Publications & Testimony

The FBI recent­ly released the lat­est ver­sion of its Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States 2005. The report showed that the mur­der rate in 2005 (5.6 mur­ders per 100,000 peo­ple) was the same as in 2001, with lit­tle change in the inter­ven­ing years. Death sen­tences, exe­cu­tions and the size of death row all declined dur­ing this peri­od. As in pre­vi­ous years, the South had the high­erst mur­der rate, 6.6, among the 4 geo­graph­i­cal regions. Over 80% of the exe­cu­tions in the…

The Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment vot­ed on November 12 to rec­om­mend the aboli­ti­ion of the death penal­ty in the state. In a 13 – 7 vote, the Commission cit­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty that an inno­cent per­son could be mis­tak­en­ly exe­cut­ed, as well as geo­graph­i­cal and racial dis­par­i­ties in how it is used. Benjamin Civiletti, the chair of the com­mis­sion and a for­mer U.S. attor­ney gen­er­al, said, ​“It’s hap­haz­ard in how it’s applied, and that’s terribly…

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Less than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will recon­sid­er the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the death penal­ty for juve­nile offend­ers, two state leg­isla­tive bod­ies have passed mea­sures to ban the prac­tice. The New Hampshire Senate passed its bill to ban the exe­cu­tion of those who were under the age of 18 at the time of their offense on February 19, 2004. The mea­sure now moves to the House, where a com­mit­tee hear­ing and vote are expect­ed in the com­ing weeks. The Wyoming…

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La apli­cación de la pena de muerte sigue su ten­den­cia a la baja en EE.UU. En 2010 fueron eje­cu­tadas 46 per­sonas, un 12% menos que el año pasa­do y casi la mitad de la can­ti­dad de ajus­ti­ci­a­dos que hubo al comien­zo de la…

A new study pub­lished in the Washington Law Review address­es the racial and geo­graph­i­cal dis­par­i­ties in the imple­men­ta­tion of the fed­er­al death penal­ty. The study, con­duct­ed by G. Ben Cohen, Counsel for the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans, and Robert J. Smith, Counsel for the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, con­cludes that the dis­par­i­ties in the fed­er­al death penal­ty may exist because fed­er­al cas­es do not use a…