Publications & Testimony

Elie Wiesel, acclaimed author, human rights activist, Nobel Peace lau­re­ate and Holocaust sur­vivor, spoke about his oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty dur­ing a lec­ture on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in October. Wiesel, who lost both par­ents and a sis­ter in the Nazi death camps, focused his remarks on fam­i­ly mem­bers of mur­der vic­tims. He said that mur­der­ers should be pun­ished more harsh­ly than oth­er pris­on­ers and encour­aged the…

Anthony Graves (pic­tured) was released from a Texas prison on October 27 after Washington-Burleson County District Attorney Bill Parham filed a motion to dis­miss all charges that had result­ed in Graves being sent to death row 16 years ago. Graves was con­vict­ed in 1994 of assist­ing Robert Carter in mul­ti­ple mur­ders in 1992. There was no phys­i­cal evi­dence link­ing Graves to the crime, and his con­vic­tion relied pri­mar­i­ly on Carter’s tes­ti­mo­ny that Graves was his…

A new nov­el by acclaimed author John Grisham, enti­tled ​“The Confession,” tells the sto­ry of Donte Drumm, an inno­cent man who was con­vict­ed of mur­der and sen­tenced to death in Texas. The book begins as the exe­cu­tion of Drumm is only four days away and anoth­er man con­fess­es to the crime to a min­is­ter. Although a work of fic­tion, Grisham’s work offers a cri­tique of our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and of the death penal­ty in par­tic­u­lar. USA…

A recent arti­cle in Second Class Justice, a weblog ded­i­cat­ed to address­ing unfair­ness and dis­crim­i­na­tion in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, high­light­ed that the death penal­ty con­tin­ues to be arbi­trar­i­ly applied in the United States. Citing fig­ures from the American Judicature Society, author Robert Smith revealed that only 10% of U.S. coun­ties account­ed for all of the death sen­tences imposed between 2004 and 2009, and only 5% of the coun­ties account­ed for all death…

Lawyers for Cameron Todd Willingham​’s fam­i­ly recent­ly pre­sent­ed expert tes­ti­mo­ny at a court of inquiry in Texas to deter­mine whether Willingham was wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and exe­cut­ed for start­ing a fire that killed his chil­dren. The lawyers pre­sent­ed tes­ti­mo­ny from nine experts who have reviewed evi­dence pre­sent­ed by fire mar­shals and found ​“many crit­i­cal errors,” as one report stat­ed. Gerald Hurst, who pub­lished a report regard­ing the evi­dence in the case,…