Publications & Testimony

A recent inves­ti­ga­ton by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram uncov­ered a series of mis­takes by med­ical exam­in­ers in Texas. ​“Medical exam­in­ers have goofed up eye col­or and gen­der. They’ve made mis­takes on the loca­tions of scars or tat­toos, described gall­blad­ders and appen­dix­es that had long since been removed – even con­fused one body for anoth­er,” not­ed the sto­ry. Webb County Chief Medical Examiner Corinne Stern was crit­i­cized for an autop­sy she per­formed on an infant while…

A new data­base of death row pris­on­ers in the U.S. is now avail­able on DPIC’s Web site. The data­base con­tains cur­rent sortable and search­able infor­ma­tion on death row inmates in each state, includ­ing their name, race, coun­ty, and date of birth. The infor­ma­tion in the data­base is also editable, mean­ing that indi­vid­u­als with knowl­edge of death row inmates may change or add new infor­ma­tion. This new data­base may be a use­ful tool in explor­ing how the death penal­ty is applied.

Todd Snider, the father of Zachary Snider, who was killed at age 10 by Christopher Stevens in Indiana, accept­ed final res­o­lu­tion of the case against Stevens when a set­tle­ment was reached for a sen­tence of life with­out parole. ​“Our fam­i­ly has suf­fered enough and would like for this to be resolved once and for all,” Mr. Snider said about the life sen­tence. ​“This will give our fam­i­ly final­i­ty. Chris Stevens will die in prison and will nev­er have the…

In an edi­to­r­i­al on September 28 in the New York Times, the paper called the death penal­ty ​“an eco­nom­ic drain on gov­ern­ments with already bad­ly deplet­ed bud­gets.” Citing fig­ures from the Death Penalty Information Center, the Times not­ed that ​“States waste mil­lions of dol­lars on win­ning death penal­ty ver­dicts, which require an expen­sive sec­ond tri­al, new wit­ness­es and long jury selec­tions. Death rows require extra secu­ri­ty and maintenance…

Japan, the only oth­er indus­tri­al­ized democ­ra­cy apart from the United States that still prac­tices the death penal­ty, may see a halt to exe­cu­tions with the recent appoint­ment of Keiko Chiba as jus­tice min­is­ter. Chiba, a lawyer and active death penal­ty abo­li­tion­ist for the past 20 years, would have to pro­vide the final sig­na­ture for an exe­cu­tion to…

John Diaz, the edi­to­r­i­al page edi­tor of the San Francisco Chronicle, recent­ly ques­tioned the wis­dom of spend­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars on the death penal­ty in California. Diaz point­ed to the enor­mous expense of main­tain­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the state: ​“Today, California has near­ly 700 inmates on death row, more than any oth­er state, with their cas­es in vary­ing lev­els of appeal. The hous­ing of an inmate on death row is more than triple…