Publications & Testimony

A recent edi­to­r­i­al in the Birmingham News called on Alabama law­mak­ers to pass leg­is­la­tion that would require a three-year mora­to­ri­um on impos­ing death sen­tences and car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions, giv­ing the state time to address flaws in the death penal­ty sys­tem. The edi­to­r­i­al out­lined five rea­sons why leg­is­la­tors with var­i­ous posi­tions should be unit­ed in such an effort.

Clark County, Nevada, has more pend­ing death penal­ty cas­es per capi­ta than any oth­er urban coun­ty in the coun­try. According to a review by Nevada Attorneys for Criminal Justice (NACJ), Clark County (Las Vegas) cur­rent­ly has 80 tri­als in which pros­e­cu­tors are seek­ing the death penal­ty. By com­par­i­son, Maricopa County in Arizona has the most pend­ing death cas­es (130), but it has twice the pop­u­la­tion of Clark County. Los Angeles County,…

The lat­est edi­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund​’s​“Death Row USA” shows that the num­ber of peo­ple on the death row in the United States is con­tin­u­ing to slow­ly decline, falling to 3,260 as of April 1, 2010. In 2000, there were 3,682 inmates on death row. Nationally, the racial com­po­si­tion of those on death row is 44% white, 41% black, and 12% Latino/​Latina. California con­tin­ues to have the largest death row pop­u­la­tion (702), followed…

On April 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit over­turned the death sen­tence of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Pennsylvania inmate who was con­vict­ed of killing a Philadelphia police offi­cer 30 years ago in 1981. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court vacat­ed a pre­vi­ous grant of sen­tenc­ing relief hand­ed down by the same court in order to allow con­sid­er­a­tion of a recent­ly decid­ed Supreme Court case with relat­ed facts (Smith v.

DPIC is pleased to announce the launch of its lat­est resource, State Information Pages, pro­vid­ing his­tor­i­cal and cur­rent infor­ma­tion on the death penal­ty for each state. This resource is a work-in-progress, but we are hap­py to present the first 15 state pages. Our orig­i­nal state-by-state data­base is still the best place to look for fre­quen­t­­ly-updat­ed infor­ma­tion such as exe­cu­tion totals and mur­der rates. The new pages are designed as…

A recent arti­cle by Terrence P. Dwyer (pic­tured), retired New York State Police Investigator, and George F. Kain, a police com­mis­sion­er in Ridgefield, Connecticut, dis­missed the notion that the death penal­ty is need­ed to pro­tect law enforce­ment offi­cers. Dwyer and Kain wrote that a major­i­ty of police chiefs believe that the death penal­ty does not deter vio­lent crime and rank the death penal­ty last in a list of effec­tive tools for fighting…

According to a com­pre­hen­sive review of stud­ies on the death penal­ty by Matthew Robinson, Professor of Government and Justice Studies at Appalachian State University, the death penal­ty in North Carolina is expen­sive, racial­ly biased and inef­fec­tive. Prof. Robinson ana­lyzed data from more than 20 death penal­ty stud­ies and found them to be remark­ably con­sis­tent in their con­clu­sions. He said,​“In the past six years, three states have abolished…

Days after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the elec­tric chair was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, a Lincoln Journal Star edi­to­r­i­al urged the state to recon­sid­er the death penal­ty:​“Instead of rush­ing to pass a new means of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, the Legislature should take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to final­ly get rid of the death penal­ty.” Nebraska was the only state to retain the elec­tric chair as its sole means of exe­cu­tion. The paper not­ed that it was the right time to take…

In a poten­tial­ly far reach­ing rul­ing, a tri­al judge in New Mexico has barred the state from seek­ing the death penal­ty because the leg­is­la­ture has failed to pro­vide ade­quate fund­ing for defense rep­re­sen­ta­tion. The state’s Attorney General, Gary King, agreed that the cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion can­not go for­ward. After find­ing that fund­ing for the defense was insuf­fi­cient and raised con­sti­tu­tion­al prob­lems, King wrote,​“The state now con­fess­es the motion to…

Ruling in a pre-tri­al mat­ter in New Mexico, Judge Timothy Garcia of Santa Fe County’s First Judicial District Court held the state’s death penal­ty law to be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al based on a study by the Capital Jury Project. The Project’s research in 14 states had found that jurors often do not fol­low the law in mak­ing their sen­tenc­ing deci­sion. In par­tic­u­lar, the judge found that the jurors’ propen­si­ty toward mak­ing their sen­tenc­ing deci­sion during the…