Publications & Testimony

Reggie Clemons has been on Missouri’s death row for 19 years for the murder of two young white women. He has already come close to execution, and one of the co-defendants in the case has been executed. Clemons’ conviction was based partly on his confession to rape that he says was beaten out of him by the police. Other testimony against Clemons came from his co-defendants. Of the four men charged with the murders, three were black and one was white. The white co-defendant is already out on…

Professor Deborah Denno of Fordham University Law School has published an article in the Michigan State Law Review concerning her research into the use of genetic evidence possibly related to behavior characteristics in criminal cases. Denno found that the primary use of this evidence was in death penalty cases at the penalty phase, and that it is almost always used as mitigation evidence. The article notes some of the dangers in this kind of evidence based on past use. Nevertheless, the author…

A recent article in the Brooklyn Law Review argues that executing long-serving, elderly death row inmates should be deemed unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment. In A Modest Proposal: The Aged of Death Row Should Be Deemed Too Old to Execute, Professor Elizabeth Rapaport (pictured) of the University of New Mexico School of Law maintains that harsh death row conditions, along with the fragility of the growing number of elderly inmates due to the aging process, result in excess…

A new book by Professors Saundra Westervelt and Kimberly Cook looks at the lives of eighteen people who had been wrongfully sentenced to death and who were later freed from death row. In Life After Death Row: Exonerees’ Search for Community and Identity, the authors focus on three central areas affecting those who had to begin a new life after leaving years of severe confinement: the seeming invisibility of these individuals after their release; the complicity of the justice system in allowing…

Legislators and other officials in Utah are expressing concerns about the high costs of the death penalty and its lack of deterrent effect. Speaking before the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee, Republican State Representative Steve Handy (pictured) said, “In today’s world, the death penalty is so infrequently used that I don’t believe it is any kind of a deterrent.” The Davis County prosecutor, Troy Rawlings, a proponent of the death penalty, nevertheless agreed that…

On August 16, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling vacating Justin Wolfe’s (pictured) conviction and death sentence for a drug-conspiracy murder in Virginia in 2001. His conviction was based primarily on the testimony of the actual shooter, Owen Barber, who claimed that Wolfe hired him to kill Daniel Petrole because of an outstanding drug debt. In 2010, Barber testified in open court that his testimony at Wolfe’s trial was false, and that Wolfe had…

The recent federal capital trial of Brian Richardson in Atlanta illustrated the high costs of litigation when the death penalty is sought. Richardson’s case required more than 30 lawyers, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in expert witness fees. The U.S. Attorney’s Office assigned eight prosecutors to the case and appointed 20 private attorneys to represent inmates who were testifying against Richardson. The Federal Defender’s Office assigned four attorneys and two investigators to…

Long-time death penalty scholar Hugo Adam Bedau died on August 13, 2012 . Dr. Bedau had been the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, and is best known for his work on capital punishment. Dr. Bedau frequently testified about the death penalty before the U.S. Congress and many state legislatures. He authored several books about the death penalty, including The Death Penalty in America (1964; 4^th edition, 1997), The Courts, the Constitution, and Capital Punishment…

Death penalty cases cost more than ordinary cases because all the lawyers, judges, and other personnel will put more hours into preparing, trying, and reviewing the issues, given that a life is at stake. Jack D’Aurora (pictured) of the Behal Law Group, writing in The Columbus Dispatch, described the time put in by just one federal judge in Ohio reviewing a capital case towards the end of its appeal, including the lethal injection process: “Hearings are attended, at a minimum, by three assistant…