Publications & Testimony

Craig Watkins (pictured), the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, recently called for a review of the state’s capital punishment system. Since becoming D.A. in 2007, Watkins has initiated a conviction-integrity unit to examine criminal cases in the county. Since 2001, Dallas County has exonerated 27 inmates, including 22 through DNA evidence, most during Watkins’s tenure. None of these inmates were from death row. Regarding the death penalty, Watkins said, “I think it’s a legitimate…

On February 21 the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a U.S. Court of Appeals decision granting a retrial to James Lambert, who had been convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 in Pennsylvania. Lambert appealed his conviction, claiming that prosecutors never disclosed evidence identifying an additional co-defendant, in violation of Brady v. Maryland. Lambert claimed this new evidence would have impeached the testimony that led to his conviction. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled…

On February 22, Virginia’s legislature blocked a bill that would have allowed the death penalty for accomplices to murder who did not actually carry out the killing. The bill would have revised the state’s “triggerman rule,” which allows the death penalty only for the person directly responsible for the actual murder. Two weeks ago, the Senate version of the bill was rejected by the Courts of Justice Committee on a 7 – 7 vote. The House then passed its own version of the bill, forcing the Senate…

A study ordered by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has found pay for court-appointed defense lawyers in death penalty cases in Philadelphia to be “grossly inadequate.” The study, which was authored by Common Pleas Court Judge Benjamin Lerner, was initiated after defense lawyers petitioned the Court to increase the fees or halt death-penalty cases. The study noted there are fewer than 30 lawyers in Philadelphia willing to take capital-case appointments for indigent clients who meet the state…

A recent op-ed in the Miami Herald by Raoul Cantero (pictured), former Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, called for state legislators to require unanimity in the penalty phase of death penalty trials. Five years ago, a study conducted by the American Bar Association found that Florida was an outlier in allowing capital juries to find aggravating circumstances and recommend death sentences by a simple majority. The op-ed, co-written by Mark Schlakman, a member of the ABA’s Florida Death…

A recent study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology about the U.S. Military death penalty system found that racial disparities among those sentenced to death are worse in the military than in other criminal courts. The study, conducted by Catherine Grosso of Michigan State’s College of Law, the late David Baldus of the University of Iowa College of Law, and others, reviewed all potentially death-eligible military prosecutions from 1984 to 2005 and identified 105…

In 2009, Maryland changed its capital punishment law, sharply limiting when the death penalty could be sought. Prosecutors can only pursue the death penalty in cases of first degree murder when there is DNA or other biological evidence linking the defendant to a murder, a video-taped confession by the defendant, or a video linking the defendant to the murder. As the first case testing this statute nears completion, DPIC’s Executive Director, Richard Dieter (pictured), was interviewed on…

On February 15, Florida is scheduled to execute Robert Waterhouse, a 65-year-old inmate who was sentenced to death for a 1980 murder in St. Petersburg. Waterhouse has been on Florida’s death row for over three decades, longer than any inmate previously executed by the state. His original death sentence was overturned in 1988 after his appellate attorney argued that Waterhouse’s trial lawyer erred by not presenting the court with important mitigating information. A second jury reaffirmed his…

Ron Briggs, sponsor of the initiative which expanded California’s death penalty law in 1978, recently announced his support for repeal of the law. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Ron Briggs explained that the 1978 Briggs Initiative was meant to “give prosecutors better tools for meting out just punishments, and that a broadened statute would serve as a warning to all California evildoers that the state would deliver swift and final justice” and “creat[e] a national model for capital…