Publications & Testimony

An edi­to­r­i­al in the Chicago Sun-Times applaud­ed Illinois Governor Pat Quinn for sign­ing the bill abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty. The edi­tors wrote, ​“We’ve learned that the sys­tem makes too many mis­takes to entrust it with the ulti­mate pow­er of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. We’ve learned that legal safe­guards can be pushed aside when emo­tions are high after a heinous crime. We’ve learned that polit­i­cal ambi­tion some­times blinds those in pow­er to the weaknesses of…

A recent study by Dr. Stephen Greenspan, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado, revealed that through­out American his­to­ry at least 106 indi­vid­u­als have been grant­ed posthu­mous par­dons, includ­ing 12 indi­vid­u­als who were exe­cut­ed. Although not all of the par­dons were grant­ed because of doubts about the defen­dan­t’s guilt, Dr. Greenspan found that in many instances the defen­dant was proven, or was very like­ly, not guilty and had…

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…