Publications & Testimony

A recent edi­to­r­i­al in the Baltimore Sun urged Gov. Martin O’Malley to work toward repeal­ing the death penal­ty in Maryland. The paper sug­gest­ed that changes in the com­po­si­tion of the state Senate might make the General Assembly more recep­tive to end­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. There have also been con­cerns raised about lethal injec­tions on the the state and nation­al lev­el. But it was the fun­da­men­tal unfair­ness and high costs of the death penal­ty that…

A group of over 60 for­mer state and fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors, judges, and oth­er law enforce­ment offi­cials recent­ly wrote to Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois urg­ing him to sign the bill passed by the General Assembly to repeal the death penal­ty. The law would also trans­fer state funds used for the death penal­ty to a fund for mur­der vic­tims’ ser­vices and law enforce­ment work. The group cit­ed the death penal­ty’s inef­fec­tive­ness in deter­ring vio­lent crime and its high…

A new study by William Bowers and oth­ers pub­lished in the Criminal Law Bulletin revealed that most jurors in death penal­ty cas­es lack suf­fi­cient under­stand­ing of their duties, ren­der­ing the process uncon­sti­tu­tion­al by Supreme Court stan­dards. The study showed that cap­i­tal jurors often mis­tak­en­ly believe that a death sen­tence is required by law, and fail to take pri­ma­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty for the defen­dan­t’s pun­ish­ment. The study sug­gest­ed that jurors tend to believe…

On February 2, the nation­al law firm of Sidley Austin LLP filed a suit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in fed­er­al court on behalf of six death row inmates from Arizona, California, and Tennessee. The suit seeks to com­pel the FDA to bar the impor­ta­tion or use of unap­proved sodi­um thiopen­tal, a drug used by most states in lethal injec­tions, but no longer avail­able in the U.S. The plain­tiff’s brief states that, fol­low­ing a…

Recent edi­to­ri­als in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times called into ques­tion the cur­rent use of lethal injec­tion in exe­cu­tions, in light of the deci­sion by the sole U.S. man­u­fac­tur­er of a key drug used by almost all states to stop its pro­duc­tion. Hospira Inc. was the only U.S. pro­duc­er of sodi­um thiopen­tal, the main anes­thet­ic used in lethal injec­tions, but the com­pa­ny said inter­na­tion­al con­cerns about the death penal­ty prompt­ed its halt. The short­age of the drug…