Publications & Testimony

An editorial in the Baptist Standard, published in Texas, recently called for repealing the death penalty in the next legislative session. Among the reasons cited by the paper for ending capital punishment were principles of religious faith, the risk of executing innocent defendants, its ineffectiveness in deterring crime, the high costs of prosecution, and its unfairness in affecting the poor and people of color. The editorial quoted the recent report from the National Research Council…

In one of the most comprehensive investigations ever undertaken about the execution of a possibly innocent defendant, Professor James Liebman and other researchers at Columbia University Law School have published a groundbreaking report on the case of Carlos DeLuna (pictured), who was executed in Texas in 1989. This “Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution” is being published today (May 15) in Columbia’s Human Rights Law Review. Prof. Liebman concluded DeLuna was innocent and was wrongly convicted “on…

UPDATE: Execution stayed by Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (May 14). Steven Staley (pictured) is scheduled to be executed in Texas on May 16, despite the likelihood that he would be deemed incompetent for execution if he was not being forcibly medicated under court order. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that it is unconstitutional to execute an inmate who is mentally incompetent. In a non-death penalty context, the Court has also held that it is permissilble to forcibly medicate an inmate if…

Al Jazeera recently released a video of an interview with former Oklahoma death-row inmate Michael Selsor (pictured). Selsor was the most recent person executed in the U.S. and probably the inmate who served the longest time between conviction and execution of anyone in U.S. history. He was first sentenced to death in 1976 for murder and was imprisoned over 36 years prior to his execution on May 1, 2012. Although his sentence was reduced to life when Oklahoma’s death penalty was overturned in…

Records obtained by the Bay Area News Group in California show that the appeal costs for the last two men executed in the state were $1.76 million. At that rate, the cost of carrying out the executions of the 724 inmates still on death row could exceed $700 million if the death penalty is not repealed in November. Records show that the state and federal appeals for Clarence Ray Allen, the oldest and most recent death row inmate executed in the state, cost more than $761,000. Appeals for Stanley…

Use of the death penalty has decreased in South Carolina, and some state officials are pointing to the high costs and uncertainty of capital punishment as reasons for this decline. The state has had only one execution in the past three years, and the size of death row has declined almost 30% since 2005. No one was sentenced to death in 2011. Prosecutor David Pascoe initially planned to seek the death penalty for a mother who killed her two children, but later changed his mind, with cost being…

A new study conducted by researchers at Duke University found that the racial composition of jury pools has a profound effect on the probability of a black defendant being convicted. According to the study led by Professor Patrick Bayer of Duke, juries formed from all-white jury pools in Florida convicted black defendants 16 percent more often than white defendants. In cases with no black potential jurors in the jury pool, black defendants were convicted 81 percent of the time, while white…

Recently published historical research led by Professor Austin Sarat (pictured) of Amherst College examines the way gruesome executions were reported in the media in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Prof. Sarat’s study found that newspapers generally presented two competing narratives in their coverage: “a sensationalist narrative, which played up the gruesomeness of botched execution[s], and an opposing, recuperative narrative, which sought to differentiate [the] law’s violence from…