Publications & Testimony

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…

On August 8, Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania signed an execution warrant for Terrance Williams for the 1984 murder of Amos Norwood. The execution was set for October 3. Although Gov. Corbett has signed 15 previous death warrants, all of those dates have been stayed because the defendant had not completed the ordinary appeals process. Williams’ death sentence and conviction, however, were affirmed by the federal Court of Appeals and his case was denied review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

A new study conducted by law professors Justin Marceau (left) and Sam Kamin (middle) of the University of Denver and Wanda Foglia (right) of Rowan University found that the death penalty in Colorado is applied so rarely as to render the system unconstitutional. The authors concluded that Colorado’s death penalty law is applicable to almost all first-degree murders, but is imposed so infrequently that it fails to provide the kind of careful narrowing of cases required by the Supreme Court in…

Carlos Moreno, who served as a Justice on California’s Supreme Court for nearly a decade and upheld more than 200 death sentences, now supports a ballot measure to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole because the system is broken and unlikely to be fixed. Justice Moreno said that as long as capital defendants are “entitled to a fair trial and decent legal representation, there’s no way the system can accomplish its stated goals — punishment and deterrence for the…

On August 3, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes the U.S., called for a moratorium on executions in the region and released a report reviewing key areas of concern about the death penalty. The report made a series of recommendations for member States, including: — States should refrain from any measure that would expand the application of the death penalty or reintroduce it, — States should take any measures…

Use of the death penalty in California has declined in recent years. There have been no executions in six years, and the number of death sentences in 2011 dropped sharply from previous years. District Attorney Mark Peterson of Contra Costa County said his office tries to be smart on crime rather than automatically seeking death. “People here want us to be tough on crime, but they want us to be smart on crime,” he said. “Even though we might personally believe a defendant deserves the death…

On August 1, Delma Banks Jr., one of the longest serving inmates in Texas death-penalty history, received a life sentence and will be eligible for parole in 2024 under a plea agreement with prosecutors. Banks was convicted by an all-white jury of a 1980 murder, but there were no witnesses to the killing and no physical evidence linking Banks to it. The prosecution’s case relied largely on the testimony of two informants, both admitted drug users. In 1999, almost 20 years after the trial, Banks’…