Publications & Testimony

On January 10, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed (8 – 1) the murder conviction of Juan Smith because the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office had withheld critical evidence that would have been favorable to Smith at his trial. Smith had been convicted of murder in the course of an armed robbery based on the sole eyewitness testimony of Larry Boatner. There was no DNA, fingerprints, or other physical evidence that linked Smith to the 1995 crime. Appellate attorneys later learned that prosecutors…

(On January 10, DPIC posted an item about an editorial in the New York Times criticizing the arbitrariness of the death penalty. That editorial relied heavily on the research of Prof. John Donohue (pictured) of Stanford Law School and his study of the Connecticut death penalty. This post looks further at the underlying study.) Prof. Donohue’s research found that out of thousands of murders committed in Connecticut between 1973 and 2007, only one resulted in an execution of the defendant. He…

On January 12, HBO cable TV will air a new documentary, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, the final installment of a trilogy that recounts the story of three wrongfully convicted teenagers in Arkansas — Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley — known as the “West Memphis Three.” The young men were convicted of the 1993 rape and murder of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Baldwin and Misskelley received life sentences, and Echols was sentenced to death. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory shows the…

An editorial in the Sunday edition of the New York Times on January 8 looked at recent studies pointing to the arbitrariness of the death penalty. The editorial noted that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down capital punishment in 1972 because its arbitrary implementation rendered it unconstitutional. In particular, the Times cited a recent study of Connecticut’s death penalty indicating the death penalty was not being imposed on the worst offenders, but rather that a death sentence depended…

Over 400 media outlets around the country reported on DPIC’s recent 2011 Year-End Report. Coverage included stories on the dramatic drop in death sentences, the decline in executions, and fewer states having the death penalty. Articles appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today, CNN, TIME, and many other papers. National broadcast outlets such as NBC’s Nightly News, National Public Radio’s Morning Editiion, and CBS Radio ran…

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s “Death Row USA” showed a decrease of 29 inmates in the death row population between January 1 and April 1, 2011. The total population of state and federal death rows is significantly smaller now (3,222 inmates) than in 2000 (3,682 inmates). The size of death row is affected by the number of death sentences, the number of executions, and the number of sentence reversals. Nationally, the racial composition of those on death row is 44% white…

Some Georgia death row inmates may soon be without representation for their appeals, potentially delaying the entire death penalty process. The Georgia Bar Foundation has traditionally provided funds to the Georgia Appellate Practice and Educational Resource Center, a twelve-person non-profit organization that represents or assists most of the 90 inmates on Georgia’s death row. Because of the economic downturn, the Foundation’s collections have declined in recent years and their grant to the…

On January 3, attorneys for Robert Gattis (pictured) filed a clemency petition with the Delaware Board of Pardons, requesting they recommend commuting his death sentence to life without parole. Gattis is scheduled for execution on January 20. According to the petition, details of frequent sexual, physical and psychological abuse occuring during Gattis’s childhood were never presented to the jury or the judge at the time of his sentencing. As a pre-school child and through adolescence, Gattis…

New Hampshire state representative Phil Greazzo, who has proposed a broad expansion of the death penalty, will also offer an alternative bill to abolish the death penalty entirely because it is so unfair. Rep. Greazzo, a Republican, previously introduced legislation to expand the state’s death penalty to include any intentional murder, maintaining the law should protect all people equally. But he said he would rather have lawmakers do away with the punishment altogether than maintain the status…