 years and hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars for extra legal fees and court costs, it is obvious…

When Vicki Schieber’s (pictured) daughter, Shannon, was murdered in Philadelphia in 1998, she and her family felt enormous grief. “Losing a loved one to murder,” she recently wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. At first, my husband and I didn’t know how we could go on with our lives.” Nevertheless, because of their beliefs, “we did not want the man who murdered our daughter to be put to death.” Now she is speaking out in support of Mamie Norwood, whose…

A federal appeals court upheld the death sentence of Georgia inmate Robert Holsey (pictured), despite the fact that Holsey’s lead lawyer drank a quart of vodka every day during the trial and was about to be sued for stealing client funds. The attorney himself testified that he “probably shouldn’t have been allowed to represent anybody.” The court assumed the attorney’s incompetence, but gave great deference to the Georgia Supreme Court’s opinion that his poor performance did not affect the…

In a recent editorial, the Sacramento Bee of California sharply challenged the theory that the death penalty deters murders. The paper illustrated that homicide rates in California, New York and Texas have tracked virtually identically between 1974 and 2009, and yet each state has differed widely in its use of capital punishment (see chart). The editorial stated, “[D]uring that time Texas had 447 executions and New York had none; California had 13. Clearly, something other than executions has…