Publications & Testimony

Twenty-sev­en peo­ple were exon­er­at­ed and released from prison this year, includ­ing some who had been on death row, accord­ing to a new report from The Innocence Project, a nation­al lit­i­ga­tion and pub­lic pol­i­cy orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to exon­er­at­ing wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed peo­ple. The 27 exonerees served a com­bined 421 years in prison for crimes they did not com­mit. The exon­er­a­tions occurred through the work of the Innocence Project…

County esti­mates in Texas indi­cate that the death penal­ty sys­tem is much more expen­sive than sen­tenc­ing inmates to life impris­on­ment. Gray County spent near­ly $1 mil­lion seek­ing the death penal­ty against Levi King, even though he plead­ed guilty to mur­der. Moreover, these costs do not include the cost of appeals, which will fur­ther increase the cost of the cap­i­tal case, nor the costs of cas­es in which the death penal­ty is sought but not giv­en. By…

New evi­dence in the Troy Davis case in Georgia has recent­ly emerged, fur­ther impli­cat­ing anoth­er sus­pect in the mur­der of off-duty police offi­cer Mark Allen MacPhail. In 1991, Davis was sen­tenced to death for offi­cer MacPhail’s mur­der. Davis became the pri­ma­ry sus­pect after Sylvester​“Redd” Coles told the police about Davis’s pres­ence at the crime scene. During his 1991 tri­al, nine pros­e­cu­tion eye­wit­ness­es tes­ti­fied against Davis.

A recent New York Times edi­to­r­i­al com­ment­ed on the new one-drug lethal injec­tion pro­to­col used in Ohio for the first time on December 8, but con­clud­ed that​“the exe­cu­tion only rein­forced that any form of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is legal­ly sus­pect and moral­ly wrong.” The Times agreed with the late Justice Harry Blackmun who called such manip­u­la­tions​“tinker[ing] with the machin­ery of death.” The edi­to­r­i­al also noted…

The Death Penalty Information Center released the ​“The Death Penalty in 2009: Year End Report” on December 18, not­ing that the coun­try is expect­ed to fin­ish 2009 with the fewest death sen­tences since the U.S. Supreme Court rein­stat­ed the death penal­ty in 1976. Eleven states con­sid­ered abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty this year, a sig­nif­i­cant increase in leg­isla­tive activ­i­ty from pre­vi­ous years, as the high costs and lack of measurable benefits…

On December 15 the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights marked the 20^th anniver­sary of an inter­na­tion­al death penal­ty treaty by call­ing for the uni­ver­sal abo­li­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Navi Pillay, the top UN human rights offi­cial, urged all states to adopt the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The pro­to­col, which bars the death penal­ty, was intro­duced in 1989.

A recent edi­to­r­i­al in the Virginian-Pilot called for elim­i­nat­ing the death penal­ty as a good way to address the $3.5 bil­lion gap in the state’s bud­get.​“Doing away with the option of a death sen­tence makes sense on sev­er­al lev­els,” the edi­tors wrote.​“It would save the state from hav­ing to pay fees asso­ci­at­ed with lengthy tri­als and years of appeals. It would end the agony of repeat­ed court hear­ings for the fam­i­lies of vic­tims. It would elim­i­nate the four…

A sin­gle death penal­ty case in Indiana can cost tax­pay­ers as much as $1 mil­lion. In Marion County, the costs of prepa­ra­tion for three poten­tial death penal­ty tri­als have reached $659,000 this year alone, accord­ing to the Public Defender Agency. A high-pro­­file death penal­ty case in the same coun­ty has cost near­ly $850,000 and not all the bills are in. Pursuing a life sen­tence costs less than the death penal­ty, even con­sid­er­ing the expense of a con­vic­t’s…

Two for­mer mil­i­tary ser­vice­men raised con­cerns about the use of the death penal­ty for war vet­er­ans who have endured trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ences while serv­ing in the United States mil­i­tary. Karl Keys, a for­mer Marine, and Bill Pelke, a for­mer sergeant in the First Air Cavalry, cit­ed the exam­ples of James Floyd Davis and Manny Babbitt, vet­er­ans who received Purple Hearts for their ser­vice in the Vietnam War but were sentenced…

On December 8, the U.S. Supreme Court over­ruled a low­er fed­er­al court that had giv­en relief to Joseph Kindler, a Pennsylvania death row inmate. Kindler had been con­vict­ed of mur­der in 1982, but then escaped to Canada from the Philadelphia Detention Center in 1984. Prior to his escape, his attor­neys had filed post-ver­­dict motions chal­leng­ing his con­vic­tion and sen­tence. Kindler was sub­se­quent­ly caught and, upon his return to…